Hello,

I know it is a touchy subject to criticize this cult game. I am not a troll and please I do not intend to offend you if you love it. I agree that this game has huge qualities like its depth, its interface or its awesome overall realisation. When I started the game, I was impressed by its potential. But I did not like it, did not feel much emotion and would not play it again.

- The plot sounds common, déjà-vu and clichéd, this story of virus has already been seen in dozens of movies, videogames, etc. This made all the reading and talking particulary painful to me.
- Freedom of action is delusory. Each time there is a door, you can pick its lock or go through the vent tubes nearby. It is micro-freedom and it only gives an illusion of freedom. And this is not enough to hide the progression through the game which is rather linear, whatever you do and choose.
- Level design is not surprising. Again, as for the settings, all the clichés of the genre are present: subway station, sewers...
- Graphics are repetitive: everything is grey and black, cities are not that different, only a few textures change. I did not feel the atmosphere of Paris, Hong Kong or New York.
- Gameplay is repetitive. I remember this game as a simulator of breaking crates and searching garbage to find items.
- While many games can be reproached with being too short, I think this one is too long. At one moment, I really got bored and was eager to end it.

Did anyone got bored?

Nope.

- You are anachronistically criticizing the game. When Warren Spector released Deus Ex, in 2000, a lot of the pop culture references that have jaded your experience had not been made.
- Again, since this game created the precedent, many, many others have followed and improved the mechanic.
- Graphics have come a loooong way since DirectX 7! (DirectX 9 was released by Microsoft in 2002.)
- YMMD; I found Paris particularly enjoyable (especially the Chateau). By this stage of the game, your Denton should have specialized his superhuman augmentations, allowing for different tactical play-throughs (covert stealth, tank frontal assault, etc.).
- This is an odd comment, as you can simply stop playing any time.
I suppose your complaint is because you wanted to see the denouement (the trilemma choice), earlier, without having to complete the late-game missions? I thought the missions were well designed and plotted.

The game aged pretty well for a decade (critical acclaim, including repeatedly being named "Best PC Game of All Time" in the 2011 PC Gamer "Top 100 PC Games"), but since then pretty much every game has learnt the lessons from this very successful IP and employed them better. That's to be hoped for!

You might as well criticize Pong for not having online multiplayer.

So, as someone who's played Deus Ex over and over again since it came out.. definitely one of my favorite games. I agree that it looks rather cliched today. However, the execution is still pretty damn good if you allow yourself to get immersed in the details of the story (as well as all the rest of the lore in the world). To me, at least, it really feels like the story unfolding is what makes me want to go on, and the way it involves you, your brother, and your colleagues is a lot more compelling than most games where the story is really just an excuse for some action.

Looking back, it's easy to see why Deus Ex got so much praise back in the day. It was simply something new, how many games do you recall from before Deus Ex that delivered a first person 3D story rooted in reality and real life locales, and taking place in a not all that implausible near future? It's interesting that I don't feel like calling Deus Ex cyberpunk or scifi or dystopia or utopia is right, even though it's all that. I don't know, I feel like these terms describe something that takes it to the extreme, to the point where it only feels loosely rooted in reality, if at all. Too fictional.

And before I admit the appeal has worn off because others have come and done the same better, I can't actually think of a comparable modern title? (Of course I've missed them, I don't play games much) Totally agree, and a part of it is all the compromises to make the game playable regardless of what skills and augs you pick. You could pick nothing, and still make it through. The game doesn't want to let you get stuck, so there's always a way around every situation just around the corner. It would be cool if they had gone further to make areas and wildly divergent paths that are really difficult if not impossible to reach or taclkle with a particular setup.

Again, things were quite different back then. Even the "micro-freedom" Deus Ex offered surpassed anything you'd seen before in a game you could call FPS (with some RPG-ish elements). The shooters back then were very linear or otherwise offered no freedom beyond the choice which part of the level you want to shoot through first. Cliches, yes. Rooted in reality, yes. That made the game's world so relatable, and that was kinda new. Now sewers aren't too exciting, but at least they did something with it. Hey, a secret lab manned by a mysterious organization you'll only find out more about way later in the game! I think they could've some of the levels more interesting (come on, the container maze in the airfield is just dullest of dull), but in Deus Ex's defense, they managed to fill areas like Hong Kong and Paris with ambience and mood you hadn't seen in a game before. And they did ocean labs. And they did Area 51. They did a friggin missile launch site. They did a cathedral *and* catacombs, but not in the same spot as you'd expect from a cliche. And they did night clubs, and a clinic. A graveyard, hotels & apartments, a restaurant, a market, triad hideouts.. And they did the friggin liberty statue. Actually, the variety of unique locales in just one game is pretty damn impressive even today as many other games feel like it all takes place in the same damn place with the same textures and effects plastered all over. Like, come on, when do we switch to the next level? Oh the game ended? Actually, with such a large platter of locales, I'd say it's impossible not to have something you'd find cliched :-)

