Finished my replay of this game on hard mode. There wasn't much of a difference with normal except that obviously you take fewer hits before you go down. Perhaps one day I'll play on realistic but something tells me that will cross the line into being annoying for my playstyle.

If you've followed me for a while or even if you've been in the same room as me for more than 15 minutes you might now that I despise stealth games. I've tried, but I genuinely hate them all. MGS, Thief, Dishonored, even stealth sections in games I like (shenmue, max payne, disaster report 4). I've had bad luck with so called Immersive Sims because of it, as most of them are essentially stealth arpg hybrids like Deus Ex, but so far its basically only the OG (and consortium by virtue of not having stealth) that I mess with. Its not exactly a mystery why, and consider this a plea for other games to follow suit : let me murder everyone. Give me an actual choice between stealth and combat and not just stealth and "you fucked up the stealth you idiot! you might as well reload a save"

Importantly, Deus Ex's combat is deceptively fun to get to grips with. Its so simple but really effective the way that you start out as someone who takes 2 business days to line up a pistol shot to being able to run around with the gep gun blowing people up like nothing. I'm surprised no one else has tried emulating the system, with your RPG esque weapon stats determining how fast your crosshair takes to narrow and become fully accurate, presumably imitating how it takes someone to aim down the sights and prepare to fire a shot.

Now, obviously for this kind of game there has to be push back, and even with a combat build your ass is not going to last if you're trying to play the game like half life, which is precisely why its satisfying to completely forgo stealth and murder everyone through traps, ambushes etc. This playthrough I discovered how useful the non lethal gas grenades are for murder runs (ironically) cause it makes enemies freeze up to rub their eyes, lining up to get headshot with the pistol for maximum murder efficiency.

The playthrough did however highlight Deus Ex's biggest flaw : the save system. Its one of those systems which is simultaneously too annoying and too forgiving. Its annoying because I am forgetful, and losing 15 mins of progress because I forgot to save is just... frustrating. On the other hand, there is basically nothing stopping you from hardcore save scumming every 5 seconds. Ironically, there is nothing more appropriately "mean" for a choice based rpg than an aggressive auto save, as it is, you can basically game most of the big decisions and encounters. Maybe even a save room system like RE4 might be appropriate? Could even lock them behind doors with an interesting weighing up of resources if its worth risking a loss of progress for a lockpick or multitool? Idk now Im playing armchair designer but either way.

Area 51 is still kinda annoying, I didnt use console commands to noclip through it this time but I still fused with Helios because it was the fastest way to complete the level, the later bits of the game are kind of a downgrade from the initial half of the game.

Primeiramente, quero deixar claro que minha experiência foi apenas afetada pelas minhas experiências com Immersive Sims anteriores a Deus Ex(System Shock 1/2 e Thief 1/2). Joguei os jogos da Arkane (Dishonored 1/2, Prey, Deathloop) mas faz tempo que joguei eles, e não comparei eles com esse jogo em nenhum momento, tanto por serem diferentes dentro de suas propostas, tanto por eu achar retardado julgar um jogo velho por concepções atuais. Ninguém é totalmente imune disso, obviamente não sou, mas tento evitar

Esse jogo é, pelas pala palavras do próprio Warren Spector, uma fusão de RPG, FPS e Stealth, e pagou o preço da ambição dele, porque ele não é impressionante em nenhum desses 3 aspectos, e assim, pra mim, tornando toda a experiência chata, desinteressante, com diversos picos de interesse onde você reconhece a qualidade do game design e oque eles tentaram fazer. Sim, em 2000 você contava nos dedos quantos jogos faziam metade doque esse jogo faz, mas sempre que eu vejo as pessoas falando dos aspectos que "envelheceram mal" eu sempre vejo elas falando de coisas como controles e gráfico(que sinceramente, é a pior crítica que eu consigo imaginar) e não o jeito que o jogo funciona em si, oque me deixa com uma pulga atrás da orelha achando que eu não entendi algo, eu acharia isso jogando na época ou não? Provavelmente não, mas lembra que eu falei que ninguém é imune a julgar o jogo por concepções atuais? Então, é de se evitar, mas as vezes não dá.

