New renderers, new engines, The Purist Mod, GMDX, The Nameless Mod...

Unfortunately I have the impression that the final part was rushed, as the story feels incomplete at best. I wish Arkane could dedicate 6 more months to this game.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvey_Smith_(game_designer)

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishonored_(series)

Bioshock has never been in the same category for me, because it is very focused on run and gun combat, for this reason I’ve never felt it worked as an “immersive sim”. The levels aren’t nearly as open plan either. It’s still great in its own right of course.

One of the few modern games that actually got me tense and scared. It is a really good game.

I mean there's deathloop ... not saying it's anywhere near as good.

It does seem like immersive sim is gone, but it feels like it's influence lives on in BG3 and Elden Ring. The best games these days try hard to hide the rails.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3131640/Deus_Ex_Remastere...

What has been shown so far looks worse than many of the free modded versions out there, and with AI lowering the bar for modifying games every week… As an experiment I asked Claude to take the source code from the browser port of the game that appeared on GitHub recently, add coop multiplayer and as much of the graphical enhancements from the remaster video.

It took about 4 prompts, and I have builds playable on Linux, MacOS and Windows, with coop. Gets well over 300fps on my Mac Mini as uses metal on an a Mac.

But probably the worst trend with modern remakes is taking the original games off of online stores or "upgrading" them to the remake thus making the original unavailable. Combined with the "demakes" trend above and it seems like we're actively destroying many historical games with these "remakes".

[1] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2021-...

— Malkavian Mod

Reference: Deus Ex [Windows video game]. (2000). Austin, Texas: Ion Storm.

---

"As long as technology has a global reach, someone will have the world in the palm of his hand. If not Bob Page, then Everett, Dowd..." - Tracer Tong (Ion Storm, 2000)

Reference: Deus Ex [Windows video game]. (2000). Austin, Texas: Ion Storm.

Wann to try it again since its release, and back then i liked it but was too young to really get what it wants from me.

Revision is popular and cute, but changes too much. Level design on some levels is so different that you can't recognize them, I still get lost despite playing though it at least ten times, as original levels are burned in my memory.

Although this can be changed in settings, I'd still avoid Revision unless you want to have another go at it after finishing the original.

My last replay was with GMDX and it felt faithful to the vision of the original, with fewer rough edges.

Hoping the remaster can deliver some further refinement and optional enhancements.

I had no idea what I was in for, and as a 15 year old, I felt twists and surprises, and organic game reactions to things I did that blow my mind even today, and imo still haven't been matched. And leveling and skills truly mattered and were tied into the game. Inventory management and ammo was interesting, the interface was perfect. It also had a kind of intellectual curiosity in the dialog that I only ever felt in, say, Alpha Centauri and later, Disco Elysium. It's still the best PC game ever imo.

Now if only someone could make a game aping 'The Difference Engine' in the style of Dishonoured... the time is right for a steampunk equivalent!

Now with GMDX it's a must play.

When the game came out though the politics around conspiracy theories was very different. Deus Ex tried to cram in every conspiracy theory circulating at the time. MJ-12, the trilateral commission, Roswell...

The good guys were trying to coordinate and make sure vaccine was widely distributed, and IIRC the original friends of the main character continue to believe in the value of UNATCO (the agency you work for in the game) and treat it like a good cause that was poisoned rather than a philosophical error.

I can see the libertarian bent, but with the very heavy qualifier that it's like Noam Chomsky 90s anarcho libertarianism than the joke that is today's fascist-friendly memeified online libertarianism. I doubt Tracer Tong and Alex Jones would have much in common if they tried to have a conversation. And it does give you three choices at the end of the day, and seems to mean it, though if you squint I suspect it's most sympathetic to Tracer Tong's preferred outcome.

> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world. “Famous conspiracy theories always turn out to be just antisemitism,” this website’s regular commenter Ross theorized after reading a piece I wrote about the thoroughly unpleasant Pierre Plantard, the man behind some of the most outlandish tales surrounding the French village of Rennes-le-Château. The more conspiracy theories I examine in depth, the more true this proposition seems.

While true, in 2026 if you're conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism, you're part of the problem.

It wasn't just misanthropy on our part.

