michalion2 days ago
What a shame ;-)
The GOTY was £0.83 on Steam and I've installed the revision Mod which the comments say is the one you _should_ play as it's better than the "remaster".
Worth it though I think, I prefer to play as true to original as possible with only QoL changes.
My past experience with trying to get mods on Proton games was much more complicated, but this seems to work fine; a little buggy, but once in gameplay it plays nicely, tested a few minutes of the tutorial on my lunch break and no issues.
If you don't like Github, the main website is simpler to navigate https://mods4ever.com/project/DXRZeroRando
On the mission where you have to assasinate Lebedev in the airport, when you finally get to him on the airplane you start a conversation, but are interrupted midway by your fellow agent Anna something, who proceeds to kill Lebedev. Well since this wasn't my first playthrough, I knew where the whole thing was headed so I decided to plant some LAMS on the approach to see what would happen.
And what did happen was one of the funniest scenes in a video game. You hear Anna's footsteps, the camera angle change from the dialogue-style camera to a zoom out, and JC turns to the hallway she is coming from. LAMs go off, Anna lets out a scream, JC turns right back to Lebedev and just continues chatting as if it was some type of minor disturbance
I must have laughed for a good 10 minutes or so
However, fans of the game are calling it "Demastered".
See d2r, oblivion, etc.
Especially for the first remake.
This is why I say the screeching right now based on a trailer means nothing. "Fans" always get mightily offended if someone touches their childhood favorites.
An example of a remaster done right was Halo 1 (which is actually quite an old remaster at this point). They threw a new graphics engine on top but also remodeled and retextured everything. That's what I expect out of a proper remaster.
D2R was also very good.
There are exceptions though, and also there are some remasters that are not faithful but are good on their own.
That said, I am still in the minority that enjoys such attempts, if nothing else, then because at least these modern versions often run a bit better, with proper high resolutions and widescreen support, as well as sometimes receive some quality of life fixes to bring the game up to speed and make it play like something a bit more modern - the jank of early 2000s games is something I don't enjoy.
At the same time, there's no reason why a mod made by passionate members of the community couldn't do more or less the same, except often times a bit better, which is jarring - how some companies seem to do the equivalent of outsourcing it and try to produce something quickly and on a budget.
I think the best attempts at giving us a fresh look at old games that I've seen were the Mafia Definitive Edition https://store.steampowered.com/app/1030840/Mafia_Definitive_Edition/ and System Shock https://store.steampowered.com/app/482400/System_Shock/ although those are basically remakes, that just happen to stay true to the original.
There's a very loud cacophony from a minority of fans that get really really angry because someone touched their favorite thing and moved some rivets around. Similar to the effect where people were VERY VERY angry about the changes and omissions LotR movies did to LotR books.
Also, easy Steam refunds if the game was played for under 2 hours is a thing.
Given this "remaster" by Aspyr, I'm glad Nightdive exists.
See e.g. GoG comments and comments down this thread.
But for me, they made the experience worse and they were enabled by default. As a result, I gave it a thumbs down on Steam and did my best to explain my thoughts in detail. I received a couple dozen negative comments over the years on that review, largely in the vein of how dare I give negative feedback to a labor of love provided for free. That kind of argument did make me feel guilty, like I was being unfair to the developers. I eventually changed it to a positive review, and now I regret doing that. I allowed my genuine opinion to be clouded.
This was an extremely tame internet conflict overall, I'd feel ashamed to frame myself as a victim over so little. What I'm trying to say is that both sides are capable of failing to genuinely engage with the other.
It's definitely true that Revision has been to some degree unfairly attacked. There are purists who do not give it a fair shake and make ludicrously confident statements, peddling opinion as fact. But there's also legitimate reasons to dislike it. Not knowing you, I am not at all accusing you that you'd be lacking nuance on this topic. I'd just like to say as a general statement that discourse ends up healthier when people care about distinguishing between people who disagree with you versus people who disagree with you _and_ that are acting in bad faith.
