The official DEUS EX thread

i guess you don't have to run steam in the background with the steam version either, actually; you can prob just run the executable. steam is weird and inconsistent with this stuff tho. anyway i own both versions for some fucking reason and they both run fine.

Started playing on Steam, seems fine.

But can't get past the stealth part in the training session!

not sure i've played the training session since i was 13 (even tho it has plotty stuff! i think bob page shows up in a secret room) but my main sneaking advice is to not forget the Q and E "lean" buttons, for poking your head out from behind cover a moment. weirdly i find the unadorned 90s-fps-style cover controls of this game (find an object and hold down crouch, use lean to glance around the object) more engaging+mimetic than modern "cover systems", where entire sequences of actions (exit cover, move right, roll, enter cover) are mapped to a single push of a button that normally does any number of totally unrelated things but is contextually responding to your status as In Cover. this usually gets called "elegant" and of course it is, from the perspective of someone playing a video game. dx is clunky and uncomfortable in comparison but it puts me consistently in the perspective of someone operating a body.

(my experience operating a body has been clunky and uncomfortable.)

I really prefer the old way of doing stealth, because it feels awkward like it would IRL. In more recent games like DX:HR it's way too slick, especially when it switches to a third person view when you're in cover, enabling you to see stuff that in first person you wouldn't. Also the whole context sensitive button 'press X to move from one area of cover to another area of cover in one smooth movement'. It takes all the tension away from the stealth experience.

Like in recent games I never get the feeling that I don't know where the enemies are. Although OTOH older games were pretty unforgiving where getting spotted by an enemy meant immediate game over.

especially when it switches to a third person view when you're in cover, enabling you to see stuff that in first person you wouldn't.

otm. headslapping.

a thing i enjoy is that despite his superhuman abilities and badass affect (and his employers' idea of him as something less than human--as a product, or a tech demo) jc is a freshly graduated trainee for whom a controlled, low-risk field test (recapturing the statue) distends into an endless terrifying night. (days pass, but for jc it is always night. at one point, as you fly west out of hong kong, you can see the sun rising behind you.) when i fumble with the controls, i decide that this is why.

(also at the beginning of the night, his superhuman abilities consist of a flashlight.)

when paul's in his living room crippled by nanovirus i click on him so that he starts a long monologue about how consortiums of bankers have always sought world government and then i walk into the bathroom and get into the shower so i can't hear him.

along similar lines, it's fun to save all the bottles of wine the triad leaders competitively gift you if you (totally unnecessarily and for no reward but this) go to the hong kong nightclub for drinks as they offer, then later get absolutely trashed with nicolette duclare in her teenage bedroom at her mother's illuminati estate. more fun to imagine jc's feelings if you do this before you wander into the drawing room and the voice of an evil artificial intelligence bursts into your ear growling WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR.

15 years and billions of dollars later show me an adolescent fantasy like that.

dlh i bought deus ex in the steam stealth sale and now it harassing me to install 'deus ex: revision'. what is this and is it any good

the screenshots/trailer are pretty--the new textures aren't much better than the much older "new vision" mod i linked above but the new lighting looks great and i bet they changed some models. not sure what else it changes. it touts "expanded environments", which, idk, hands off, honestly. it also seems to optionally integrate Shifter which i would not use on my first playthrough (or my first adult playthrough), even though it fixes some genuine bugs; it makes some changes to the augmentation system and the effect by the halfway mark is to make you ten times the superman you become in the vanilla game. still tho, it is optional. in the end my only wholehearted objection is that they have for some reason changed the music. fuck that.

potential discussion here re: the merits of these sorts of overhauls, comparison of their usually ecstatic reception to the poor reputations of similar technical adjustments in other media (e.g. colorization), the casual assumption one sometimes sees in unexpected places that video games follow some sort of moore's law of asymptotic aesthetic refinement and that all games even good games would only have been better had their tech been more advanced. but i recommended new vision and my morrowind and fallout:nv are near-unrecognizably encrusted with mods, and in both cases i feel like the mods have liberated the platonic game from a cramped box. deus ex has never felt that cramped to me tho--it's never felt like its potential is being frustrated or squandered.

i'll install it on my next playthrough. these come slightly less often than viewings of the third man.

i guess my advice would be, play the game, and if you stop playing the game for the specific reason that it looks like shit, mod it.

btw interested in hearing about your hatred for dx3. i more or less enjoyed most of it but as i have mentioned in this thread before i am the only human being alive to have reached the end of the genuinely dire dx2.

idk, it just hit my i-don't-give-a-shit threshold by the end of the tutorialish level, and it felt horribly anonymous--i feel like the first one's primitivism adds character, sorta (quake and quake iii also look 'better' in some sense now than they did at the time). i didn't even get to the proper start of the game

well strangely despite its primitivism the first one is more ambitious: an opening level where you're offered the opportunity to sneak down hallways and fire from cover vs an opening level where you freeroam across a virtual recreation of liberty island

idk if quake looks better now--some of the newer engines for it, "darkplaces" etc, look pretty great, and its incoherent goth-metal-aliens aesthetic is all-time classic, but it is unmistakably the game that invented Shooter Brown--but doom looks totally, totally beautiful.

Reviews coming out for Mankind Divided, sounds solid. Interest piqued by the VR Missions-type mode.

i more or less enjoyed most of it but as i have mentioned in this thread before i am the only human being alive to have reached the end of the genuinely dire dx2.

https://kotaku.com/the-internet-agrees-that-elon-musk-is-deus-exs-trillion-1843185039