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Personally I saw DX more of a strange immersive novel than even a shooter. A shooter to me was grapple-hooking around dark lava-filled corridors shooting railguns into people…. or worse team fortress or ctf matches with rocket-grenade-tripwire turrent laser mines and eventually the glorious 1 shot kills of action q2/ the original counterstrike, followed eventually by the actual counterstrike and the *most amazing hl1-mod ever: ‘the specialist’.

DX came into my personal gaming saga at a interesting time~ I usually fell a few years behind the curve since I was about 10 in 1996….. so a lot of these games I ended up getting to in a odd order around 98-2000. My father ran a programming/computer/internet store so I remember being about 4 and having him read the passwords from the book so I could play Wolfpack by Broderbund… sinking allied convoys from a U-boat when I was 4 on the big floppy B: drive…. yesh. How many of you folks learned to read so you could drive a submarine?

Strategy for me was a mix of command and conquer, total annihilation, and selecting which strange quake 2 mod to play at the time. Diablo and starsiege Tribes were even making me think a little bit before hacking and slashing. DX actually had a STORY… and a interesting one at that. It had a thinking STRATEGY associated with it too… not quite rainbow 6 tactical or anything but it was there along with a bigger picture. A story and a bigger strategy. I had played some of the ultima’s and the underworlds, the dooms and duke nukems… but they were all a brash mix of twitch and kill-everything or talk to a lot of annoying npc types and sell lame stuff or click a lot at boring monsters. I was always wondering what would happen next in DX even though it was slightly predictable. It was NOT predictable in that if you ‘accidentally’ killed your npc who knows what strange thing would happen. It was kind of like one of those books that gives you choices at the end of a section- Do you: kill (turn to page 85) Give cake? (pg 119) Whisper sweet nothings? (pg 345) Shazbot! (pg 5)

It was that choice and open feeling of choice that really made it stand out. It wasn’t a ‘rocket launcher or BFG’ choice, or even a kill or stealth choice…. but the fact that of all the other gaming experiences I had at the time it was the game that had a choice-driven story… and a slightly open world that you could get lost in, and a inventory… that you could keep lots of stupid things in.

I think 1/2 the fun was getting through the story, and the other 1/2 was the crazy stuff you could figure out how to do along the way. All the weird emails, funny ways to get through puzzles, crazy augs and guns, odd alien-area51-cyberpunk/crackhead/Illuminati interaction…. the list goes on.

DX made me realize a game that can make you think about the real world gives you a lot more to walk away with than the adrenalin hype of the twitchy-shooty-grapply-railgun types. DX was telling a story and, technical problems/limitations aside, it did a great job of just that. I liked it much better than the half-life series because you wern’t restricted to your little train/cart/ one way thing though stories are generally restricted along a certain linear path.

Now if only dx3 stuck to that concept but with a better fighting/melee/graphics piece… wow. The specialist mod for hl was, for me, the apogee of fps battle. Jumping and diving off walls, katanas and knife throwing, kicking weapons out of peoples hands, one shot one kills…probably the most adrenalin filled battles possible. Combine that withs augs and sneakin…. eh I can only hope.

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I’m not even a person who tries to discover all the ways to do things in games (to which DX must be a wet dream) but I have played it a few times to really appreciate the choice you do have. As opposed to HL2, Halo, CoD, etc etc that are the same every time you play, apart from Halo3 which has ‘emergent’ arenas of fighting with the decent AI, similarly to Fear.

It’s just an ‘old-shool’ design thought I think that has been hampered by statistics and the overwhelming success of the Halo’s HL’s and CoDs of the world. Valve’s admission that they design so a person will see virtually everything in the game in one playthrough is telling at what the games lack in a certain sense. They admit that most people don’t play their games to completion and thus they don’t design branching paths etc as statistically people won’t try the alternatives. This is a massive immersion fail in general. Valve are just lucky that their games are still pretty damned good and they have a few tricks to circumvent this a bit. Just not as exciting as the true emergent stuff, or even ‘emergent-light’ a la Bioshock.

Let’s hope DX3 and Thief 4 and a bunch of other games can keep the emergent flavour about them (also with in-game consequences) that makes this type of game so satisfying… to probably a minority of us.

I now have to finish off IW and then play through SS with the mlook mod.

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I want to stress that I actually enjoyed DX a ton in its day, and did do my best to “play the system” at the time. There were lots of fun easter egg type discoveries and moments of joy seeing what you tried come out good, but compared to a game like Red Faction Guerilla or (i know) even Bioshock, the perceived “emergence” of DX is extremely meagre.

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I remember starting Deus Ex around 2005 and being disgusted at the ugly character models and their crazy “breathing” animation. I put it down for month after barely even starting because I couldn’t stand it.

However, after giving it a second shot I fell in love with it. Sure it looked old, but it didn’t feel old if that makes any sense. The way it played felt newer than anything I was playing at the time and it was as if this was where video games should have gone after System Shock 2 and Thief, but didn’t for some reason.

Now I almost always have it installed and I play through it over again at least twice a year. It’s usually the first game to go into a new machine and the last game to come out.

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Did none of these people play Thief? If that’s the case, then do so ASAP. It’s another classic from the PC gaming golden age.

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@ tomwaitsfornoman: I guess you mean “Jacob’s Shadow”, and -unfortunately- it’s just a fictional novel, so the bits in the game are all there is to it.

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