Jasede said:
Don't kid yourself. The game may not be "as bad as expected" or as some of you put it, "as bad as the popamole newshit", but ultimately, it still fails as a game, exhibiting all the symptoms and developments of modern mainstream game design.
To illustrate:
Imagine you grew up watching Star Trek the original series and The Next Generation. Then you hear they're making a new one, and you watch Star Trek Enterprise. And sure, there's space in it, and Vulcans, and aliens- but it's not like what you grew up with. It's been adjusted for modern tastes, with all the flaws that comes with. But in trying to fix them, they got rid of the old "flaws" - which are part of what made the old shows so endearing.
Half-agree on one point, disagree on the other.
For me, the appropriate comparison isn't Star Trek Enterprise - it's the Star Trek reboot movie. It isn't the original team, and can't reproduce what made the originals great. BUT it is made with love, by folk who genuinely love the original games and are trying to tribute them, rather than stomping on their corpse for cash.
Fact is, there has only ever been one developer capable of making a game of the quality of Deus Ex. Warren Spector. And with Thief, System Shock 2 and Ultima Underworld, he's got a record with that particular subgenre that nobody is ever going to come close to matching.
But don't underestimate the significance of a big team actually coming in and giving us a fucking genuine sequel. Sure, they won't have the old charm of Deus Ex, and you can't expect them to match Spector's map design brilliance (has ANYONE ever matched Spector in this genre, or in the qualities that are important to this genre? Interplay and Troika included?).
By the standards of 2000 it would have been brilliant. By the standards of 2000-plus-the-kind-of-advancement-in-gaming-we-expected-back-then it sucks ass. But treated as a reboot, and it's the single best re-use of a dead franchise in...fuck...possibly ever.
It is a game that has been made with love, and that's a really fucking rare quality these days.
Now I've been raving in support of the game - but don't get me wrong, I can certainly see and understand your criticisms. But I've been saying for AGES that Deus Ex SHOULD have been the 'sell-out' commercial standard for FPS-RPGs. Deus Ex had ultra simple mechanics, and its genius was that it let you do so much with those simple mechanics. If you can play Fallout 3, or even Oblivion, then you can EASILY play Deus Ex. Fuck, if you can play Mass Effect then you can play Deus Ex. It's a genre that didn't need dumbing down to be sold to the masses - it never 'failed', it just disappeared.
One of the reasons I'm raving about this game - aside from the fact that it is the first AAA title that I've genuinely enjoyed - as in Interplay/Troika/System-Shock enjoyed - in many years (I liked FO:NV, but this is better in my opinion) - is that it should (if marketers have any sense) represent a brighter future for mainstream gaming. Again, Deus Ex was a really fucking simply game, mechanics-wise - it was designed for people whose previous gaming experience was Doom and Quake. Any gamer can lap that shit up, and I'm hoping that this shows folks that it's possible. Especially those developers who underperform for the sake of accessibility - Obsidian of course, but also the guys who made Bioshock and were too scared to give the player even the limited freedom that SS2 had (and that was also a game that used ultra simple mechanics to build a more complex freedom).
Deus Ex is my favourite game of all time. I've played it at least once a year since release, and on average more like 3 times a year. It's to me what Fallout is to many of you - the game that I find infinite variations on playstyles, so that it just never ever gets boring. The reboot doesn't achieve that any more than JJ Abrams could turn his big budget and fanboydom of Star Trek into recapturing TOS and TNG. But like JJ Abrams' version, it's something really worthwhile in itself, to see a genuine fan attempt to do a franchise properly, in an era where franchises exist purely to be stomped on until cash falls out. Enterprise was everything that was wrong with franchises in popular entertainment - the Star Trek reboot showed that, even though you can't capture the same lightning in a bottle twice, there is still love to be shown.