So yeah, there are cliched locales. And there are places I wouldn't consider all that cliched. Come on now, what kind of real world places could you do now that aren't cliched? They'd probably have to take the game off the streets because cities and streets are cliched..

Cliched or not, they've executed well for most part. Speaking of micro-freedom, there's still quite a bunch of alternate routes and optional areas in the game. I kept finding new things years after my first playthrough. Jock's apartment and the collapsed tunnel? Wow, that really did take me years. And it took me so long to figure out the underground access to the NSF power generator building.

My point is: cliched or not, they've put a lot to explore in these levels. That's what people cherised when the status quo was shooters where you walk over guns and powerups and shoot monsters until the more-or-less linear level is over. I certainly did feel the atmosphere of Paris (and in fact I miss it right now), but that's subjective so I'm not going to argue about it.

But it is true that the graphics aren't that great. Heck, they were considered somewhat sub-par at the time of release. It's kinda understandable given the scope of the game however. Tech was changing real fast back then; you could make a simplistic shooter with a new engine with new graphics gimmicks in a year, but the Unreal engine they had started on was getting old.

Did they do good given the constraints? I'd say it was pretty good. A good attempt at realism with the Unreal engine. Admittedly Unreal offered a more colorful experience and some vistas that I am still excited to see. So yeah, I'd say they could've done better. Still, I don't think they did bad. Gameplay is definitely a weak point. I don't know what else they could've done though? Gameplay seems to be a weak point for most games today, unless they're pure action/sport games. Actually you can mostly ignore the crates and garbage. But people go for them because they like to obtain items. Maybe you liked them too? It's so subjective. Of course, if the story doesn't grab you.. yea, I can see that happening. I think most games are too long. But Deus Ex? Well, it's not too long, but I actually *don't* like the end-game levels nearly as much. Like, post Paris? It gets too industrial/military/alien (literally, in some cases) from there on. I like the parts that are relatable in the "I could really conceive being here" way. So I end most of my playthroughs without actually finishing the game. A51 is definitely my least favorite part of the game. If I'd change something about the length and level setup, I'd make the ending a bit shorter but compensate by expanding and putting more detail into Paris and maybe the other urban areas.

Still, it grabs me longer than most games.

I can definitely see why it doesn't have the same appeal it did back in 2000.

Adding to the list of complaints, I'd say stupid AI, too easy difficulty, some dull game mechanics (lockpicking and multitooling.. just click once and stand there, really?), and well, the fact that your skills and augs don't matter one bit. And because of the stupid AI, sneaking is pretty much pointless and a waste of time. The aiming is pretty dumb (stand there and wait for the recticle to narrow down.. yawn), I think gmdx is on the right track making it work more like a real first person shooter and giving guns a little bit of .. impact?

As to whether I'd get bored if I started playing the game today for the first time.. I honestly don't know. I don't have much patience for games today. And, to be frank, Deus Ex starts pretty damn slow. So it's possible that I wouldn't be able to forgive the dull mechanics and slow start to get to the best parts, which begin a few missions into the game when the story starts to pick up.

I love Deus Ex. I hate Deus Ex. It's still one of my favorite games.

