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clarry | 5 years ago
Huh. Nobody praised the graphics back then. They were dated on the day Deus Ex came out; it uses the original Unreal engine (with some tweaks) and looks just as dated. Rendering technology moved fast back then and a game as large as Deus Ex had no hope of staying ahead of the curve. Plus they had to make some compromises to fit such a large scale game on disk & in RAM (there were other UE1 games that looked arguably better). I recall reviews considering Deus Ex's graphics "boxy" (literally!) and it has plenty of super small textures..
The thing that most people praised was the freedom. That's part mechanics, but what I was trying to say is that very few of the mechanics in Deus Ex were innovative; mostly they just did a great job incorporating mechanics that already existed in prior games. That's the ticket. You don't need to innovate and make some superb new mechanics to make a new Deus Ex quality game.
> In any case, story driven games have existed long before Deus Ex and still exist now.
Yes, but few games pull all the elements I mentioned above together. Deus Ex has "all the parts", and for most part it's done well, therefore it's more than the sum of its parts. Yes, story driven games exist, but few of them incorporate all the other elements that made Deus Ex what it is.
> I see these kinds of comments all the time and frankly a lot of it is rose tinted glasses.
I see people always dismiss this as nostalgia. I call bullshit, if only because I played very few games "back in the day" (and I don't like most of the games I had back then; I played them only because I really didn't have anything else to play).
Most of the old games I discuss today are games I've only played sometime during the last decade for the first time. And I keep finding old games that I really like, and then I don't like their sequels, and I have a hard time finding new games that I like as much.
laumars|5 years ago
I'm pretty sure they did. Unfortunately I don't still have any magazines of that era
> They were dated on the day Deus Ex came out; it uses the original Unreal engine (with some tweaks) and looks just as dated.
Back then "with some tweaks" and high resolution textures did make a significant differences
> I recall reviews considering Deus Ex's graphics "boxy" (literally!) and it has plenty of super small textures..
I guess our recollections differ then. I do remember the game ran slooooow compared to other games out there that used the Unreal Engine. Perhaps you had to run the game at a lower texture quality or resolution than other games?
> Yes, but few games pull all the elements I mentioned above together. Deus Ex has "all the parts", and for most part it's done well, therefore it's more than the sum of its parts. Yes, story driven games exist, but few of them incorporate all the other elements that made Deus Ex what it is.
Basically your criticism here is few other games are Deus Ex since if everything you loved about Deus Ex was copied you'd just end up with the same game. And if that happened you'd probably also criticise it for not being original.
> I see people always dismiss this as nostalgia. I call bullshit, if only because I played very few games "back in the day"
That's exactly it though. You don't have to love every game you grew up with but you did have to spend time playing Deus Ex because you had fewer options verses now where you are able to skip game the moment your attention wavers.
clarry|5 years ago
> I guess our recollections differ then.
IGN: As good as the gameplay is, visuals aren't one of Deus Ex's stronger points. Since it's built on the Unreal engine, Deus Ex isn't as pretty as other first-person games like Quake III or Soldier of Fortune. The graphics are blocky, the animation is stiff, and the dithering is just plain awful in some spots [...] (between presentation, graphics, sound, gameplay, and lasting appeal, graphics got the lowest score)
Gamespot: Deus Ex's graphics aren't very good, either. Though the game uses Epic Games' Unreal engine, which was once lauded for its exceptional visual quality, Deus Ex is actually a fairly bland-looking game because of its incessantly dark industrial environments.
(I could've sworn PC gamer also considered the graphics blocky, but I can't find that right now)
HDTP: The original in-game textures were of a very low resolution, some textures even being as low as 32x32.
For comparison, Doom (1993) had 128 px tall wall textures. Quake 3 (1999) shipped 256x256 textures and generally much better looking (and more dynamic) visuals thanks to its shaders and gamma hack. Unreal shipped hi-res s3tc textures (sorry, can't figure out what the resolution is right now).
Also I think Deus Ex used indexed (256 color) textures, while Quake 3 engine based games used truecolor. At least I remember having to dither & convert textures to 256 color gifs back when I did some Deus Ex modding..
> Basically your criticism here is few other games are Deus Ex since if everything you loved about Deus Ex was copied you'd just end up with the same game. And if that happened you'd probably also criticise it for not being original.
Absolutely not. My criticism is that very few other games try and let alone manage to put all the elements together as competently as Deus Ex did. You absolutely can deliver an original story & setting with all the elements that made Deus Ex good without making the same game. Virtually nobody today is trying.
> That's exactly it though. You don't have to love every game you grew up with but you did have to spend time playing Deus Ex because you had fewer options verses now where you are able to skip game the moment your attention wavers.
No, that's not it. You missed the part where I mention old games in plural. Yes, old games other than Deus Ex, that I played sometime post 2010 and liked a lot (more than most recent games I try to play). Deus Ex is rather the exception, in that I both played it back in the day and enjoy it a lot (even today). Most of the games that I like from that era are not games I played in that era. And most of the games I played back then are not games I would enjoy today. So the vast majority of my opinion about old games does not come from nostalgia or rose tinted glasses, but from discovering them on GOG and playing them post 2014 (which is when I created my account on GOG and started trying out these old games I never had a chance to play back in the day).
I have zero reason to believe in nostalgia making much difference in how I feel about games I play today. I can pick up a game I loved 25 years ago, and get bored in 30 minutes because it's actually not that good. I can pick up a game I never played 25 years ago and love it because it's actually good. I can pick up a game I heard about 25 years ago and wanted to play, and find out it's actually not good. I can pick up a game I hated 25 years ago and like it, because it's actually better than I thought back then.
Actually playing these games today is the best way to dispel nostalgia, and usually 15 to 120 minutes is more than enough time for that.