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.
At this point I don’t know which country is more ridiculous, Israel or North Korea. They’re basically the same, a tiny pariah state barking loud at anyone that looks at them while getting support from a rich neighbor.
although the ancient Romans weren’t nearly as racist.
I beg to differ considering anyone that wasn’t roman was a “barbarian” to them. They didn’t judge you on skin color like people do nowadays, but they were still xenophobic and racist as fuck.