This is a case study of how GMDX was made by FPS fans who don't understand the nuance of Deus Ex - a key factor in its philosophy and success.
Nah, just not a fan of the author's attitude and snake oil salesman advertising practices... Especially when the final product is riddled with flaws and inability to understand that actual philosophy of the game itself. Not a huge issue in a vacuum, but when he peddles it as "vanilla but better in every way", stuff like this makes me roll my eyes.
How much is or isn't is beside the point that, if you track GMDX's history, it's defined by adding silly things because the author wanted to, then deleting things all his beta testers complained about, then claiming he had an intentional direction the whole time. The dumb stuff is in there because he added it without caring, and the amount of problems symptomatic of that lack of care for the game's intentions is perhaps best topped off by the blatant violations of its philosophy of design.
Check out mission 08 some time without LAMS or a GEP gun in your pocket, and have the progression force you to go to smuggler's place before you can scuttle the freighter. You'll find that his 1 robot is replaced by 2, neither of which remember whether you've met smuggler, the lasers have been modified to be impossible to speed aug/stack over, and the electronics panel is now guarded by lasers in the doorway AND windows, lasers that are turned off only by hacking the panel.
This change was not made with Deus Ex in mind. It was made with "me want spend resources it FPS, ooga booga" mindset, intentionally negating most means of solutions. Hope you got wireless range upgrades for the multitool, or else it's 100% time to either get shot by turrets or mauled by robots.
Onto the actual meat of the matter: I can genuinely only think of 3 AI changes, two of which are dumb, and one of which is meaningless. Greasels now have a jump attack that, unlike a modern game would plan for, has no cooldown, and they will activate over and over and over again (depending on RNG, literally nonstop) when fighting you. In a hallway without speed aug on, even not running out of stamina, you WILL suffer damage from these guaranteed attacks, and there's nothing you can do about it. Great when paired with greasels not turning allied when you free them in versalife, and getting back into the hallway to the gray labs, or the greasel tunnels in paris in general.
There's flare throwing that I have never once see make a difference. Cool I guess.
There's AI strafing, but the AI is intentionally not meant to play the game like it's Unreal Gold, and this creates an immediate problem: The only thing stopping AI from shooting at you isn't a "reaction time", it's actually whether they're facing you enough. You'd think this would be something worth fixing if you make AI strafe at random, but apparently not. As a result, and because strafing makes them automatically always face directly at you, if any AI decide to strafe around a corner at you, they fire THE frame their collision box has cleared enough geometry to shoot. Very epic. Cool factor concept, bad understanding, bad execution.
Model improvements: Decent, but ultimately meaningless. It's got 2 custom models from a temp hired modeler, Clyzm (shotgun), 1 more from him using kitbashed CS grenade anims (the flare), and the rest are just ported from HDTP... Which is supposed to be configurable with an on/off switch globally, and in Revision, can be customized per each object (save for decos, which are still an all or none choice), but screw it, let's make the game incapable of launching without HDTP models by improperly referencing the assets. What could go wrong?Biggest problem is: HDTP never touched NPCs to any meaningful level, and when it did, it resulted in a number of (extra) questionable style choices and constant animation errors. It's great that now this crate has slight bevels in it and the desert eagle inspired, stamp sheet metal pistol is now just a polymer frame glock (more polys, I guess?), but every single NPC you will ever talk to has the same 256x256 pixel textures strewn across them and are under 1000 polygons. Mmm-mmm.. Sure glad those oven mitt hands weren't fixed.
Nobody from modern era gaming noticed those, I'm sure... And that's the point. Weapons and decos were arguably the least important thing to fix (being the last jarring in regard to fidelity), and they're all that's changed.
Sound improvements: Horse crap claim. DXOGG is actually a new sound device used to play music in deus ex, allowing for actually playing higher quality music, despite standard format restrictions. It does not extent to non-music. GMDX does not use a new sound device or format for sounds. The sounds have the EXACT same restrictions on quality Deus Ex's sounds have, and are the same constraint of 44.1KHZ, 16 bit, PCM, mono channel WAV type of file used.The difference is, being a simulacrum, GMDX employs edgier sound design to go along with the edgier NV 1.X textures forcibly bundled (and unlike Revision, not toggleable in the options) that even the creator admits was a bad design direction, as NV 2.0a explicitly steered itself back towards not making everything shades of grey with all the color heavily reduced.