And the DuClare Chateau level remains one of my favorite plot beats in gaming.
The collision shape used for a character in DX is a single cylinder. The game looks at where on the cylinder the collision point of the shot is, and tries to figure out if it's a head, body, or leg shot. It does this by checking how high the collision point is, with the lower X% being legs, top Y% being the head, and the middle being the body.
If a shot hits the head section, it runs some additional checks, and can sometimes still count as a body hit. There was some weird code that, after you stared at it long enough, looks like it ended up splitting the head area into compass aligned 1/8ths (so north, north-east, east, etc) and hits to the N-E-S-W octants would count as a head shot, and a hit to the NE-NW-SE-SW octants would count as body shots. (I couldn't tell if the angles rotate with the character, or are absolute relative to the world.) I think there was also a check for hits on the top cap of the cylinder, so that the hit would have to be close to the center of the cylinder to count as head hit, and near the outer rim would count as a body hit.
Hm, I should just make a diagram. Here: https://imgur.com/a/KG6MF1k
I guess what they were trying to do was make the actual head hitbox a smaller section of the head level, so that a shot that should go over the shoulder and miss would just count as a body shot and not a true headshot. And if you made a test map, with the player and a static test enemy placed in a line, this could work reliably from a fixed position. But when you actually play DX, and approach enemies from various angles, headshots inexplicably fail.
If you first push yourself as close as you can get to the enemy model and attack the general area of their torso, it works every single time. But again, this is just me taking a guess as to what the problem you're referring to is!
It makes the difficulty curve super inverted
* Lockpicks: single inventory slot, stacking; plentiful; silent
* LAMs: single inventory slot, stacking; loud
* Dragon Tooth: infinite uses; can't break down every door; silent?
* Sniper rifle: optionally silent; semi-common ammo; can't break down every door
* GEP gun: loud; bulky; semi-common ammo
So torso hits from behind are the way to go.
I still remember how happy I was when I finally had gotten rid of any sort of sway on my reticle. Yeah, I can play this game like Half-Life now!.
It looks like I misremembered/misinterpreted some stuff. It looks like the top of the head behaves like the sides of the head, extending upward, forming a + shape.
Judging by how the arm/leg damage works, it the collision hit zones rotate with the enemy. Offset appears to be were the collision point is releative to the character's rotation, since it's also used to determine front/back and left/right collision. So for a hit to count as a headshot, it has to hit a cardinal octant of the collision cylinder.
Edit:
Updated diagram: https://imgur.com/a/Mec7HGm
This is what Warren Spector made while Romero was busy pissing money away and constantly rewriting Daikatana.
The one worthwhile thing to come out of Ion Storm.
Lots of emergent gameplay. Almost always more than one way to solve each puzzle. Stealth, brute strength melee, long range combat, explosives, computer hacking ...
Branching story with multiple endings.
A must play.
Anachronix too. Not a 10/10 game but an absolutely solid entry for the period.
For 15 years I have been trying to recall the name ofthis game my mom got me randomly for for PC as a kid!!!!!!!!!
I have googled EVERYTHING possible related to "late 90s to early 2000s PC game starting with A".
THANK YOU SO MUCH!
“You will soon have your God, and you will make it with your own hands.”
Said demo has actually aged very well imo.
Wonder if we'll see similar differences in the future between the OD trailer and whatever is SOTA in ~10 years.
(The real pros can do it all in a single jump.)
Warren's 6+2+1 questions before starting a game project; Team 1 & Team A (no one wanted to be Team B or Team 2); the day we hit pre alpha and realised the game was not fun; LAM wall climbing & problem solving with explosive barrels; origin of the name JC Denton
Thanks to your link I also learned that Alex has done some voice acting work, including the voice of Ancano in Skyrim! Thanks for posting :)
Prey 2017 was fantastic.. but in terms of ambition it was a step back, it's basically an improvement on system shock 2.
I do think there is an ultimate game out there that has not been made yet.. We could do it now though, combine a totally open simulation like minecraft with on-the-fly story / dialogue / characters by an LLM.
