Game Review: Deus Ex (GMDX Mod)
2020-Dec-31, Thursday 20:22![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Finally I return to Deus Ex, almost ten years after the time I reviewed The Nameless Mod in my second review ever.
I got Deus Ex as a university student, when I had plenty of free time to play it--I can look over and see the original CDs from where I'm writing this--and I played it through multiple times my sophomore year. I even spent a bunch of time in the multiplayer mode they released in patch 1.12, whose player base was small enough that I got used to seeing the same people over and over again, and where I still remember the time I jumped into a game, killed five people in quick succession, and then someone said in chat:
I've been wanting to replay it for years and it's never left my computer--as the saying goes, every time you mention Deus Ex someone reinstalls it--and this year is the 20th anniversary so it seemed like a perfect time. I'm not sure I was considering just how perfect it really was, however. A pandemic? Protests? A government that seems content with both increasing its control over daily life while also not caring if the people live or die? I posted a quote from the game:
Let's escape into the idyllic world of conspiracies and cybernetic superspies, shall we?
You can tell it's cyberpunk because of the Chinese characters and neon. Or maybe it's just Asia.
Deus Ex is an "immersive sim," a genre which doesn't really have rigidly-defined boundaries but is generally distinguished by the emphasis on player choice and devotion to realistic depiction of the game world within the constraints of the game's systems--i.e., allowing for the existence of magic or advanced technology. When infiltrating a top-secret military base, there will be barracks, mess halls, and bathrooms in the level's layout, because an actual military base needs bathrooms and even cybernetically-augmented supersoldiers still need to eat. Player choice comes through providing a series of mission objectives but no prescribed means to accomplish those objectives. Given a mission to steal a particular document, the player could kill all the guards, they could distract the guards at the gate and sneak past them, they could avoid the gate entirely and enter through the sewers, they could flood the whole complex with poison gas or reprogram the sentry bots to attack anything that moves, and as long as they walk back out with that document, that counts as mission accomplished.
To that end, Deus Ex also has an RPG system attached with points awarded for exploring hard-to-get places and achieving objectives. Essentially every game is an RPG now, because video game developers fully exploit the psychological reward of filling up bars and watching numbers go up, but Deus Ex was my first experience with what we now call "RPG elements" and the choice of whether to focus on stealth, hacking or lockpicking, long-range or close range weapons, or oddball skills like "Environmental Training" are part of that element of player choice. You can choose stealth, hacking, silent assassination, or guns blazing, and there's a skill build that supports that choice. And unlike a lot of open world games, there aren't enough skill points to master every skill even if you scour every single map and talk to every single NPC, so it's important to pick your areas of competence and focus on them rather than try to become okay at every field. If you want to go non-lethal, then stick with the prod. If you plan to unlock every lock and hack every computer, you probably won't be able to go toe to toe with military combat robots.
Since it's a cyberpunk conspiracy game, Deus Ex also contains technological augmentation that represents an additional area of choice. Every possible augmentation is exclusive--buying the Cloak aug to become invisible to other people prevents buying the Radar Transparency aug that avoids detection by robots, and buying the Regeneration aug is exclusive with the Energy Shield aug. There's no way to switch augs after choosing, so like with skills, it's important to pick an area of strength and focus on that, and like with skills, there are many possible paths to power.
This was my viewpoint for most of the game.
That said, nearly every time I previously played the game I followed the same path.
I would start off focusing on non-lethal methods of combat, like the tranq gun and the riot prod, and then when the conspiracy is revealed about a quarter of the way through the game, I'd completely abandon non-lethal methods, pick up an assault rifle, and just gun down everyone who dared attack me for the entire rest of the game. I'd often pick up heavy weaponry too, for when I was facing military bots, and I'd buy the ballistic protection, strength, and speed augs to make myself a one-man army. There'd be battles where I'd be facing multiple heavily-armed troopers and a bot launching rockets at me and I'd kill them all and come out of it with more health than I started with thanks to my Regeneration aug. I'd beaten the game several times using that exact same build in the past, and I wasn't interested in retreading the same path even if it had been over a decade since I'd last done it. This time, I was going to go all-in on stealth.
Well, mostly. As I mentioned, Deus Ex has an objective-based mission progression and reward structure, so while I spent most of the game sneaking through ventilation shafts and using my riot baton to knock out unsuspecting soldiers, there were times I resorted to a more direct approach. Sometimes I'd throw grenades or blow up security bots. Sometimes I'd hack the security systems and turn the defensive turrets on the soldiers, and sometimes I'd knock everyone out and toss them in the storeroom. I was free to change up my approach based on the situation and on how I was feeling, which is really what the core of an immersive sim--I wasn't strong enough to fight an entire room of soldiers, but I could Batman every one of them individually.
