The official DEUS EX thread

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