Regarding the plot being cliche: It's an amalgamation of conspiracy theories and urban legends (a man-made virus, Grays, mole people, Agents-in-Black, the Illuminati and MJ12, black helicopters, false flag attacks (on NYC to boot), Area 51, FEMA camps, and on and on and on). Which at the time was pretty unique (and inspired a share of other works). The same goes for level design: City blocks with buildings you could enter, passer-bys you could interact with, a hostage situation in a subway station etc. were refreshing.
Regarding the freedom of choice, first off as others have said: In 2000, having the ability to choose between multiple solutions was huge (it was actually one of the main design goals). Not being forced to kill every enemy you encountered and instead being able to sneak by them. Obstacles that can be overcome by not only finding THE KEY, but also by picking the lock, finding another route or using abilities you unlocked, bypass a bossfight by doing some hacking or taking the right dialogue choices...
If you can't enjoy that because you take it for granted, my condolences. But you can thank Deus Ex for that. ;-)
But your choices actually go beyond that: You can save Paul, Lebedev and Jock. Which was mindblowing at the time. There's also some limited non-linearity (the Dragon sword mission for one and how you deal with Navarre)
The graphics were at the time considered not that great, yeah, but the greys and blacks were an intentional design choice: It's the cyberpunk/dystopia esthetic, same as JC's trench coat and shades (his vision is augmented. That's also why it's always night.) If that's really not your thing, it might not be the game for you.
The "destroy crates/barrels/urns to collect powerups/items" mechanic was a common gameplay trope at the time and continued on for way too long afterwards. Yeah, it's not exactly fun. Me, I remember sneaking and shooting and increasing skills and finding alternative routes more than crates, though.

And I don't think the problem is the length (it's fine IMO), but that continuing to play a game that one does not enjoy (for whatever reasons) drags. Same way that 90 minutes can be too short for a movie or 89 minutes too long (Classic Movie: The Recut. Minute 1: Rocks fall, everybody dies ;-))

There was a lot more to the plot than simple terrorists / virus, eg, the whole collection of actual real-life conspiraies (Illuminati, FEMA camps, "AIDS is a man-made virus", false-flag terrorist events, Area 51 & aliens, etc), simply wasn't done in any game before the way it was all merged into one Super Conspiracy. Far from being another "kill terrorists" game, it was actually very fresh when the game launched and made many other FPS's single-layer plots at the time look shallow. The game is a linear FPS and has never pretended to be an open-world game like Skyrim. The choices you have are about creating different play-styles within a linear plot, eg, through the front door (combat) vs sneaking in vents (stealth) vs hacking. Without vents, stealth would be useless. If anything, I respect linear FPS's like Deus Ex, Bioshock, System Shock, etc, for simply being honest about what they are rather than trying to fake complexity with "fake choices" or "open world for the sake of it", which really doesn't fit some games and often just screws up the pacing of the main plot. The 3 multiple endings was also unusual for the time. The main choice is that the devs wanted to give people the ability to "Play it like Thief as much as they can play it like Quake". And they succeeded. I vaguely recall someone on the design team answered the same question 18 years ago with "It's supposed to be bleak looking! These are dark times!" Same reason why they designed it so everything happens at night. As for the visuals vs modern games, Unreal Engine 1 (made in 1997-98) based games tend to not look like Crysis for same reason other 20 year old game engines don't. :-) True but repetitive compared to what? Half Life 2's endless canals, or the insane amount of intentional mindless "grind to unlock" that modern 18 year newer multi-player FPS's / MOBA's / MMORPG's / mobile phone games have devolved into? Again, it's open about being a "straight shooter" with a deep plot rather than a puzzle game. A "proper" 25-30hr main plot is probably the game's strength, and the defining characteristic of the franchise. Take a look at Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (only 15hr long main plot) and see the many complaints about it feeling "half a Deus Ex game" (which that actually is). Enjoyment is the key to whether or not you get bored and really, if you're not enjoying it then don't force yourself out of guilt. Personally I've found even 7hr long games (eg, Crysis 3), "too long" simply because I wasn't enjoying them. Again, if you're not enjoying it, don't force yourself. Everyone probably has at least one "must play" old game that everyone else was expecting you to like, but you simply didn't out of personal taste. Nothing wrong with that.

Ultimately, any old game is subjective, more so if you didn't play it at launch and instinctively start comparing it to 10-20 year newer games. For its time though, Deus Ex got a lot of things right with pushing forward the "boundaries" of FPS's after a several year run where most other FPS's were simple "arena shooters" (Doom, Quake, UT, etc). As Gloranor said above, that people now take stuff for granted like multiple endings, multiple paths to approach a target, option of non-lethal combat, etc, is precisely what it got so right that it ended up influencing a lot of games +10-15 years later.

Nope

People not talking about the game, AKA most people.

Like most "best games of all time" it's way too outdated to care about nowadays, its character progression system specifically is a broken dumpster fire like most of the western non-D&D systems of that era, hence the countless amount of tweaking people have been doing to it with patches and revision mods. It also fails horribly in its exploratory design as it allows you to waste resources to unlock doors etc when the keys/passes are out there in plain view, which ties into how the "play it your way" philosophy that went into its design fails when you very quickly realize that certain approaches are being consistently more rewarding than others.