This is in contrast to the later technical-prequel game, Human Revolution, which had a far more granular reward structure that made nonviolence the correct way to play. DX:HR has a flat XP reward per enemy killed, then a bonus for knocking them out instead and an additional bonus for concealing the body, with extra bonuses for not setting off any alarms, never being seen by cameras, and so on. That meant that when I played, I would sneak through the entire level like a shadow until I got the bonus, then double back and knock out every guard and stuff them into the ventilation shafts. This got me a bunch of XP, but it made every level take twice as long and trivialized the difficulty curve because I could buy almost every upgrade by the halfway point. There's a management principle that people follow the incentives even if they lead to bad behavior, and there's an MMO design principle that if there's two ways to achieve a goal, one of which is five percent faster and a hundred percent more annoying, almost the entire player base will take that path and complain the entire time about how the game is garbage. I'm not immune to such incentives even though I know about them, and the joy of playing Deus Ex is that it explicitly does not care about the fiddly details.
Sometimes you have to go loud.
There's a particular oddness about stealth games, because even more so than other video games they operate by a consistent set of rules that has nothing to do with real human behavior. There are a lot of jokes about the AI of games like Skyrim, about how you can shoot a bandit in the head and their drinking companion will get up, run around in a panic for thirty seconds, and then go sit back down next to their friend's body while muttering "must have been the rats." Deus Ex isn't that bad, but it is true that a stealth game can't have a realistic enemy response to hostile infiltration. If a soldier in a real-world military base found a body stuffed into a utility closet, there'd be an alarm raised for hours and the entire base would be on high alert. In a game, though, that might as well result in an immediate mission failure, so there needs to be some intermediate point to make the game playable.
Deus Ex has guards that assume everything is rats, true, but the security systems remember. Being spotted by a camera sounds a series of warning beeps and then sets off an alarm, and alarms alert guards, trigger automated turrets to target you, and sometimes release security bots. This is better than a simple mission failure and can sometimes be turned to your advantage, since scrambler grenades or hacking computers can be used to turn turrets or bots to your side and make them target enemies. That makes an increasing number of enemies an advantage, and since Deus Ex is objective-based, it doesn't matter how many alarms you set off on the way to your target as long as you get to that target. The only ghost or non-lethal objectives are ones you set yourself.
It also has a much more granular stealth system than I initially realized, revealed to me thanks to GMDX's aug that shows light levels. Deus Ex calculates the amount of light at all times and uses it, as well as how concealed the player is, to determine when the guards are alert. Similarly, noise levels vary depending on how fast you're moving and what kind of surface you're walking on, so running on carpet is safer than running on a concrete floor, and falling from a high surface into water is better than onto a metal catwalk (and not just to avoid leg damage). There were multiple times I thought I'd be seen only to realize that I was hidden in shadows, and other times I forgot that security bots ignore light levels thanks to infrared sensors and then I got blown up by rockets. You can't win them all.
ACAB.
Deus Ex is the story of JC Denton--a codename, but the only name used in voice acting--the second nanotechnologically-augmented agent to work for UNATCO ("No, Savage." "U-UNATCO?"), the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. Terrorism is on the rise world-wide, and the UN has funded an anti-terrorism coalition with global reach. After the first mission where JC Denton captures a leader of the National Secessionist Forces, who hijacked a shipment of the ambrosia vaccine used to cure the Gray Death plague that is ravaging New York and other major American cities, he’s sent to chase down the vaccine shipments before the NSF can spirit them away. This is what I mean about Deus Ex being timely.
As the game goes on, though, the web of conspiracy deepens. From a strange base in the New York sewers where black-clad soldiers conduct experiments to the hidden truth behind UNATCO, JC learns that there are sinister forces behind the plague, the increasing globalization and centralization of world government, his augmentations, the internet surveillance, the NSF...basically every single plot element is tied into a chain of moves and countermoves as the real players move their pawns around on the chessboard of society. It's a world where every single conspiracy theory is actually true. Even Roswell, though none of the aliens survived the crash.
