This is another one of those games that I've been putting off for 20 years. Friends, freaks and even my old high school IT teacher have been recommending Deus Ex to me for my entire life, but it's never felt like the time was right to play a game held in such reverent esteem by so many people I know. What better time, I suppose, than 2021?
You could spend days of paragraphs just discussing Warren Spector's vision of 2052 and the myriad ways it lines up with our present. In his GDC post-mortem of the game, Spector claims that Ion Storm chose the year 2052 because they needed a far-flung future that they could use to safely and somewhat-believably explore ideas like an international pandemic, trans-humanism, automation, meme wars, extreme inequality, globalisation, soy food and all the other concepts I found in the game's newspapers but didn't bother reading. I won't list every parallel with the present here - that would be a day of paragraphs alone - but it is indeed startling how much sooner the spectre of Spector's future came to pass than he originally predicted way back in the dark ages of the 1990s. In fact, scientists are saying that the future will be far more realistic than they originally predicted. I would recommend playing Deus Ex right here and right now in 2021 if you want to have a temporally-significant and spatially-specific gaming experience that you can tell your kids about in the FEMA global warming/COVID-52 refugee shelters.
There's a temptation here to make the leap from the 2021 parallels found in details of the game's 2052 setting to the grand conspiracies that drive JC's story forward, but it would all too easy to attribute our world's ills to a single organisation like the Majestic 12. No matter how many times our reality plays out stranger than fiction and we uncover another island of paedophiles, I still don't think that Paul Denton's theory about a globe-spanning cabal of bankers holds much synthetic water. It's fun to imagine and simplify the world in such ways, but the game, while trying its hardest to simulate meatspace, is still doing the real world a disservice. Reality is much more complicated and evil than all that you can squeeze onto a 150MB CD-ROM.
I think that's what ultimately stops me from hailing Deus Ex as the same masterpiece as those freaks told me it was - this is superficial complexity masquerading on top of something much simpler. I don't want to tear apart something from 20 years ago for not being as well-realised as the imsims of the present (this came out five years after Doom II! Jesus Christ, Denton!), but the game presents the player with the suggestion of infinite diversity in infinite combinations that more often than not boil down to turning yourself into a lightsaber-wielding Wolverine, gobbling down candy bars and 4loko in the corners of a bulk freighter in order to run full-force at three soldiers who have forgotten you were there just a few seconds ago and are now clip-clop running away and straight into the nearest wall.
It fucking rules, but it's not the "Million-Dollar James Bond Does Blade Runner" gameplay experience that everyone from 4chan to my dorm room told me it was going to be. Sure, you can bribe an overworked office worker into giving you his ID badge so that you can silently descend into a top-secret sealab, but why bother doing that when you can just unload your GEP gun into a lobby of bodyguards, close the door, then walk back in 5 seconds later like nothing happened? Again, let me be clear - it fucking rules to play Deus Ex as a murderous cyberpath in a world of automatons suffering from early-onset dementia, but I thought it was going to be something much more. Why bother doing anything more subtle than a cyberbrick through a holowindow when you can mercilessly cut down cops with your Hattori Hanzo Cattle Prod and laugh when they freak out about it for the duration of their walk to the coffee shop at the end of the street?
Try and play Deus Ex a different way and you will more likely than not spend most of your time with your finger on the quicksave button, hoping in vain that this time, the guard won't bug out and spot you while you're crouching silently in a shadow texture 50 clicks away. Maybe this time, your attempt at a hack won't go awry because a random guy on the street's pathfinding has caused him to permanently hover-sit in the Illuminati's top-secret doorframe. It's funny - often hysterical! But it's not exactly an immersive simulation. At least when you go on another LAMpage in an NYC nightclub because a guy pulled a gun on you for picking up his empty wine bottle, you know the game isn't gonna be too fussy about the specifics. Everyone just goes back to their drinks after a while, and Manderley will probably still pay UNATCO's finest a healthy bonus for being really good at his job. No big deal!
I loved my time with Deus Ex. It was so much fun, and I'll likely play it again soon because I want to see what else it can do. It's just that the things it can do are so wildly different from what my imagination thought it could do. I wanna see how many more ways the NPCs can wild out and make chaos for me on a night mission; I wanna see how many more lines of dialogue were run through an accent mangler and emotion flattener; I wanna see how many more ways I can hilariously die while trying to hoodwink a cybercommando by throwing a couch and some potted plants at him. Maybe I'll come back when or if the dust ever settles on Our Current Situation and These Unprecedented Times pass, because I dunno how many more times I can hear someone say something like "Zeez peepel arrr not abel to afford zee vaccine!" without feeling a strong tinge of guilt moments before I throw them out of a third-storey window in an attempt to distract a mech that's enforcing a national lockdown. What a shame.