A história desse jogo é outra coisa que não entendi porque falam tanto. Sobre a história, é realmente algo que é realmente muito foda na época dele, e isso eu respeito, mesmo que hoje em dia ela não seja tão foda. A história desse jogo é um enredo até que intrigante sobre todo tipo de teoria da conspiração, que é algo que tava muito em alta na época, então é certo falar que sim: A história desse jogo é massa, mas pra quem fala hj em dia que a história é uma masterpiece, vou assumir que metade jogou na época, 25% teve esse meu discernimento e o restante só não jogou o jogo.

Bom, gostaria muito de gostar mais desse, mas não teve a mesma mágica em mim que teve em outras pessoas. No fim, acho que os jogos da Looking Glass valem mais a pena, por serem mais focados e serem magistrais no que se propõem (não que Deus Ex não valha a pena)

Mas afinal, eu acharia tudo isso se eu tivesse jogado na época? Afinal, System Shock e Thief já existiam, e hoje em dia ainda não vi alguém com uma opinião semelhante a minha acerca dos elementos desse jogo, oque me dá a impressão que eu deixei algo passar. Vou ver se conforme esse jogo vai envelhecendo na minha memória, eu ache a resposta

Um dos melhores jogos q já joguei na vida, talvez seja por q eu acabei de terminar o jogo então talvez esteja eufórico, mas vendo todas as etapas q passei n vejo como n colocar ele no pódio. Uma das melhores histórias cyberpunk q já vi, com uma profundidade absurda, um dos primeiros immersive sim q teve o maior impacto. O game desing das fases são geniais simplesmente recompensando qualquer escolha do jogador por sua criatividade, as possibilidades parecem infinitas, com cada passo tendo uma consequência n só na gameplay mas tbm no enredo. Dava pra falar de horas só sobre esse jogo e seu impacto, ele é quase perfeito tirando q ele se alonga um pouquinho demais, porém isso só é uma gota dentre o oceano de qualidades q esse jogo tem, um divisor de águas se é q da pra entender.

Played the PS2 version but nobody reads that page so I'm reviewing it here.

I loved this game a lot. At first I thought I wasn't going to enjoy it with how rough Liberty Island was (nearly got filtered lol oops) but when I got to UNATCO and spent 95% of the time fucking around, reading random books and newspapers about the state of the world, I really fell in love with it. Sci-fi that's just futuristic/biological word vomit is the most interesting type of sci-fi to me. I enjoyed being handsomely rewarded even if I went a no-kill route one level or slaughtered everybody in my wake the next. I didn't feel pressured to play any specific way and that's what made it so satisfying. Of course, I saved hostages when I could and actively tried not to kill civilians when in the middle of a (considerably laggy) firefight. I wasn't THAT horrible of a person. Oh yeah, and the soundtrack is incredible.
One of my gripes with it, though, was how boss fights weren't really bossfights. The GEP gun basically steamrolls every single fight save for Simons who eats two missiles before exploding into meat, but even then every fight lasts two seconds if you just whip out the GEP gun. Even though Walton was hovering over your shoulder and bragging about his augs the entire game, I blew him to bits with two rockets, so the fights being so mechanically simple was disappointing. Another criticism I had was how Gunther was written. He's meant to be viewed as a tragic character due to the circumstances of his outdated augmentations, his usefulness to UNATCO, and self-esteem issues stemming from that, but the writers make him out to be a bumbling dumbass instead. I also wasn't a huge fan of how Paul just disappears from the game after Hong Kong, permanently glued to his chair, but I guess it makes sense from a branching narrative/development standpoint if he dies in New York.

JC is a new favorite character of mine. He definitely reads as autistic. Simons was a cool villain and his coat was even cooler though he walks like he's severely constipated. Anyway, this game was fun as hell and it truly does break my heart that this series is more or less dead in the water. I'm sick to death of remakes but I'm not gonna lie and say I wouldn't enjoy a potential remake of this game. Not sure if I want to play the sequel though as apparently the writing takes a complete nosedive and it shits itself even on the platforms it was made for. Everyone also looks 10x fuglier in Invisible War than they do in this game which is a feat in itself, since most of them look like cats with their faces pulled back.

