IW had an amazing level design actually for the size of the areas though...

And I still find IW and Deus Ex 3 to still have better level designs than most games. Yes, they may be unrealistic by being too "intruder friendly" but at the same time it does allow more options of how to get through the level. Maybe a lazy way of having multiple options through a level but still better than not going about it at all like most games. I don't play games for realism but for fun so the ventilation shafts being very very very poorly placed doesn't take away from the fun and I still love ventilation shafts no matter how silly the placement of them are.

The Deus Ex games are best in reverse order. Human Rev is by far the.best, followed by the somewhat clunky masterpiece Invisable War, and then the abortion of the series, the original DE. To be honest, unless you can get it for a buck or so, i'd skip the first game and start at IW.

And there he goes again....

Ten reviewers who have never played videogames before would all agree with me. I am alone, a man unclouded by nostalgia

You just don't like the game. That's perfectly fine, but don't be a dick about it. I played Deus Ex in 200...5? Yeah, 2005 for the first time, loved it anyway. Not to mention people who were objective and weren't clouded by nostalgia ON THE GAME RELEASE you know :D There have been similar games, like System Shock games or Strife, so it wasn't for the lack of competition...

edit: Oh, don't feed the troll, right?

Exactly, the games MUST sacrifice realism for sake of the gameplay. Consider RTS: have you ever heard about an army going to the battlefield with a few units and some builders, mining resources on the spot, building the factory line from scratch and sending the freshly produced units at the enemy?

I wasn't that into games from 99 to 2004 or so and really only played Deus Ex at that point, in 2004 or 2005, and I still call it my second-favorite game of all time.

Yeah, because the original Deus Ex totally did not do that.

Seriously, that's exactly the same as that one well-known Star Wars Ep1 review in which among other things the reviewer complains the architecture of some of the places in Naboo makes no sense while conveniently forgetting that in Jedi, the Emperor has a bottomless pit right in his fucking throne room, with no railing anywhere. On its own, it's a valid criticism, but it applies to the new and the old in equal measure.

What's the first?

Morrowind.

It's funny, the early 2000's era is probably my favorite for gaming. It felt the most well balanced between depth and accessibility, difficulty and ease of play. Yet it was also an era I gamed very little because I actually had a social life.

I did devote a month to Morrowind during that time though... on Xbox, believe it or not, because my gaming PC sucked at the time.

Interesting. Morrowind owes me a few years of life, but I probably wouldn't even rank it in my top 5. It's definitely in the top 10 though.

I Own it and it plays really well! Like the original Deus ex!

For me a big part of the fun with "multiple options" is to actually have to look for them, to have to scratch your head a little about the best way to avoid some guards, the best way to enter into an apparently impregnable building , etc... even if it mean that, sometime, there is no way at all to avoid the guards and the only way to enter is to distract them, bride them or kill them to pass.

Here most of the time you didn't had do it, if there was a guard, laser fence, closed door, you knew that you only had to look for a ventilation shat nearby, most probably conspicuously hidden behind a cardboard box, which would allow you to go right behind the obstacle (and the other usual options were not far away either)

In HR it wasn't helped by the fact that most of the "augs" had very little impact on the gameplay, it didn't matter if you were a invisible stealth hacker or a kill everybody ask question later kind of character all the options, except maybe cracked walls, were available to you.

Of course I don't ask games to be "realistic", I don't ask some level designer to spend months creating a realistic ventilation system for a warehouse in which the player is going to spend 2-3 hours for a mission, but at least they could try to be more "imaginative", here they provided you with all the alternative routes on a silver plate without requiring you to have to actually look for them (most of the time at least).

Now you do have a point there

I'm not trolling at all, it's a terrible game. Completely overrated because it's fashionable to say it's one of the best of all time. I am sure some.people discovered it themselves, without reading reviews or praise, but most people who espouse it's virtues are completely unbiased.