Deus Ex is very firmly placed in the 90s version of conspiracies, though, back when we thought the government was competent, and all the plot elements reflect that. Talking about black helicopters or FEMA camps or Project Echelon nowadays sounds quaint, like a weird uncle at Thanksgiving. I clearly remember reading a forum thread of someone playing DX:HR and completely being unable to suspend their disbelief when they found the secret FEMA camp, since this was post-Katrina and it was obvious that FEMA could barely organize a relief effort in a major American city, much less arrest millions of residents and transport them all to secret detention facilities. It was a weird time, the End of History, when all our external enemies had been defeated and so we had to look within for threats.
How stupid it all seems now. If only there really were electronic old men running the world.
Just standard Friday night bar talk.
In keeping with its 90s genesis, Deus Ex is also full of philosophy and political rhetoric. This is the most egregious example, where JC debates the merits of representative democracy vs. authoritarianism with a bartender in Hong Kong, but the very first mission target in the game also talks about the increasing control the government has over public life, the decreasing share of taxes paid by corporations, and his theories about how the government made the plague as a means of population control and the Trilateral Commission is a sinister group that's hand-picking presidential candidates. All of this is correct in the game, by the way, including the plague as a government plot. I wasn't kidding when I said all conspiracies were true.
All of this philosophy and dialogue makes the game eminently quotable, and to this day I still use JC's response to the NSF leader's diatribe about corporations, taxation, and freedom:![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
sashagee described the French accents as "like if someone described a French accent to you, and you've never heard it, but you decide to speak in one from now on" and I can't really argue with that. The Cantonese accents in Hong Kong aren't much better.
And the oddest thing to me, though it seems weird to write this, is the lack of antisemitism. It's not like I want any antisemitic characters in the game--in a game where all conspiracy theories are true, that'd make it Nazi propaganda. But considering that almost all real-world conspiracy theories in America eventually go back to antisemitism (yes, even reptilian aliens), in a game where one mission involves JC infiltrating the secret cathedral lair of the Knights Templar in Paris, where they had controlled world banking for centuries after their supposed dissolution, at the behest of the Illuminati in order to steal the Templar gold to aid in the war effort against Majestic 12, in a game where the NSF leader and Paul Denton name-drop the Rothschilds and talk about a conspiracy of global bankers, its absence is glaring. This is a game that draws on real-world conspiracy theories for every element of its plot but it doesn't think we have anything to do with it. It's the most unrealistic element of the game, far less believable to me than nanotech augmentations and universal constructors, and I don't know how to resolve it. It'd be a terrible game if it had been included, and it's not a realistic representation of conspiracy theories without it.
As you can see, my immortal nanotech god-king will definitely be a benevolent ruler.
If you remember the Mass Effect 3 controversy about the three-button ending, I'm here to say that Deus Ex did it first.
Deus Ex is good, though, because the ending is about the political conflicts that run through the entire game, the ability of humanity to govern itself, the necessity of strong leaders, and the tendency of large governments and corporations to serve themselves rather than the people. Each ending expresses a position and comes with a quotation after the ending video plays. To wit:
All of this is far more interesting to me than what color space laser to fire, even if the end result is still just a small cutscene and a splash screen with a quote at the end. When I first played the game back at university, of course I went with the Helios ending. I would be able to rule well if trusted with absolute power! Just like Light Yagami from Death Note, who claimed that being an honor student made him eminently qualified to exercise the power of life and death over anyone in the world, right? Nowadays I'd still pick the Helios Merge ending, but it's a much more conflicted option--the best choice of three hard ones, rather than the clear best choice.
New Dark Age definitely has the best music, though. Listen yourself.
My vision is augmented.
Since I had played Deus Ex multiple times before, and even gotten through most of the game on realistic difficulty, I decided to check out the mod scene. Rock Paper Shotgun had posted an article a while back about Deus Ex: Revision, a mod that was mostly a graphic and level design overhaul, but when I looked on the internet, the attitude seemed to favor Give Me Deus Ex, a mod I had never heard of which was supposedly more faithful to the original. I looked online and found the trailer, which uses my favorite Deus Ex OC ReMix (in the Listening section of this post!) and which basically looked like the game I remembered, and I installed it and gave it a go. And I have to say that I think GMDX makes Deus Ex a better game but a worse immersive sim.