I'm so fucking tired of people claiming that Warren Spector coined the concept of Immersive Sims, when the man himself will tell you it was Doug Church, all the while these people bash the concept of such a genre even existing. Their arguments are uniformly rooted in prejudicial ignorance every single fucking time. Often making some idiotic remark about how the name is misleading because flight simulators have nothing to do with them, WHEN THE ACTUAL OG IMSIM DEVS MADE FLIGHT SIMS TOO. The entirety of the Looking Glass output were ALWAYS simulations. I'm inclined to believe that the people who were the original developers at the forefront of Simulation focused game development are right in attaching such a denomination in one form or another to their RPG and FPS outputs as well. There's a very simple litmus test you can employ to discern why the bulk of modern first person video games do not deserve to be brought up in conversation by halfwits mistakenly complaining about the genre being "meaningless" because "all games strive to be immersive" (lmao even) or what have you when that's clearly not true. The litmus is whether or not the game is implementing its mechanics via scripted interactions or SIMULATING systems to allow for a rationally comprehensible and predictable game world. Yet somehow people keep bringing up Elder Scrolls, Metroid Prime, et al, in conversation.
I suspect this is an unfortunate effect of general human neurology struggling with comprehending nuance and abstractions, all the while putting much too much emphasis on definitions. Thus the incessant roundabout arguments throughout all of history that often boil down to nothing more than fucking pedantry.

Anyway, as I see it what makes ImSims most consistently identifiable, rather than pedantic slavish insistence of finding individual shared mechanics, is observing how systemically implemented game mechanics end up informing and recontextualizing a game's Level Design.
I feel the need to point this out because I've seen far too many people think that statpoints and skill trees are of chief significance, when they're really just a tool by which developers can choose to allow players influence over their characters. Too few people have played the OG System Shock which is quite lacking in all the ARPG frills that have come to define a particular subset of this criminally misunderstood peak genre of PC gaming. A genre that arguably IS PC gaming.

Oh, yeah, the game. Deus Ex is okay. I made the mistake of playing on Hard and had to suffer through the mediocre gunplay. It was still good though and definitely a must-play. I willfully restarted the Hong Kong level a few times because I wasn't ready to move on before trying several different approaches just for the hell of it. Truly an excellent level.

For all my complaining of pedantry, I wish such widespread flagrant misunderstanding and misapplication of terminology didn't piss me off so much, but I simply can't tolerate besmirchment of PC gaming's most engrossing lineage.

BioShock is a corridor shooter.

I bounced off Deus Ex hard initially. But I have never been more glad that I didn't immediately give up on a game. The beginning was rough but as I started to develop my stats and arsenal, I began to see the game's greatness and I fell deeply in love with Deus Ex.

The biggest barrier for new players is that frankly it doesn't feel very good to play, even for a game from 2000. The weapons lack a feeling of impact and are inaccurate until you level up your abilities, and the stealth is crap compared to Thief 2 from the same year. But the fun is in problem solving with the endless arsenal of tools you can use, the ways you can use the environment to your advantage, and the myriad of routes to progress through the levels. Each level is extraordinarily non-linear. The sheer amount of choice you have in how you complete each level, along with the choices you make in the story and in building your character, mean that each player can have a vastly different playthrough.

Though the game is notorious for being cheesy and has produced many memes over the years, there is a captivating story and eerily prescient social commentary amongst the cheese; something its sequels failed to recapture. The dystopian atmosphere is still gripping despite the old graphics, and the soundtrack goes hard to this day.

Besides some awkward gameplay, the only other issue is that some levels are too big and become very tedious to traverse, and easy to get lost in. But this only becomes noticeable in a handful of levels.

Deus Ex will forever be a classic. If you have a reasonable tolerance for jank it's unmissable.

Still extremely playable today in its unchanged form (not revival, not any fan mods - just the intended experience with a few technical fixes like increased FOV and running on OpenGL), and would probably be a joy to play for any imsim fan. Almost 25 years later, it's still one of the most open-ended ones even in the genre already emphasizing player agency and freedom to choose your own approach to solving problems.

The level design is definitely the undisputed highlight. Almost any given objective can be reached in a number of ways depending on your character build and playstyle, to the point where the few instances where the game forcibly funnels you into a specific approach (e.g. a door that can't be lockpicked or bypassed electronically so you HAVE to find the code) immediately jump out. Lockpicking, hacking, crawling through vents (usually still accompanied with at least some more skill checks), or bashing in doors are all perfectly valid approaches, and while the game still makes sure that any character is able to actually progress the main objective, it does feel a lot less obvious than in most modern imsims - getting a code or finding an alternative route will generally take a lot more effort than just picking the door if your character is equipped to deal with the lock.