You could spend days of paragraphs just discussing Warren Spector's vision of 2052 and the myriad ways it lines up with our present. In his GDC post-mortem of the game, Spector claims that Ion Storm chose the year 2052 because they needed a far-flung future that they could use to safely and somewhat-believably explore ideas like an international pandemic, trans-humanism, automation, meme wars, extreme inequality, globalisation, soy food and all the other concepts I found in the game's newspapers but didn't bother reading. I won't list every parallel with the present here - that would be a day of paragraphs alone - but it is indeed startling how much sooner the spectre of Spector's future came to pass than he originally predicted way back in the dark ages of the 1990s. In fact, scientists are saying that the future will be far more realistic than they originally predicted. I would recommend playing Deus Ex right here and right now in 2021 if you want to have a temporally-significant and spatially-specific gaming experience that you can tell your kids about in the FEMA global warming/COVID-52 refugee shelters.
There's a temptation here to make the leap from the 2021 parallels found in details of the game's 2052 setting to the grand conspiracies that drive JC's story forward, but it would all too easy to attribute our world's ills to a single organisation like the Majestic 12. No matter how many times our reality plays out stranger than fiction and we uncover another island of paedophiles, I still don't think that Paul Denton's theory about a globe-spanning cabal of bankers holds much synthetic water. It's fun to imagine and simplify the world in such ways, but the game, while trying its hardest to simulate meatspace, is still doing the real world a disservice. Reality is much more complicated and evil than all that you can squeeze onto a 150MB CD-ROM.
I think that's what ultimately stops me from hailing Deus Ex as the same masterpiece as those freaks told me it was - this is superficial complexity masquerading on top of something much simpler. I don't want to tear apart something from 20 years ago for not being as well-realised as the imsims of the present (this came out five years after Doom II! Jesus Christ, Denton!), but the game presents the player with the suggestion of infinite diversity in infinite combinations that more often than not boil down to turning yourself into a lightsaber-wielding Wolverine, gobbling down candy bars and 4loko in the corners of a bulk freighter in order to run full-force at three soldiers who have forgotten you were there just a few seconds ago and are now clip-clop running away and straight into the nearest wall.
It fucking rules, but it's not the "Million-Dollar James Bond Does Blade Runner" gameplay experience that everyone from 4chan to my dorm room told me it was going to be. Sure, you can bribe an overworked office worker into giving you his ID badge so that you can silently descend into a top-secret sealab, but why bother doing that when you can just unload your GEP gun into a lobby of bodyguards, close the door, then walk back in 5 seconds later like nothing happened? Again, let me be clear - it fucking rules to play Deus Ex as a murderous cyberpath in a world of automatons suffering from early-onset dementia, but I thought it was going to be something much more. Why bother doing anything more subtle than a cyberbrick through a holowindow when you can mercilessly cut down cops with your Hattori Hanzo Cattle Prod and laugh when they freak out about it for the duration of their walk to the coffee shop at the end of the street?
Try and play Deus Ex a different way and you will more likely than not spend most of your time with your finger on the quicksave button, hoping in vain that this time, the guard won't bug out and spot you while you're crouching silently in a shadow texture 50 clicks away. Maybe this time, your attempt at a hack won't go awry because a random guy on the street's pathfinding has caused him to permanently hover-sit in the Illuminati's top-secret doorframe. It's funny - often hysterical! But it's not exactly an immersive simulation. At least when you go on another LAMpage in an NYC nightclub because a guy pulled a gun on you for picking up his empty wine bottle, you know the game isn't gonna be too fussy about the specifics. Everyone just goes back to their drinks after a while, and Manderley will probably still pay UNATCO's finest a healthy bonus for being really good at his job. No big deal!
I loved my time with Deus Ex. It was so much fun, and I'll likely play it again soon because I want to see what else it can do. It's just that the things it can do are so wildly different from what my imagination thought it could do. I wanna see how many more ways the NPCs can wild out and make chaos for me on a night mission; I wanna see how many more lines of dialogue were run through an accent mangler and emotion flattener; I wanna see how many more ways I can hilariously die while trying to hoodwink a cybercommando by throwing a couch and some potted plants at him. Maybe I'll come back when or if the dust ever settles on Our Current Situation and These Unprecedented Times pass, because I dunno how many more times I can hear someone say something like "Zeez peepel arrr not abel to afford zee vaccine!" without feeling a strong tinge of guilt moments before I throw them out of a third-storey window in an attempt to distract a mech that's enforcing a national lockdown. What a shame.
3 Comments
oh, and great review Jim!! the part about how the game is genuinely prescient when it comes to the societal woes but simultaneously extremely juvenile with how it conceives the cause of these problems very much resonates with my own thoughts
I think it's more that the creators of the game took themselves less seriously than many of the people who have essayed this game to death. It's a relatively silly game, so it probably should have a relatively silly concept driving it.
Woodaba
3 years ago