Let me start with the good points. GMDX overhauls the skill and aug systems, which were good in the original but which did have a few standout flaws. Swimming was a skill and Aqualung was an aug, even though taking the Regeneration aug made both of them obsolete as JC's nanites rebuilt his tissues faster than oxygen deprivation damaged them. Environmental Training, which in the original was tied to limited-time power-ups that couldn't be deactivated once used, was made more useful by making powerups toggleable and stack in inventory with higher levels of the skill. No longer would one second of hazmat protection require using up an entire hazmat suit--instead, the hazmat suit (or ballistic armor, or tech goggles, or rebreather) only drains power when actively being used and can be recharged with bioelectric cells, making a full Batman-style tools playthrough possible. In addition, there's a perk system included with the skills, such as stopping JC from yelling (and alerting enemies) when damaged or increasing the range of multitools so that electronics can be disabled from across a room. Augmentations were overhauled so that taking Regeneration or Power Recirculator is no longer a no-brainer--and indeed, I actually picked Energy Shield over Regeneration this time, since in GMDX some augs are passive and always on, unlike the original game where everything has to be toggled. Eighty percent protection from explosions, plasma, fire, or EMP attacks? That sounds amazing. The RPG system improvements are an unqualified success.
GMDX also adds mantling, making many more areas accessibly even to those who don't have the speed aug (like I didn't). Enemies can't even jump so while this is a major change, I don't think it's one that affects gameplay to an enormous extent.
There were other changes I was less keen on, however. I haven't played Deus Ex recently enough to know all the changes that GMDX made, but two I noticed were stronger lockers and some enemies not carrying their weapons. Apparently GMDX changes the opening Liberty Island scenario so that the NSF paramilitaries who normally carry a tranq crossbow and a sniper rifle don't actually provide those weapons to JC when looted. The reasoning is that Paul Denton offers JC the choice of a tranq crossbow, a sniper rifle, and a GEP (Guided Explosive Projectile) Gun at the very beginning, and taking the GEP Gun is the obvious choice since the NSF has the other two weapons, and by removing them from the initial level Paul's offer to JC becomes an actual choice. This is true, but the NSF uses those weapons on JC and should be carrying them. It's making a gameplay choice more meaningful at the expense of properly simulating the world. Similarly, there are several lockers later on that can only be lockpicked because they have infinite strength, which is presumably to require the player to choose whether to spend lockpicks rather than just blowing up the lockers like in vanilla Deus Ex. But, these are lockers. If JC takes the Microfibral Muscle aug he should honestly just be able to rip them open. It's not like they're reinforced or anything. Again, meaningful gameplay at the expense of the simulation.
The mod also promises AI improvements, but I'm not sure I saw any. I haven't played the original deus Ex in long enough that I can't explicitly compare GMDX to the original, but there's only so much AI improvement a stealth game can take. Enemy soldiers still stared straight at me as I ducked into the ventilation and then said "Must be the rats." The hostility code is the same as well--in the Hong Kong canals I smashed a window, then cloaked and jumped into the canals so I'm sure no one saw anything, but the soldiers there still went hostile. It is what it is.
I'd still recommend it, but play the original Deus Ex first so you know what the baseline is. This isn't a Metroid: Zero Mission situation where the original is obsolete.
Told you.
Unlike Gunther Hermann and Anne Navarre, the cybernetically augmented agents who are threatened by JC Denton's new breed of nanotech augmentations, Deus Ex is the furthest thing from obsolete. Even though the conspiratorial background is firmly rooted in the 90s, the Plague Year has made it even more relevant than ever, and Deus Ex being so conspiracy oriented makes it weirdly comforting. The crutch of conspiratorial thinking is that it always relies on there being a mastermind behind everything, on someone being in control, on there being a plan. The reason America is the way it is today is because there was no plan, as this longread from the New Yorker discusses in depth. Honestly, at least if coronavirus were a nanotech bug designed to create chaos to allow Majestic 12 to take over the world, then someone would have foreseen all of this.
Reality isn't like that, of course. That's why we play video games. And Deus Ex is a game well worth playing.
Also if you have played Deus Ex, I urge you to get out Deus Ex Recut Remastered, which I've linked multiple times above. I think about it at least once a week.
I got Deus Ex as a university student, when I had plenty of free time to play it--I can look over and see the original CDs from where I'm writing this--and I played it through multiple times my sophomore year. I even spent a bunch of time in the multiplayer mode they released in patch 1.12, whose player base was small enough that I got used to seeing the same people over and over again, and where I still remember the time I jumped into a game, killed five people in quick succession, and then someone said in chat:
"Who is Dorchadas and why is he kicking my ass?"Probably my proudest moment in any competitive FPS, to be honest.