If you're like me in being addicted to hoarding "optional" resources since you're used to game just handing over the solution as you progress anyway, the most important piece of advice for Deus Ex would be: don't. The game is genuinely so much more enjoyable if you let yourself play the character and use the infiltration routes available to you; unlike in, say, Prey, the maps here are definitely not designed for the player to see every corner and vacuum up every single object; instead, they are large and complicated to facilitate the freedom to choose a route and stick to it. Sure, most doors have codes or keys, but they are very missable, presumably exactly to insentivize using all the other tools in your arsenal, and if you let the game lead you instead of resisting this guidance, the quality of your experience is likely to improve tenfold.

From the gameplay perspective, the signs of aging are a lot more apparent than in the level design. Early on, I don't see Deus Ex being playable in an action-y style thanks to its famous aiming system (where the reticule takes up half the screen and slowly decreases to a point as long as you don't make any sudden moves); however, as your character progresses in skill level and gets more augmentations, the run-and-gun tactics become a lot more viable: by the end, you will be able to jump around at supersonic speeds headshotting bozos in mid-air, or tank an entire arsenal worth of bullets to the skull, should you be so inclined. Despite the slow start, once the augmentations really start rolling in, the power progression really becomes extremely noticeable and gratifying.

The shooting itself is fine, with the exception of enemies routinely taking several shots to the head to kill - seems like there are some hit detection shenanigans that make certain headshots count towards the torso instead. Speaking of - the complex locational damage system is pretty impressive, with body parts being targetable for both the player and all (humanoid) enemies; this isn't really used for anything interesting other than headshots as far as I could tell, but still surprising to think this was made in 2000. The game even supports non-lethal takedowns - and comments on it if this is your preferred playstyle. This doesn't have much of an impact on anything but I definitely appreciate the option being available.
The augmentation system is also neat in concept - having to choose between 2 mutually exclusive upgrades for every slot is interesting, and augments do genuinely have the power to completely upturn the way you play - the only obstacle to this is the default key bindings. Do yourself a favour and rebind the most used ones to something more ergonomic than the F- keys, and once you do, managing enabled abilities, toggling them on and off, becomes a fun element of extra challenge rather than an annoying drain on your finite bioenergy resource.

Story and voice acting - the absolute crackpot mash of a bunch of conspiracies is really amusing at the start, but surprisingly actually becomes pretty engaging as it goes on, the general tone shifting from a story about a cool gigacop with augmented vision to an illuminatipilled global conspiracy-driven paranoic mess is cool to witness, and the few reactive story elements are always fun to come by, especially the ones you aren't expecting. Honestly didn't expect to get invested, knowing what I did about the plot before going in, but did end up thoroughly entertained.

For the more negative aspect - the latter levels are falling into the same trap as a lot of other games of the era by ramping up the "difficulty" through throwing a bigger amount of more annoying enemies at you (ones that explode on death, or take little damage from bullets, etc.) but in an unprecedented move for imsims, the game actually sticks the landing with a good final boss fight, highlighting the freedom that defined most of the game up to that point instead of forcing combat that some builds may be unequipped for, or resorting to some awful gimmick.

Overall, Deus Ex is still a great game, still managing to hold its own against the present-day immersive sims thanks to its outstanding level design and breadth of possibility when it comes to problem-solving, with a lot of its DNA being easily trackable to much more modern games. Easy recommendation for anyone interested in the genre and not afraid of a little jank.

Definitely a game that started showing it's age a while ago, especially visually, both in a graphical sense and in a clarity sense, but it would be quite unfair to judge it based on this, as it's still a cut above a lot games that were released at the time.
Deus Ex is an immersive sim in the same vein as Thief or System Shock, all of which are structured into distinct levels and have a focus on offering the player a number of different solutions to obstacles presented throughout. A large part of where this game shines is just how well it does this, often you'll see a number of different paths available to get through any section of Deus Ex, encouraging exploration and experimentation. While you could lockpick a door, you could also hack a nearby power generator to find a key, or you could've found a code earlier that lets you bypass both of those options. This process is similarly applicable to combat throughout the game, absent is the focus on stealth from future Deus Ex games, so there is always the binary choice of approaching quietly or loudly and then further how you want to go about doing either. It's this freedom of approach that both makes the game replayable and allows for agency in how you skill JC without feeling locked out of any content or considerably weaker than if you had spec'd into other things.
Though often referred to as an RPG, the connection is tenuous at best, very little Role Playing is done throughout, having more in common with a title like Cruelty Squad than any actual modern RPGs. The closest thing is the skill system which more exists just to feed into the ImSim elements of the game than do anything by itself, and there is very little in how you play that affects the story outside of some small acknowledgments very early in.
That's not to diminish the writing here though, what's on offer is phenomenal, leaning heavily into conspiracies prevalent at the time, Deus Ex does an incredible job world building, both through it's environments and the story, and has an extremely strong narrative to go along with it.
Overall, Deus Ex was an incredibly enjoyable experience, and very impressive from both a game-design and story-telling perspective. Though maybe not as ground breaking as when it was first released, it still holds up unreasonably well for a 24 year old game.
However, I was promised you could fly when it was raining if you maxed out swimming and then was sorely disappointed to find out I had been gibed so it's basically unplayable.