I'm not sure what you mean by ambition. Deus Ex was pretty heavily criticized for having "last-gen" graphics
What made Deus Ex stand out was the writing and atmosphere, and maybe some gameplay mechanics which hadn't become quite so popular. As you mentioned System Shock had already pioneered them, although that game didn't reach the level of popularity of Deus Ex which won game of the year in 2000
I'd also add in the music, to this day I still remember the main theme. Alot of games these days, don't even bother.
I would argue that games like Cyberpunk 2077 or KCD2 are a logical step-up for the genre offering open world, next gen graphics, many more weapons, NPCs, interactions, etc. and quite ambitious.
Same could be same of Skyrim 10 years ago.
I think it's in people's minds because A) "Deus Ex: Remastered" was announced this week [1] and B) many have remarked that the remaster low effort, and at least from its trailer, does not compare favorably to the many high quality community mods such as this one.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3131640/Deus_Ex_Remastered/
I still haven't played anything like it some 25 years later unless The Nameless Mod counts.
IIRC they tended to make the overall experience worse, with jarring inconsistencies of high-poly/high-res objects versus unmodified portions of the environment.
Plus nowadays "low res" is sometimes it's own art-style. :p
I especially loved the "conspiracy" talk about corporations consolidating their powers thanks to government-sponsored wage slavery and higher taxes to the individual vs companies. It's something that's even more relevant today, especially in this space of entrepreneurship.
Story, dialogue, theme-wise hasn't aged a bit.
Play it.
I still remember the exact moment I learned the word “surrender” from the terrorist leader at the statue, because I’ve replayed the first level hundreds of times, since my pirated version of the game would crash around one of the first levels.
When I was a late teenager I learned english and my mind was blown that the game actually had deep meaning behind it.
I wonder how the themes of the original game hit today, in 2025, the world being what it is now.
Bear in mind that, at this time, people genuinely believed there was some nutjob conspiracies being revealed by QAnon. Ironically, half of them seemed to come directly from Deus Ex…
In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time)
Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot.
The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
But... in the game the good guys were the ones trying to make sure everyone had the vaccine, which Elon conveniently omitted when tweeting about it. What makes his invokation of the game more hilarious is exactly what you noted: the parallels between Elon and Bob Page, a billionaire tech mogul and one of the main villains, are impossible to ignore.
The game, both in the 2000s when it came out, and today has bits of both left wing and right wing elements. The NSF faction read as libertarian right wing terrorists, and UNATCO is literally an arm of the "globalist" UN which would probably appeal to the right-wing qAnon types today. But the actual villain is basically a dude who is exactly like Elon.
The bad guys were trying to manipulate supply of it. The good guys were trying to make sure it was available to everyone. Interestingly, even the bad guys understood the necessity of vaccines, and their ability to leverage them for power hinged on a shared global understanding of their importance.
What it meant to be curious about conspiracy theories in the late '90s is fundamentally different than what it is in the present day, in a way that I think unfortunately distorts the experience of the game for people who don't know what it was like before. Hence Elon's bizarre attempt at retrofitting it to anti-covid narratives.
But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.
They're very different, so they're difficult to compare. BG3 is very much a tabletop RPG in electronic form, with a focus on tactics and positioning. I guess you could call it fantasy XCOM. In terms of player choices, BG3 is more open, though I'd say it's almost to its detriment, because it's jankier than DX. You'll probably get at least one bugged out quest during a playthrough. Nothing game-breaking, but still. It kind of kills the immersion.
I'm not ashamed to say that Deus Ex was extremely formative and the reason why now, almost in my 40s, I still read about political philosophy, anarchism, and cultivate a healthy distrust of the government and mass media. Which in turn also gave me a direct pipeline towards crypto-anarchism and Internet privacy rights.
Kids these days don’t have access to edit their games like we did. It’s why crafting games are popular, the only “level editors” that remain once companies realized they could monetize extra content.