I've been wanting to replay it for years and it's never left my computer--as the saying goes, every time you mention Deus Ex someone reinstalls it--and this year is the 20th anniversary so it seemed like a perfect time. I'm not sure I was considering just how perfect it really was, however. A pandemic? Protests? A government that seems content with both increasing its control over daily life while also not caring if the people live or die? I posted a quote from the game:
Walton Simons: "This plague... the rioting is intensifying to the point where we may not be able to contain it."...and people thought I was quoting a news article from that month. What a year 2020 has been.
Bob Page: "Why contain it? Let it spill over into the schools and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them."
Let's escape into the idyllic world of conspiracies and cybernetic superspies, shall we?
You can tell it's cyberpunk because of the Chinese characters and neon. Or maybe it's just Asia.
Deus Ex is an "immersive sim," a genre which doesn't really have rigidly-defined boundaries but is generally distinguished by the emphasis on player choice and devotion to realistic depiction of the game world within the constraints of the game's systems--i.e., allowing for the existence of magic or advanced technology. When infiltrating a top-secret military base, there will be barracks, mess halls, and bathrooms in the level's layout, because an actual military base needs bathrooms and even cybernetically-augmented supersoldiers still need to eat. Player choice comes through providing a series of mission objectives but no prescribed means to accomplish those objectives. Given a mission to steal a particular document, the player could kill all the guards, they could distract the guards at the gate and sneak past them, they could avoid the gate entirely and enter through the sewers, they could flood the whole complex with poison gas or reprogram the sentry bots to attack anything that moves, and as long as they walk back out with that document, that counts as mission accomplished.
To that end, Deus Ex also has an RPG system attached with points awarded for exploring hard-to-get places and achieving objectives. Essentially every game is an RPG now, because video game developers fully exploit the psychological reward of filling up bars and watching numbers go up, but Deus Ex was my first experience with what we now call "RPG elements" and the choice of whether to focus on stealth, hacking or lockpicking, long-range or close range weapons, or oddball skills like "Environmental Training" are part of that element of player choice. You can choose stealth, hacking, silent assassination, or guns blazing, and there's a skill build that supports that choice. And unlike a lot of open world games, there aren't enough skill points to master every skill even if you scour every single map and talk to every single NPC, so it's important to pick your areas of competence and focus on them rather than try to become okay at every field. If you want to go non-lethal, then stick with the prod. If you plan to unlock every lock and hack every computer, you probably won't be able to go toe to toe with military combat robots.
Since it's a cyberpunk conspiracy game, Deus Ex also contains technological augmentation that represents an additional area of choice. Every possible augmentation is exclusive--buying the Cloak aug to become invisible to other people prevents buying the Radar Transparency aug that avoids detection by robots, and buying the Regeneration aug is exclusive with the Energy Shield aug. There's no way to switch augs after choosing, so like with skills, it's important to pick an area of strength and focus on that, and like with skills, there are many possible paths to power.
This was my viewpoint for most of the game.
That said, nearly every time I previously played the game I followed the same path.
I would start off focusing on non-lethal methods of combat, like the tranq gun and the riot prod, and then when the conspiracy is revealed about a quarter of the way through the game, I'd completely abandon non-lethal methods, pick up an assault rifle, and just gun down everyone who dared attack me for the entire rest of the game. I'd often pick up heavy weaponry too, for when I was facing military bots, and I'd buy the ballistic protection, strength, and speed augs to make myself a one-man army. There'd be battles where I'd be facing multiple heavily-armed troopers and a bot launching rockets at me and I'd kill them all and come out of it with more health than I started with thanks to my Regeneration aug. I'd beaten the game several times using that exact same build in the past, and I wasn't interested in retreading the same path even if it had been over a decade since I'd last done it. This time, I was going to go all-in on stealth.Well, mostly. As I mentioned, Deus Ex has an objective-based mission progression and reward structure, so while I spent most of the game sneaking through ventilation shafts and using my riot baton to knock out unsuspecting soldiers, there were times I resorted to a more direct approach. Sometimes I'd throw grenades or blow up security bots. Sometimes I'd hack the security systems and turn the defensive turrets on the soldiers, and sometimes I'd knock everyone out and toss them in the storeroom. I was free to change up my approach based on the situation and on how I was feeling, which is really what the core of an immersive sim--I wasn't strong enough to fight an entire room of soldiers, but I could Batman every one of them individually.