This is not deus ex. This is what people expect when they hear "cyberpunk", and there's even Q&A's with the dev team about how Deus Ex wasn't intended to even be cyberpunk, but ended up being it at day's end due to how categories are decided. It's not from the mind of William Gibson. It's from Eidos.
The edgier sounds would be a matter of preference, regardless, except that the sounds are explicitly stolen from a variety of sources. the 2027 mod (Earlier versions of GMDX literally bundled 2027 music and overrode the soundtrack on certain levels. Modern GMDX still bundles model and texture assets from it as well). Wolfenstein enemy territory. Half life. SWAT 4. Notice how the pain noises and squeaks that come out of people when hit aren't even the same voice actors that voice the same NPC's actual dialogue. That is factually wrong to do.
There is no sound design direction, and in fact, if you have an ear for it, it's a frankenstein's monster, and paying mind to the sounds will 100% pull you out immersion every single gunshot or pain grunt you hear from an enemy. My playthrough of GMDX made me completely incapable of being immersed because of this royal shitshow of design. Calling it "improvement" is certifiably incorrect, as the actual consistency and style with which sounds were used is now a complete, scattered mess. Most people don't know sound design, though, so I guess it works out for many people purely by the nature of being ignorant.Don't believe me? Loadmap to the 747 and shoot anna a couple times and listen to her pain sounds. Then load up UNATCO HQ and shoot her again. Notice the complete disagreement in what sounds are even used, let alone their style.
Bonus round: The author is not a programmer, and spent literal months of extra time applying things to every instance of an actor in the map editor, instead of changing 1 or 2 variables on the backend and saving himself time, effort, and all those many, many times where variables don't line up. Here's another one, and one I'm 100% positive is in vRSD, as I saw a stream of it coming up: Start doing large amounts of damage to riot cops in front of the Ton hotel in M08. Not enough to kill. One of them has "MaleLaugh" his large pain noise, because it was right next to "MalePainLarge" in UED's sound browser. I shit you not. There's a guy that laughs from taking a 10mm to the chest. I know these come out as cherry picked examples, but I'd be hear for ages describing every single thing wrong. It's a brutal death by 10,000 cuts and 20 punches to the face. I rated it poorly because I have eye for these things and it was an endless horror show of every other little thing being done wrong, with some big, objectively counterintuitive changes topping it off.
Quality of life is cool on paper, but some of it is improperly produced. Protip: Eat a candy bar by left clicking on it in-world with an empty hand. It'll heal you for 3 points vs 2, because apparently calling the actual activation function was too hard. Moreover, everyone and their grandmother has QOL options available for modern playing of deus ex. Factor in the intentionally anti-newbie difficulty changes, naked solution deletions, and other design choices, and QOL is best gotten elsewhere if you're a new player.
Major mods? There's a handful of options with various tradeoffs. For just getting QOL and assloads of bugfixes, Deus Ex: Transcended does a really good job sticking to the base game while getting lots of the must-have features. Funny enough, the new solution for character appearances is starting to become one of the 3 variants of Helios overhaul, and those can be dropped into any mod, and as they are not canonically supported by any, are just as hard to put in any mod (or even vanilla) vs another, making it net no points to anyone in particular... Berzerker has done a good job encouraging harmony in how his mod is distributing with respect to other ways to play the game, just in general, in fact.
Revision is, much like GMDX, a remix mod with QOL, graphics, etc sprinkled in, but Revision is more a map geometry remix while GMDX is more of a functional remix, changing how you move through levels by changing actor positions and actor stat blocks rather than geometry shape. I would caution going into both Revision and GMDX with a big grain of salt, and would recommend the base experience (possibly DXT, given its extreme focus on not deviating from the game's original direction) for a first playthrough, then get around to trying prettymuch every mod at least once, and seeing what does or doesn't float your fancy based on tastes. To use a crude metaphor,don't have your first time be in a gangbang or a BDSM club, let it happen organically in a bedroom with someone you care about, and whatever you get into down the road is all up to you.
The AI things I kind of have gripes about, since many of them are mislabeled or misleading. Suppressing fire isn't about suppressing fire, it's about AI shooting places you used to be with AOE weapons, really just coming down to the plasma rifle in practical terms, but there's a lot of them added, so I guess it's common enough. Or AI shooting at decorations you're behind. The base game actually already did that, but didn't do it for decorations that were deemed too durable to be worth the effort. "Using grenades more often" AKA let me not even draw this grenade I don't have in my inventory , but instead magically manifest it mid-throw using a miniaturized, hacky grenade throw function with absurd levels of velocity, and have it land by virtue of being almost undodgable. Gun butting is a cool concept, but if you've played the mod on various difficulties, you know that a gunbutt hits a few fold harder than the fucking pistol does, which is just comical. Once again, bad execution, decent idea. Enemies do NOT use thermoptic camo. He used the exact same variables used on Anna, Paul, and Simons for cloaking and just applied them on MJ12 troops.
