Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Why wait until the increasingly plausible cyberfuture for life-extending augments, nano enhancements, and modifications? Our PC games are getting them right now, as they have been pretty much since the inception of our humble hobby. Case in point: Deus Ex. It still sees the occasional hugely ambitious mod now and then, and it’s more than a decade old. Deus Ex: Nihilum, especially, fits the bill quite nicely, lining its worn but hardly ragged trench coat with more than ten hours of content, 2200 lines of new dialogue, an entire, completely new soundtrack, and tons of nooks and crannies to explore and hack. It’s a labor of love that’s been several years in the making, and you can finally download it now.

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Remember Deus Ex’s long-awaited New Vision mod? Of course you do. We brought you word of its incomplete release last year, and obviously, you’ve calibrated your cyber-brain’s nanomachines to remember every last detail of every last revision of every last RPS post. I mean, what else would you use flawless memory superpowers for? At any rate, for those still running inferior flesh hardware, New Vision repaves the original Deus Ex with crisp modern textures. All of them. It’s a labor of love that’s been in the works for the past five years, but it’s finally completely and totally finished.

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My wait, actually. The best bit of the PC Gamer Top 100 meetings was listening to Gamer’s secret weapon Tony Ellis (if you’ve ever laughed at a caption or dark dark bit of humour, it was probably from Tony’s sick mind), talking about Anachronox: we’d all stop flushing heads down the toilet and pause mid-Chinese burn as he told us about the insanity of Ion Storm’s other game: all I remember now is that you could have a planet as a companion. A planet! I’ve been waiting for it to appear on GoG, and this morning it did. In addition to the planetary buddy, it’s a combination of Japanese style RPG and western sensibilities, but thanks to a rushed production (lots of content was removed then Ion Storm closed a month after release), it’s also rather buggy.
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Edit: cos there are various theories flying around below about my perceived intent in posting this, I shall clarify my own feelings. I would really like to see contracts between publishers and developers more commonly include an arrangement whereby key (and ideally, but rather less plausibly, all) creatives on game projects continue to see some post-release royalties, as is the case in some other entertainment and publishing industries. That so many old games are being (apparently profitably) rereleased lately highlights this disparity. That is all.

There’s obviously a very good chance you already know this, but just in case: when a developer is bought out by a publisher, it’s usually the case that they then don’t see any ongoing royalties from the games they make for them, or indeed for any existing intellectual property that was swallowed up as part of the studio acquisition. It’s standard practice, knowingly agreed by both parties during the dark deal some studios made to ensure immediate financial viability and larger project budgets. But what it does mean is that a great many of the PC games we regularly celebrate around these parts are no longer bringing in any money for their creators, despite still being on sale. Whenever we excitedly see an old classic appear on Steam or GoG (such as Thief last week), chances are very high that whatever we pay for it goes purely to the publisher and the download service. And while it may well be right that these bodies profit from projects they funded and distribute, it’s sad that the men and women who toiled over that game’s creation won’t see another penny from it.
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