This is in contrast to the later technical-prequel game, Human Revolution, which had a far more granular reward structure that made nonviolence the correct way to play. DX:HR has a flat XP reward per enemy killed, then a bonus for knocking them out instead and an additional bonus for concealing the body, with extra bonuses for not setting off any alarms, never being seen by cameras, and so on. That meant that when I played, I would sneak through the entire level like a shadow until I got the bonus, then double back and knock out every guard and stuff them into the ventilation shafts. This got me a bunch of XP, but it made every level take twice as long and trivialized the difficulty curve because I could buy almost every upgrade by the halfway point. There's a management principle that people follow the incentives even if they lead to bad behavior, and there's an MMO design principle that if there's two ways to achieve a goal, one of which is five percent faster and a hundred percent more annoying, almost the entire player base will take that path and complain the entire time about how the game is garbage. I'm not immune to such incentives even though I know about them, and the joy of playing Deus Ex is that it explicitly does not care about the fiddly details.
Sometimes you have to go loud.
There's a particular oddness about stealth games, because even more so than other video games they operate by a consistent set of rules that has nothing to do with real human behavior. There are a lot of jokes about the AI of games like Skyrim, about how you can shoot a bandit in the head and their drinking companion will get up, run around in a panic for thirty seconds, and then go sit back down next to their friend's body while muttering "must have been the rats." Deus Ex isn't that bad, but it is true that a stealth game can't have a realistic enemy response to hostile infiltration. If a soldier in a real-world military base found a body stuffed into a utility closet, there'd be an alarm raised for hours and the entire base would be on high alert. In a game, though, that might as well result in an immediate mission failure, so there needs to be some intermediate point to make the game playable.
Deus Ex has guards that assume everything is rats, true, but the security systems remember. Being spotted by a camera sounds a series of warning beeps and then sets off an alarm, and alarms alert guards, trigger automated turrets to target you, and sometimes release security bots. This is better than a simple mission failure and can sometimes be turned to your advantage, since scrambler grenades or hacking computers can be used to turn turrets or bots to your side and make them target enemies. That makes an increasing number of enemies an advantage, and since Deus Ex is objective-based, it doesn't matter how many alarms you set off on the way to your target as long as you get to that target. The only ghost or non-lethal objectives are ones you set yourself.
It also has a much more granular stealth system than I initially realized, revealed to me thanks to GMDX's aug that shows light levels. Deus Ex calculates the amount of light at all times and uses it, as well as how concealed the player is, to determine when the guards are alert. Similarly, noise levels vary depending on how fast you're moving and what kind of surface you're walking on, so running on carpet is safer than running on a concrete floor, and falling from a high surface into water is better than onto a metal catwalk (and not just to avoid leg damage). There were multiple times I thought I'd be seen only to realize that I was hidden in shadows, and other times I forgot that security bots ignore light levels thanks to infrared sensors and then I got blown up by rockets. You can't win them all.
ACAB.
Deus Ex is the story of JC Denton--a codename, but the only name used in voice acting--the second nanotechnologically-augmented agent to work for UNATCO ("No, Savage." "U-UNATCO?"), the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition. Terrorism is on the rise world-wide, and the UN has funded an anti-terrorism coalition with global reach. After the first mission where JC Denton captures a leader of the National Secessionist Forces, who hijacked a shipment of the ambrosia vaccine used to cure the Gray Death plague that is ravaging New York and other major American cities, he’s sent to chase down the vaccine shipments before the NSF can spirit them away. This is what I mean about Deus Ex being timely.
As the game goes on, though, the web of conspiracy deepens. From a strange base in the New York sewers where black-clad soldiers conduct experiments to the hidden truth behind UNATCO, JC learns that there are sinister forces behind the plague, the increasing globalization and centralization of world government, his augmentations, the internet surveillance, the NSF...basically every single plot element is tied into a chain of moves and countermoves as the real players move their pawns around on the chessboard of society. It's a world where every single conspiracy theory is actually true. Even Roswell, though none of the aliens survived the crash.
Deus Ex is very firmly placed in the 90s version of conspiracies, though, back when we thought the government was competent, and all the plot elements reflect that. Talking about black helicopters or FEMA camps or Project Echelon nowadays sounds quaint, like a weird uncle at Thanksgiving. I clearly remember reading a forum thread of someone playing DX:HR and completely being unable to suspend their disbelief when they found the secret FEMA camp, since this was post-Katrina and it was obvious that FEMA could barely organize a relief effort in a major American city, much less arrest millions of residents and transport them all to secret detention facilities. It was a weird time, the End of History, when all our external enemies had been defeated and so we had to look within for threats.
How stupid it all seems now. If only there really were electronic old men running the world.
Just standard Friday night bar talk.