Zooming out, macrohistorically[1], the amount of destruction that can be controlled by the individual soldier has increased, steadily at first, then exponentially in the modern era. Obviously the extreme example would be something like SADM[2], but this increase also includes the multiplying complex systems of the modern world - bulk ammunition, heavy vehicles, commercial aircraft. As the numbers needed for X level of destruction decreases, the span of viable ideologies increases; it's easier to convince 12 guys of nutty ideas than it is to convince 12,000. So, in the big view, the idea of big cultural icons getting flattened, this is something scifi has been kicking around for a while now. One could argue it's a significant pillar of "cyberpunk" worldbuilding: the persistent presence of the "crazies" wielding the modern tools of fuel, bullets, and nuclear bombs.

[1] Which is definitely the perspective of the Deus Ex creative team.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...

Second, there's Open Deus EX (I think not GMDX compatible yet) and DX-Rust, which it is.

I still play to that game, and it's my favourite among Slashem and some few interactive fiction ones.

OpenDE: https://github.com/jarmitage99/OpenDE

If you use Recomp Launcher you can install these with ease, even on Steam Decks.

"There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.

The myth of the solo creator who heroically makes something amazing has a romantic appeal to a lot of people, especially those who dream of doing such a thing themselves someday. In truth, all great things in history have many collaborators and what we think of as the “creator” is often just a person who played the role of bringing together the collaborators, with perhaps a few other direct contributions.

But in the AI era, this solo-creator myth can now become reality, or if you are more cynical, just an even deeper delusion that exploits the non-consensual labor of millions for one’s personal benefit.

Perhaps we need a better prototype for a much larger system...

It was all fun and games until I created a personal psychotherapist and realized that I don’t have a fear of AI because I know how it works. There is an uncharted landscape of horrifying growth when we leave our safe space and take these tools somewhere else entirely.

It's so mammalian.

1: https://www.mobygames.com/person/39957/mary-c-demarle/

The "but" alone loses the whole damn case the dude is trying to make ...

I've seen a lot of discussions among fans about why one specific publicly visible person made this or that decision when he was never part of any discussion related to it.

My understanding is that he often came up with ideas for products and 'forced' engineers to find a way to make it possible. He wasn't very technical, but in a way that was a strength.

That's why iPhone clones turned up almost immediately. Management said to their devs, ok now Apple has done it, you can make that thing you've been wanting to make for ages. The capability was there, what was missing was the belief that something better was possible and needed.

One thing strikes me however, as perhaps revealing my own naïveté:

> Lurking in the accusations against “wealthy bankers” is the oldest, ugliest conspiratorial trope of all, the idea — stemming from the 1903 forgery “The Protocol of the Elders of Zion” — that a cabal of Jews secretly run the world.

I never made that connection until literally reading this piece. Bankers weren’t all Jews, and not all Jews were Bankers. I had heard the stereotype, sure, but I never read said stereotype into such conspiracies or narratives. It just made logical sense that a newly-emerged global society formed around currency and trade would be manipulated by those people who specialize in said sectors, i.e. bankers and financiers. The fact said individuals continue having outsized import on daily news and current events almost cements the plot point as real prophecy instead of antisemitic nonsense, but I can also see how bad actors would tie hate speech to current events to boost their own platforms.

Just an odd bit of reflecting, is all.

Compared to those, all bankers of the world even combined are still a minor insignificant player. I wonder if we will ever see 'occupy sillicon valley' movement?

On the contrary: whenever I see someone accuse a work of antisemitism because it has greedy bankers, I think that says a lot more about the accuser than it does the work in question. It is not normal to look at a fictional banker sect and assume that they are meant to be Jews, or a reflection on Jews.

Shame what happened to the series after DX:HR (with Mankind Divided feeling rather unfinished and ending on an abrupt cliffhanger with no follow-up on the horizon, despite the game itself being great otherwise). But at least we got some really good crumbs (HR and MD) out of it, and I am very much thankful for that.

I loved the gold filter for HR, for another example. I know I am probably in the minority.

I can recommend the HD remix.

Remaster, I guess. Which also makes more sense ;)

I loved the theme changes on them -- I remember HK Streets had explore, combat and death scene; transitions felt seamless in the game.

And the discoverability of all kinds of stuff in the canals. The cityscape building hopping, it had everything. You truly felt like you were discovering every inch of it and like it wasn't just on rails or procedurally generated.

[1] https://open.spotify.com/album/2gC3Ecmd6SuSSvdtpa30zP

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20221225103900/https://www.pcgam...

[0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5YdnLKkg2U&list=PLczA8pMWxl...