Don't play it today expecting it to be good. Deus Ex stands more as a proof of concept and a culmination of influences Warren Spector gathered through his interactions with Origin and Looking Glass people and their works.

The Deus Ex post-mortem in last year's GDC is worth checking out, though. It gives you a better picture of why this game was made the way it was made, and what the PC-confined landscape looked like back then.

disagree with Tziouv... I player it 2 years ago for the first time... it's still the best game of all time

i hated the game crashing on me just when I forgot to quicksave, losing 2 hours of progress. Also had weird graphical glitches every now and then, but i guess Nglide and unofficial patches/mods fixed it. I originally played it without a proper GPU and unofficial patches.

Game's fine--but these days I wouldn't dream of firing it up without the texture mods that seriously upgrade the game's graphics to something approaching decent. I will say that I have never finished it, though...;) Get distracted by another game(s)...happens frequently. I don't own or want a console--my hand-built PCs are infinitely superior...;)

What always amazed me about this game is why the follow on DE 2 game was so horrible by comparison--it was a console port, IIRC, and this explained a lot. But it was like they took the very things that made DE a classic and removed them so that the game could be dumbed-down and sold as console fare. Spector tried but failed to remedy a lot of the console limitations, but of course the game would have to be rewritten and that never happened. I think that in part DE is remembered fondly because of how it mutilated in the follow on. Don't think Spector ever did anything quite like DE 1.

[0] Paris is, hands down, my favorite level.
I think the developers nailed this area, with police patrolling the streets like it was World War II, complete with military — and mechanized — back-up. Now, with Salafist terrorists routinely killing people in the streets of Paris, London, New York, Boston, etc. there are armed (military) police in cities, but back in (pre-9/11) 2000, it was a thought experiment. Unfortunately it turned out to be a very realistic one. :(

[1] There is a dilemma to solve when creating games.
Twitch reflexes provide true feedback (hence the continual popularity of Quake Arena, for instance, which actually evens the playing field by removing all weapon-specific "realistic" delay) versus a modified, more inclusive style.
Perhaps think about those people with disabilities: are they welcome to play the game or not? (And, as we all age, those same reflexes are less able to win. Age catches everyone.)
So a FPS can require split-second timing to get past the obstacle, or the game can intervene. And, how else is it possible to model avatar skills, like superior marksmanship?
There are games I cannot play because they require skills I cannot currently provide, which is a pity because some of them look like I might like to play them (for their plot, character & general social observation insights, for example).
[2] I disagree; I think the first level is quite well paced. There are opportunities to experiment with a vanilla character and try front assault or stealth behind. As it is the first level there are no differences between augmentations to balance, too, so it's a pretty fair game.

It happens when a content producer mortgages the goodwill equity of a particular IP for quick gains in sales; in this case the temptation to collect revenue on multiple platforms was diminished by less investment, pro rata. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but — supposing they wanted to maximize profit — they would have been better served by investing more in the product development, rather than the distribution.

Still, the series was rebooted, so there was no permanent harm done except to lose the incidental revenue. (Somebody probably got fired for that. :)


edit: finally determined what was preventing previous reply and corrected it, addendum corrigendum est.

One can say a lot of things about Deus Ex, for and against, but there are really only two points you really need to consider:

1) Deus Ex is objectively a game filled with shoddy mechanics and unremarkable story telling. Bad shooting, bad melee, bad stealth, awkward action-cRPG character "progression", story elements built on 90's conspiracy tropes (black helicopters!). Nothing stands out as excellent. Taken all together however, the game is worth more than the sum of it's parts. It has the right amount of tension, atmosphere, gravitas. If you let the illusion take over, it's quite an experience.

2) You won't truly appreciate how detailed and responsive the game is unless you play it multiple times trying different things. Stay focused on your progress, don't explore the levels in detail in a single playthrough as you will discover the many now redundant paths when you only need one. Stay in the fantasy just going forward. Also, if you have already spoiled the less obvious story choices (leaving through the window or not being the most obvious), try playing as if you didn't know those paths. Decades later, I'm still discovering new conversations and variations on conversations I've heard many times before.

Closing thought: It is entirely legit not to like this game. You're not being a heretical contrarian. No game is deserving of the mythological status sometimes ascribed to them.

I wonder if any game would "objectively" be deemed satisfactory using these metrics.

(See my comment directly above yours, vide supra).