In keeping with its 90s genesis, Deus Ex is also full of philosophy and political rhetoric. This is the most egregious example, where JC debates the merits of representative democracy vs. authoritarianism with a bartender in Hong Kong, but the very first mission target in the game also talks about the increasing control the government has over public life, the decreasing share of taxes paid by corporations, and his theories about how the government made the plague as a means of population control and the Trilateral Commission is a sinister group that's hand-picking presidential candidates. All of this is correct in the game, by the way, including the plague as a government plot. I wasn't kidding when I said all conspiracies were true.
All of this philosophy and dialogue makes the game eminently quotable, and to this day I still use JC's response to the NSF leader's diatribe about corporations, taxation, and freedom:
"Do you have a single fact to back that up?"I remember the Russian soldier in the bar yelling "I spill my drink!" And I also remember the voice acting, which sadly doesn't measure up to the writing. JC speaks in a gravely monotone for the entire game, apparently because the actor was directed not to put too much emotion into his performance so that the player could fill in the emotional gaps themselves, but any character who isn't supposed to be a native English-speaker is a bit questionable.
sashagee described the French accents as "like if someone described a French accent to you, and you've never heard it, but you decide to speak in one from now on" and I can't really argue with that. The Cantonese accents in Hong Kong aren't much better.And the oddest thing to me, though it seems weird to write this, is the lack of antisemitism. It's not like I want any antisemitic characters in the game--in a game where all conspiracy theories are true, that'd make it Nazi propaganda. But considering that almost all real-world conspiracy theories in America eventually go back to antisemitism (yes, even reptilian aliens), in a game where one mission involves JC infiltrating the secret cathedral lair of the Knights Templar in Paris, where they had controlled world banking for centuries after their supposed dissolution, at the behest of the Illuminati in order to steal the Templar gold to aid in the war effort against Majestic 12, in a game where the NSF leader and Paul Denton name-drop the Rothschilds and talk about a conspiracy of global bankers, its absence is glaring. This is a game that draws on real-world conspiracy theories for every element of its plot but it doesn't think we have anything to do with it. It's the most unrealistic element of the game, far less believable to me than nanotech augmentations and universal constructors, and I don't know how to resolve it. It'd be a terrible game if it had been included, and it's not a realistic representation of conspiracy theories without it.
As you can see, my immortal nanotech god-king will definitely be a benevolent ruler.
If you remember the Mass Effect 3 controversy about the three-button ending, I'm here to say that Deus Ex did it first.
Deus Ex is good, though, because the ending is about the political conflicts that run through the entire game, the ability of humanity to govern itself, the necessity of strong leaders, and the tendency of large governments and corporations to serve themselves rather than the people. Each ending expresses a position and comes with a quotation after the ending video plays. To wit:
- Helios Merge: Join with the Helios AI, fusing an understanding of human motivations and desires to the pure logic of the machine, and rule as a benevolent(?) immortal nanotech god-king. Quote:
"If there were no god, it would be necessary to invent him."
—Voltaire - A New Dark Age: Destroy the Echelon backbone of the internet centralized at Area 51, severing global communications and unleashing an age of smaller polities and prosperous(?) city-states. Quote:
"Yesterday we obeyed kings and bent our necks before emperors. But today we kneel only to truth..."
—Kahlil Gibran - Illuminati Rule: Kill Bob Page and accept Morgan Everett's offer to join the Illuminati, returning the world to 20th century global capitalism where most people have okay(?) lives but inequality is widespread. Quote:
"Better to reign in hell, than serve in heaven."
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
All of this is far more interesting to me than what color space laser to fire, even if the end result is still just a small cutscene and a splash screen with a quote at the end. When I first played the game back at university, of course I went with the Helios ending. I would be able to rule well if trusted with absolute power! Just like Light Yagami from Death Note, who claimed that being an honor student made him eminently qualified to exercise the power of life and death over anyone in the world, right? Nowadays I'd still pick the Helios Merge ending, but it's a much more conflicted option--the best choice of three hard ones, rather than the clear best choice.
New Dark Age definitely has the best music, though. Listen yourself.
My vision is augmented.
Since I had played Deus Ex multiple times before, and even gotten through most of the game on realistic difficulty, I decided to check out the mod scene. Rock Paper Shotgun had posted an article a while back about Deus Ex: Revision, a mod that was mostly a graphic and level design overhaul, but when I looked on the internet, the attitude seemed to favor Give Me Deus Ex, a mod I had never heard of which was supposedly more faithful to the original. I looked online and found the trailer, which uses my favorite Deus Ex OC ReMix (in the Listening section of this post!) and which basically looked like the game I remembered, and I installed it and gave it a go. And I have to say that I think GMDX makes Deus Ex a better game but a worse immersive sim.