Cases in point:

https://youtu.be/odfCTFPyZCo

https://youtu.be/Aq8vFqY6XDo

https://youtu.be/yq9xJB9_lpU

https://youtu.be/DZU6XyFxCA0

> https://jarmitage99.itch.io/opende

Haven't been able to repeat that in Deus Ex, you can't play through the campaign as a total pacifist, and Carter explains as much right at the beginning.

100% of regular NPCs can be spared IIRC.

The gameplay and graphics don't hold up but the story was absolutely prescient around AI, billionaire oligarchs, and mass surveillance.

I tried playing Alice a couple times when I got Steam in 2023, and I couldn't get into it. Made it about halfway through Half Life on a long flight, and same.

It's wild how games that were considered state-of-the-art when we were kids can feel unplayably unpolished today.

IIRC Quake “a” and “d” to… turn, instead of strafe, by default. Absolute madness. Can be played without a mouse I think(?).

On the other hand, it is still very cool that you can get the bad guys to fight each other sometimes. That should be a feature in every game really.

I've still got an old G4 tower with a working install.

> https://www.macintoshrepository.org/3777-deus-ex

> https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/mac/562944-deus-ex/reviews/108...

There's a portion in the game when your brother Paul is sick and he tells you to leave him to fight off enemy goons alone. Apparently you can fight your way through the hotel and he survives all the way to the end of the game!

You can kill Anna on the plane where you're supposed to kill Lebedev; the game accounts for this with voice dialogue and everything. Crazy. At that point in the game there is no reason for you to even try (and she's a tough match) unlike later on --- but you can!

The issue with this is that the game doesn't really communicate this fact to you, and not killing the goons technically should mean that they're still going to go upstairs at some point and kill Paul.

The most hilarious part of this is that Paul himself says he's too weak to climb through the window, but as soon as those goons bust in through the front door, he whips out a 50 lb flame thrower and starts strafing around at 30 mph like he's in the motherfucking murder olympics.

My advice is to put a few more points in your primary combat skill, and don’t forget that you can level up during the game (like I did!)

Paul Denton: Don't be so quick to trust the UN.

JC: Are you kidding?

JC: The UN's about the only chance we've got these days. If the U.S. spirals into another Civil War...

Paul Denton: A pretext, nothing more.

Paul Denton: The whole project of world government going back to the League of Nations has been funded and manipulated mainly by wealthy bankers. JC: Is that so? Paul Denton: Remember that the UN itself was built on land donated by John D. Rockefeller Paul Denton: The wealthy have always been the ones to profit from one-world government Paul Denton: The United Nations' secret goal... well, this is David Rockefeller's description, from half a century ago: Paul Denton: "the supernational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers." Paul Denton: The UN was founded not to end war but to gradually dissolve national governments and replace them with a Globalist meritocracy. Paul Denton: Average people never benefit from government and business on a scale they can't even understand

If only the anti-government people could be told how much federal agencies do for us covertly, they'd change their attitude.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxOKEsBx4NU

I can’t recommend highly enough the remasters and remixes by Mothership Loudspeakerz.

"Oh fuck off" said A.

A said "fuck off you smarmy bastard"

I remember playing it again and again as a teenager, each time finding something new, some shaft I hadn't explored or a character in some side street I hadn't talked to. I must have played through 15+ times.

My favorite quote: "A bomb!" -Joch

I recall some anecdote from Harvey Smith that he liked to start the day earlier than the rest of the studio, and he could do a 'first draft' of a level before anyone arrived. I believe the example was the 'Ton hotel, which is a small map.

The Stanley Parable is an exploration of the fact that this sort of "interactive storytelling" is largely impossible. It's not a coincidence that it was made as a mod for Half-Life 2 (and then as a Source game). The different paths represent different attempts by the game designer or the player to either fix or cope with the failure of the game as the Narrator originally envisioned it.

https://www.it-he.org/deus.php

It's an amazing game in its own right and holds up really well today. The problem with hopping directly into Deus Ex is that it's really showing its age these days, even with mods.

DX:HR is a prequel, so from a timeline perspective it makes sense to play it first :)

Some years later I learned some english and found out the game is deep with layers, and the more I play the more I learn something new.

great example in my mind of that games dont need to be perfect to be released or very memorable.

good writing is essential in my mind, dialogues and music / atmosphere. maybe its personal taste.

thanks for the lovely blog and memories :) totally makes me wanna go and replay them!

No, the author didn't say it was.

I have the logo tattooed on myself (along with Babylon 5). First played it around 16 pre-spoiler-filled internet and was blown away by my friend and I having completely different outcomes to pivotal moments of the game related to Paul Denton (no spoilers: if you know, you know).