i sincerely apologise to everyone over the years who has recommended this to me based on my personal writing preferences but i just could not get into this no matter how much i tried. (side note as of 6th of march 2024 because i think its important; my issues with deus ex are entirely personal, i KNOW for a fact its an incredible game and can tell as such from all of the attempts ive made to get into it, but i realised my main issue is just that i am cognitively impaired in a way that does not allow me to experience it properly. annoying, but, of course theres not much i can do about it, even with the plethora of accessibility options available lmao. its just that my issues are so specific it would require entirely taking out the immersive sim and stealth aspect that makes deus ex what it is. which of course wouldnt be fun, either, and would completely dumb the game down to a super linear hand-holdy experience like any other action-stealth game, i ALSO want to make it clear that deus ex is undeniably a very accessible game, im not trying to bash it for lacking in accessibility whatsoever,
i just have actual fucking brain damage on top of autism and very simply cannot process information and audio especially in the way i need to to be able to progress. this little rant is a lot lengthier than i wanted it to be. sorry. i love you btw. and if anyone has any recommendations as to an easier way to get a meaningful experience out of deus ex without entirely cheesing my way through it, using cheats or whatever, i would much appreciate any advice. since most video games are very, well, video-gamey experiences, its very rare that i struggle with stealth games like this, and id at least LIKE to believe im not any less skilled than the average player, but the mix of instructions being given in real time, mixed with the dark environment and HEAVY focus on being as much of an immersive sim as possible, i just end up getting overwhelmed with everything going on and completely shutting down since i can only put my focus into so many things at one time. sorry if this all just sounds like the rambling of some guy whos sore because he couldnt get past a specific level in a video game and decided to use any possible excuse to try and prove it wasnt his fault, im always worried thats how i come off or even is what im actually doing when i mention my cognitive disabilities in regards to gaming, but this is a game ive been trying to get into for over a decade so i know that cant be the case. it just makes me sad seeing all the praise it gets and knowing id absolutely love it but just am unable to experience it without putting myself under an amount of pressure in the moment that honestly is entirely not worth it just to feel like im a "real gamer" per se, or having to have someone guide me through it. ive tried every difficulty, easy isnt any more manageable for me than realistic or hard, so knowing its not just a skill issue i can maybe fix over time just kind of. feels like shit. rant over, once again, sorry for rambling, i just feel very strongly about this, i know its stupid to get so worked up over a videogame. tldr; undeniably incredible from all i can tell, the problem is me.)

A classic that's showing it's age, if only because it laid the ground works for a new genre.

Deus Ex is undeniably a project worth celebrating, it allows the player a tremendous amount of agency and rewards them for playing smart. At any given moment I felt curious enough to look around, explore the environment and try and find new ways to tackle a task.

However, I never felt encouraged to, the world is incredibly sparse and the design isn't tight, it can guide you to things but it's more a case of luck or stumbling onto something rather than it feeling like being taken on a route. I don't necessarily have a problem with this kind of design, but it can feel frustrating at some points.

I can't knock Deus Ex too hard on this, it's really the first of its kind and I'm accustomed now to games like Dishonored and even Deus Ex's modern iterations improving on this formula. For example, the game gives you a lot of lethal, non-lethal, loud or silent options to take on enemies, yet they never really feel like it makes a difference what you do to get to the end as long as you get to the end. Again, not so much a problem, I like that the options are there, but it would be nice to feel the weight of these choices in some scenarios.

Ultimately, Deus Ex holds up as a classic, one I'm sure I'll revisit many, many times.