Let me start with the good points. GMDX overhauls the skill and aug systems, which were good in the original but which did have a few standout flaws. Swimming was a skill and Aqualung was an aug, even though taking the Regeneration aug made both of them obsolete as JC's nanites rebuilt his tissues faster than oxygen deprivation damaged them. Environmental Training, which in the original was tied to limited-time power-ups that couldn't be deactivated once used, was made more useful by making powerups toggleable and stack in inventory with higher levels of the skill. No longer would one second of hazmat protection require using up an entire hazmat suit--instead, the hazmat suit (or ballistic armor, or tech goggles, or rebreather) only drains power when actively being used and can be recharged with bioelectric cells, making a full Batman-style tools playthrough possible. In addition, there's a perk system included with the skills, such as stopping JC from yelling (and alerting enemies) when damaged or increasing the range of multitools so that electronics can be disabled from across a room. Augmentations were overhauled so that taking Regeneration or Power Recirculator is no longer a no-brainer--and indeed, I actually picked Energy Shield over Regeneration this time, since in GMDX some augs are passive and always on, unlike the original game where everything has to be toggled. Eighty percent protection from explosions, plasma, fire, or EMP attacks? That sounds amazing. The RPG system improvements are an unqualified success.
GMDX also adds mantling, making many more areas accessibly even to those who don't have the speed aug (like I didn't). Enemies can't even jump so while this is a major change, I don't think it's one that affects gameplay to an enormous extent.
There were other changes I was less keen on, however. I haven't played Deus Ex recently enough to know all the changes that GMDX made, but two I noticed were stronger lockers and some enemies not carrying their weapons. Apparently GMDX changes the opening Liberty Island scenario so that the NSF paramilitaries who normally carry a tranq crossbow and a sniper rifle don't actually provide those weapons to JC when looted. The reasoning is that Paul Denton offers JC the choice of a tranq crossbow, a sniper rifle, and a GEP (Guided Explosive Projectile) Gun at the very beginning, and taking the GEP Gun is the obvious choice since the NSF has the other two weapons, and by removing them from the initial level Paul's offer to JC becomes an actual choice. This is true, but the NSF uses those weapons on JC and should be carrying them. It's making a gameplay choice more meaningful at the expense of properly simulating the world. Similarly, there are several lockers later on that can only be lockpicked because they have infinite strength, which is presumably to require the player to choose whether to spend lockpicks rather than just blowing up the lockers like in vanilla Deus Ex. But, these are lockers. If JC takes the Microfibral Muscle aug he should honestly just be able to rip them open. It's not like they're reinforced or anything. Again, meaningful gameplay at the expense of the simulation.
The mod also promises AI improvements, but I'm not sure I saw any. I haven't played the original deus Ex in long enough that I can't explicitly compare GMDX to the original, but there's only so much AI improvement a stealth game can take. Enemy soldiers still stared straight at me as I ducked into the ventilation and then said "Must be the rats." The hostility code is the same as well--in the Hong Kong canals I smashed a window, then cloaked and jumped into the canals so I'm sure no one saw anything, but the soldiers there still went hostile. It is what it is.
I'd still recommend it, but play the original Deus Ex first so you know what the baseline is. This isn't a Metroid: Zero Mission situation where the original is obsolete.
Told you.
Unlike Gunther Hermann and Anne Navarre, the cybernetically augmented agents who are threatened by JC Denton's new breed of nanotech augmentations, Deus Ex is the furthest thing from obsolete. Even though the conspiratorial background is firmly rooted in the 90s, the Plague Year has made it even more relevant than ever, and Deus Ex being so conspiracy oriented makes it weirdly comforting. The crutch of conspiratorial thinking is that it always relies on there being a mastermind behind everything, on someone being in control, on there being a plan. The reason America is the way it is today is because there was no plan, as this longread from the New Yorker discusses in depth. Honestly, at least if coronavirus were a nanotech bug designed to create chaos to allow Majestic 12 to take over the world, then someone would have foreseen all of this.
Reality isn't like that, of course. That's why we play video games. And Deus Ex is a game well worth playing.
Also if you have played Deus Ex, I urge you to get out Deus Ex Recut Remastered, which I've linked multiple times above. I think about it at least once a week.