Never worked in games (bar a bit of voice acting in The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex) but I think were it not for that era of gaming I’d never have ended up working on Homebrew or at GitHub.

Sadly the graphics have not aged well but if you can handle them: the writing and non-linear/branching plot and dialogue is still probably second to none.

[https://www.moddb.com/mods/terminus-machina/images/the-human...]

With Deus Ex, I think one factor that really boosts it is that very few games previous to it focused nearly as much on experiencing a story while giving a first person player agency of any degree, and this is probably doubly true for the kind of audience that would find a first person real-time experience appealing, or at least I imagine the audiences for Fallout and Planescape: Torment and such, while overlapping some, weren't really quite the same audience as for Deus Ex, and stuff like Lucas Film's Maniac Mansion style games (puzzle narrative games?) are even further removed. While other games that are obviously similar in some ways, like Half Life, are much much more on rails in terms of both player experience and narrative compared to Deus Ex.

I think it's a great game, just like the X-Files was a great show, but also just like X-Files was not a perfect show. (Though I'm not sure there's a strict analog to the degree of unnecessary continuation X-Files has had.) By the standard of its time, just being first person and having varied endings, varied routes, and a lot of narrative support are all big winners for its time.

Having played all those games before GoldenEye, I still thought GE was groundbreaking and raised the bar for both PCs and consoles. My guess is it's harder for those who came after to go appreciate it. Or really anyone who needs stable, high frame rates. Because GE's low frame rate is probably its biggest flaw.

Screen sharing and low frame rates were all I can recall disliking. And the former could be solved with some cardboard ;). Nowadays you can play emulated or decompiled with high resolution and high frame rates. The models may not hold up as well, while most everything else is great.

I always wondered how this was supposed to make any sense at all given that the skyline (a screenshot of which is shown right there in the article!!) is clearly a 2D image rather than being polygonal…?

> When we made the skyline in the background we had pieces with the Twin Towers and pieces for the other parts of the city and for New Jersey. The texture memory was so high that I couldn’t use it all. I took one of the pieces and put it on one side, flipped it and put it on the other. So I made New York out of one half of the city so the Twin Towers were out.

> When people complained, we just explained that it had been destroyed by terrorist attacks. We start the game with the Liberty Island statue having been destroyed by terrorists a few years before. We just said that the towers had been destroyed too. And this was way before 9-11. Years.

Then, in 2012, Warren Spector said, in an interview with Game Informer [1]:

> Did you notice in the skyline on the City of New York, there’s no Twin Towers? […] It’s entirely coincidental, but this game about terrorism… and the Twin Towers are not part of the New York City skyline. […] We got rid of the Twin Towers, and I wish I could say we did it on purpose and we were, you know, sort of seeing the future, but it was actually just a mistake. The guy, the artist who did the skybox just, uh, left em out. And it sort of worked out in an unfortunate sort of way.

There's more about this that one can find online, including how apparently an image of the towers exists in the game's files, but hey, I'm not the one researching and writing the article and making claims that are plainly false on their face, which anyone can visually verify by looking at the screenshot right there in the article that is supposed to illustrate this supposed technical constraint!

Jimmy should probably fix the article to mention any or all of this, rather than repeating the often-retold urban legend, given how much he seems to care about factual accuracy in his writing! But, alas, he did not approve my comment, so maybe someone else can point this out to him instead.

[0] https://www.ign.com/articles/2003/02/18/dx-visible-interview

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOPHmbulMp4

I really miss PC Powerplay. It was great in its time.

I worked with Ashton Mills for a little bit in the early 2000s and he was a standup guy, I included him in the Acknowledgements to a book I recently wrote as an inspiration.

Was not disappointed. Demiurge is still one of my favourite books.

It has zero randomization, great setup experience on Windows and Linux, and what I consider to be the ideal set of changes for making the game better while adhering strictly to the vanilla experience. Not to mention all the bug fixes! The only thing I'd check for a vanilla experience is that password assistance is turned off.

I had a couple of friends play Deus Ex that way for the first time and it was a joy.

Unrelated, the randomizer speedrun mini-scene was the only time I did speedrunning and the most fun I've ever had replaying a game. The randomization aspect assuaged all my concerns about speedrunning having the wrong kind of repetitiveness for my preferences. I never saw myself doing speedruns, then I somehow ended up doing a world record. All because I saw a randomizer speedrun race and thought it was the coolest thing ever. If you're _that_ kind of Deus Ex fan, you owe it to yourself to check it out!