RPS Feature It's not bad!
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
We’d remember Deus Ex: Invisible War more fondly if it weren’t named Deus Ex, wouldn’t we? So let’s imagine that.
Released in 2003 by Ion Storm, Invisible War is a flawed but pretty fun FPS action-RPG, where we get to be a swanky cyborg larking about in that grim cyberpunk future.
RPS Feature Electronic older men
Deus Ex is 15 years old, which means it’s almost old enough to move out of our house and stop having to do what we say. For now though, John, Alec, Adam and Alice decided to celebrate the relentless passing of time by jotting down some memories of Ion Storm’s beloved immersive sim.
RPS Feature Deus Exegesis
This took rather longer than we thought. But after five entries, and two weeks, I’ve come to my conclusions. You can read the whole saga here, if you’ve not yet caught up, as I chronicle my experience of replaying Deus Ex – a game I’ve always maintained is the Best Game Ever – fifteen years later. Was I wrong? Is it even possible for me to be wrong? Read on.
RPS Feature Deus Examination
My chronicle of returning to Deus Ex fifteen years later, to see if I’m right when I tell anyone who comes near that it’s the best game ever, is nearing its end. You can read the whole saga here.
In this fifth part I contemplate the significant change in approach in the last third of the game, and then make my choice for the ending.
RPS Feature Deus Excruciating
And so continues my chronicle of returning to Deus Ex fifteen years later, to see if I’m right when I tell anyone who comes near that it’s the best game ever. You can read the whole saga here.
In this fourth edition, I once more fail to save my brother, become increasingly frustrated with the limits of the game’s intelligence, and ponder whether real choice is actually usefully conveyed to the player.
RPS Feature Deus Exclamation Mark
As my re-exploration of Deus Ex continues, I find my memories clashing with the reality of the game, as I try to establish if it’s still the Best Game Ever™. You can read the whole saga here. It’s accusing me of crimes I didn’t commit, an in turn, I start committing some crimes.
RPS Feature Deus Executables
Here continues my attempt to discover if Deus Ex really is the best game ever, like my brain thinks. Part One is here. Today I yet again struggle to get the game working, then struggle to work within the game. But cheer myself up reading some newspapers.
RPS Feature Deus Existential Crisis
When asked, “What is the best game ever?” I always give one reply. “Deus Ex.” Back in the days when my passport still allowed me into PC Gamer Top 100 meetings, I would furiously argue that it should be no. 1, and indeed become furious whenever it did not. While I may pick another name if asked for my favourite game, when it comes to “best”, I always say Looking Glass/Ion Storm’s greatest moment.
But what if I’m wrong?
Texture packs, replacement models, and post-processing mods can do a lot to pretty a game up, but they can’t conceal that jagged old level geometry. It’s an awful lot more work to re-do and update levels but by gum, the folks at Deus Ex: Revision are putting in the time. The Caustic Creative team have been tarting up and reworking Deus Ex‘s levels with more props, more decorative architecture, and fancier lighting.
Version 1.0 of the “re-imagining” mod had been due on May 12 but due a mysterious alluring offer it’s pushed back into the nebulous “near future,” those PC Gamer chaps have spotted. In the meantime, we’ll have to make do with a new video showing off a few of the reworked levels.
RPS Feature "I think we became an artform with Pong."
There are a lot of words being written about the new consoles this week but when I spoke to Warren Spector a few days ago, he was clear about where his future lies: “I think all the interesting stuff is happening on PC now… Assuming I make more games, which I intend to do, PC and Mac are going to be my targets.”
It’s good to hear. We spoke at the Bradford Animation Festival and covered a wide range of topics, from his theories of design and pioneering role in PC gaming to thoughts on the current state of the industry. In this first part of our conversation, there’s insight into how Spector see his own legacy and the work of his former colleagues, and how frustrations with Thief’s difficulty inspired the player empowerment of Deus Ex.
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.
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.
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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