Yeah, that’s the one. And yeah, the cases can get pretty complicated at times, I’ve had one case for instance where I had to find a person by their description… Except the description was literally their job title and their first name initial letter (or something very similar). I had to go to a gubermint building, hack into a computer and manually cross-reference the health history of literally everyone in town to find the person. And that was just the first step of the case.
The closest thing we had was the System Shock duology, since both predate Deus Ex. Deus Ex was basically accessible System Shock. Having dialogue trees and NPCs without losing the open-ended nature of System Shock’s more dungeon crawl-y approach was the real selling point.
You’re clearly misremembering System Shock if that’s what you think. Those games were just Ultima Underground with guns, especially the first. Deus Ex was soooo beyond dungeon crawler, it was almost a full blown RPG by modern standards, it had big hubs with multiple NPCs that you could talk, quests with alternate endings that sometimes changed later sections of the game, highly interactive environments, level design with lots of verticality and hidden paths… System Shock had nothing of that.
Really, if anything Deus Ex owes more to Thief in the gameplay department than System Shock, the interactive environments and very detailed level design, even the stealth were straight out of Thief. It clearly has some inspiration from System Shock, especially with the augments, but even those were more useful in ways to allow you traverse the environment than the former. Calling it an “accessible System Shock” is reductive at best.
There’s an indie game called Shadows of Doubt that does the whole immersive sim in a big hub stuff pretty well. Kind of jank and unfinished, but I think it’s the closest thing I’ve seen in recent times to Deus Ex.
it’s less groundbreaking in context than I think people give it credit for.
Are you seriously going to tell me that the open-ended structure of Deus Ex, coupled with the RPG elements and interactive environments wasn’t groundbreaking for the time? There wasn’t anything quite like it back then, so much so it basically created the genre of Immersive Sims as we know it today.
Hell, you could trace basically any first person shooter with RPG elements from after 2000 back to Deus Ex, it’s the gold standard for a reason. The closest thing we had to this kind of game back then was Strife, a Doom clone with a basic quest system and inventory, even System Shock 2 is less dynamic and open-ended than Deus Ex.
It’s been a while since I’ve watched these, his video on the original is spot on, but I really dislike his takes on Human Revolution, felt like he was mostly nitpicking for the sake of nitpicking, especially the story bits.
Yeah, I kind of agree. I wish they’d make a new Quake or something, Doom is cool and all but this barely resembles it. Eternal was fun, but too goofy and campy, Doom 2016 did it perfectly.
It definitely has a learning curve at the start, if you’re still interested the new version has a tutorial in-game now, I can’t vouch for how good it is because I’ve never used it though. There’s also plenty of quick and easy tutorials online, I learned the basics from this one by Peridexis but it’s rather outdated by now, the wiki has some recommendations on more up-to-date ones.
Decided to go back to Dwarf Fortress after a long while, I’ve been basically re-learning the game and trying some !!fun!! stuff I’ve never done before. Funnily enough I think I just built my most successful fortress, outside of a really nasty tavern fight that resulted in the death of two children, one dwarf and their cat (the drunkard literally grabbed the poor sod by the tail and smashed it into a statue to death LOL), everything went rather smoothly. Lots of forgotten beasts passing through the caves, one got in while I wasn’t looking (lol) but was dispatched easily without casualties.
Thinking about building a fort on a volcano next, see if I can do some crazy magma wizardry.
I don’t even know how I feel about this. On the one hand, it’s great we’re moving away from 4 which was always a shitshow to begin with, on the other hand I have no faith whatsoever 5 is going to be even on par with 4.