There are only two ways to implement action in a game: hand-eye coördinated twitching, done best by the Quake ]I[: Arena engine, or with the game as some sort of intermediary, as can be seen with Bethesda's Elder Scrolls ]I[: Morrowind.

As I noted, the former is popular because it eliminates all realistic weapon delay, like recoil affecting aim. (Which is why it spawned many professional sports tournaments such as QuakeCon, Cyberathlete Professional League, Dreamhack, and the Electronic Sports World Cup.)

The latter permits additional elements: skills like superior marksmanship or penalties like inebriation, for instance.

While most people are drawn to the visceral responsiveness of the former, I would caution you to think more kindly about the latter. Having a skill barrier for a game unavoidably prevents those without such skills from playing it. Not a big concern for "ZombieKill4r LXIX", but antithetical for those producers looking for a broad(er) audience. Should those who are differently-abled not play games? No blind skiers on your piste?

edit: cont. …

Bad character progression? What do you mean?

Bad stealth? Compared to what? This was 1999, Thief: Deadly Shadows was released for another five years! There were DnD games on the 2.5D Infinity engine that may be a better implementation, but Fallout was arguably much worse.

I think you may be reading something in my post that isn't there. "Good shooting/melee/action" is about game feeling. Do you feel like you're pointing the gun, does the impact of the bullet feel intuitive and powerful? Does your melee attack feel like it connects, do you feel your weapon swing through the air and strike where you expect it to? Does combat feel like a dance where you're trying to get the upper hand and stay on top of things? Does it feel like you can deliver shockingly efficient violence on unsuspecting foes?

Deus Ex does not deliver on any of these points. From the moment you get off the docks to the point where you have upgraded your favorite weapon to 100% precision and max damage, combat never attains a great gameplay feel. Your cross hair takes up half the screen and won't tighten up for several seconds at the beginning of the game, and in the late game the lacklustre game feel of the weapons and the peculiarities of the AI makes combat forgettably unsatisfying.

You can argue that not being able to reliably mass kill your way through the game helps reinforce diverse gameplay and validate other methods, but that is really only explaining why combat is shoddy. The point of my original post is that most things in Deus Ex, viewed in a vacuum, are bad or mediocre, but taken all together they add up to one great game.

I've never seen anyone say the XP to skillpoint system is good. The decision to scrap it for Deus Ex Invisible War is one of the few good ones they made. Deus Ex has cRPG style XP that feeds into a skill system. It exists. It is there. That is all there is to say about it. It's not great, it's not engaging. I don't feel like I'm expressing myself by deciding whether or not to invest in swimming, and the breakdown of weapon skills are quite arbitrary and don't really help enhance the fantasy. The game takes seems to take place over the course of a few nights or a few weeks at most, it doesn't actually make sense for an expertly trained agent of whatever Denton is to start the game possibly being terrible at everything he is supposed to do and then arbitrarily get better at the over the course of days on the job.

Deus Ex did not need to be a pen and paper RPG. It is not conducive to such mechanics, yet they are still in the game, they are still an out-of-universe limitation on the gameplay. As I said, they got rid of it for the sequel because it made no sense and didn't add anything to the game except artificial obstacles.

It's just bad stealth gameplay, no comparison or excuses necessary. It is the primary gameplay style for myself and seemingly most players because it is very efficient and clearly the game is a strong proponent of non-lethal and stealthy decision making (mechanically only relevant in the first mission, but it hammers in the lesson with much fervor). Still, despite having crawled for possibly 100 hours total over the years, I don't have a problem saying it isn't great. Everyone knows the AI cone of vision is quite silly and at anything below the hardest difficulty setting the AI reaction time is farcial so long as you stay crouched regardless of circumstance. I try not to think about it while playing, but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

So, to reiterate my point: Deus Ex is made up of shoddy game mechanics, none of them are good on their own. Somehow, they all add up to something far greater. The sense of freedom, and more importantly, that the game responds to your choices (what you do and in which order you do things matter) and there is a feeling that fate branches organically (some paths need not be taken, some will be made unavailable or open up) rather than through obvious checkpoints and scripting. You can creep around for most of the game, but decide that this one group of evil henchmen needs being taken out, or that one door is best blown open etc, and the game accomodates your line of thinking seamlessly. No one thing feels great, but the freedom to weave in and out of different mindsets, coupled with a bit of imagination and tolerance for abstract mechanics, makes for a potentially excellent gaming experience.