You can tell because unlike the short lived thermo camo, their cloak is bottomless in supply. At one point in development, in its early phases, the original author was, I shit you not, placing actual Anna Navarres and reskinning them to be MJ12 troops and editing every single variable by hand in the map editor... For every single "elite" there was. When questioned about the sanity of this design method, he said "don't underestimate me", and later caved and used an actual class for it anyways. This is 100% known to be nothing new.
I admit I fucking laughed rereading " Improved Gunther, Anna & Simons bossfights, and plenty more fine tuning. " Which is code talk for: "I deleted the ability for stealth players to handle these encounters", as Anna has troops with her that make a killswitch not the whole encounter after you strive to get it. Gunther is literally locked in a room with you by a gate that can't be lockpicked or blocked with invincible decorations, and whose switch sits directly behind him so there's no cheeky way to get access without going through him, and now he has more HP and his flamethrower has double range. Very epic. Walton simons is no longer off to one side for a cinematic approach so you can run if you hurry and take some plasma splash damage in the process. He is now crammed point blank against the door out to see him, so it's extremely impractical to try and slip past him, if even consistently possible given his beefed up stats and way higher damage plasma rifle.
The straight up downgrades are the part that really gets me about handling these things.
You can disagree about the practical value of the AI changes, but having played the game for ages, short of greasels jumping and AI strafing around corners, the experience is hardly changed to any real degree. If anything, shoving stat numbers around for weapons and enemy HP has had far more impact in GMDX than AI changes.
An example might be how gunshot noise is scaled way up in terms of volume and radius, so AI can hear from farther away, but is done in maps that are not scaled for this level of gunshot volume... The cons of refusing to change core geometry. The sawed off shotgun, consequently, is the best weapon for one shotting everything around a corner, and simultaneously the best way to bait people to coming around that corner from 50 miles away. Just take one shot and start picking people off one at a time. As BS as strafing making insta-reactions is, it's a broken mechanic that makes the AI get 1 or 2 shots in, regardless of whether you have supreme tactical advantage by doing cheesy shit like this. Two wrongs make 1 and 1/2 wrongs, I guess.
Yeah the rape scene was added in GMDX, it hasn't been removed in vRSD because that would requiring acknowledging GMDX has flaws. According to the original author it's to let people know "MJ12 are bad guys..." across the street from a vanilla convo humanizing individuals and encouraging you to think twice before murdering everyone nonstop, and this 2/3rds through the game, fresh after stopping them from infecting an entire continent with a manmade virus.
Oh, and I guess while depicting these things is fine in concept, it's not deus ex. If you check out a lot of the betas, they intentionally pulled away from going complete dystopia pretty fast, opting for a more articulate and careful approach to world building, and adding troops raping women adds edgy shock factor and tells us nothing we couldn't extrapolate on a mathematical level. Hell, even UN forces rolling into stop atrocities get accused of raping local citizens with the power given to them.
The rest of this is so ultimately trivial that I only mentioned what I can actually recall being different from moment to moment. In the worst of cases, turning can be kinda weird around corners, so the sane solution would be strafing with an actual reaction time. Instead of clunky, overly paced out RPG shooter mechanics, we have poorly shaped, early arena-style shooter mechanics. I don't particularly value one over the other, but reasonable persons may disagree.
That being said, I'm trying to avoid getting too deep into this one, but I admit you've brought up plenty I've forgotten, so I'll toss the rest to you and just re-iterate my select gripes and how it broke the parts of the experience for me that I actually value the most.
Funny enough, I was previously accused of giving a bad review to GMDX because I the creator is an idiot. As is obvious by its absurdly long and whimsical development period. Buuuut, coming this april, I'll have my own mod coming in the ACTUAL same category of Vanilla Overhaul. So, as a show of integrity, I'll be stopping my GMDX rants (and will avoid making comparisons with any works in the genre or violently cramming my work down people's throats) indefinitely come tomorrow, and I've edited all the colorful language out of my review retroactively, so thanks for letting me think of that while I was in the neighborhood. Effectively, this is the last GMDX rant I'll be writing. Take care.
