Retrospective: Deus Ex
Deus Ex was one of those games that had been inspiring gamers of the year 2000 and early 2000s. It was a game I didn’t know much of at the time and wasn’t really that much into PC games at the time. Yet, the PS2 was coming up with a version and finding out about it piqued my interest. The interesting thing for me before playing was the idea of conspiracies and being a first-person shooter game but also an RPG. I like the idea of having both first-person and RPG together in a game. Since I wasn’t into PC games at the time and more into console gaming, I didn’t start trying to play the game on PC until a couple years later, but my PC wasn’t really made for gaming, so it had issues with either the game or my PC (long story). Yet, I knew there were some differences between the PC and the PS2 version but most of the feeling of the game and what you can do, minus the health bars for your torso, arms, legs, and head was not part of the PS2 game. There were a couple of other edits made for the PS2 version and including an inventory system that I liked. It seemed to me though, the same feelings that many PC gamers had for the game was the same.
When I first played the game, that first level wasn’t easy to navigate but as I went on, it got a bit easier. Finding out that there were various ways of getting into the Statue of Liberty was different than many games of that time that I’ve played. Most first-person shooters, at this time, that I’ve played were just going from point A to point B instead of having more than one way to achieve a goal. This was the greatest strength of the Deus Ex. Most games you had to find a key and go a particular path. In Deus Ex, you could hack, use a lockpick, or just use explosives to get in if you don’t have a key. That is just going through the front door but there is usually a back door which you won’t even need a key. Although sneaking was considered important, it wasn’t a problem if you couldn’t. It wasn’t like some games like Thief where you HAD to not be detected in your sneaking. You could go ahead and start firing away as long as you can survive. A good example would be in the Statue of Liberty. When you get in the front door to rescue a coworker named Gunther, you have go through an door opening with lasers and three guards. You can attract the guards and start firing. You can sneak through the vents and get them in the back or avoid them. You can hack the lasers and go in. There was another way, and it wasn’t something that even Warren Spector didn’t think of until he saw it played and there was a TNT box that the player moved near the lasers. He then went back a bit and used the pistol and fired when the guards were near the area. The box exploded and killed the guards and got rid of the lasers.
Interactions were key in this game and many things can be used from toilets, drinking fountains, computers, many common things that are considered usable, etc. Many games now use this like the newer Deus Ex games, Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. One of the things I really liked was the LAMs which are grenades/mines. Interestingly, they were ones where you could just fling like a grenade or get close to a surface and it becomes a mine. Funny thing was that I’ve seen people on the PC, use the LAMs to jump to other areas by having them as mines. Obviously, the mines don’t affect you, but will affect others. The developers found this out and had to create some ladders in order to get back to the area.
The RPG feel with the story brings us to being able to talk to NPCs and receive information and decisions can be made to either help them, kill them, or whatever the options are. Some of the NPCs will tell you interesting tales and also interesting conspiracies that are going on in the game. The RPG side of the game is deciding what types of abilities to have, such as do you want Invisibility, or do you want to be electronics invisible? These abilities are considered Augmentations and considered extra abilities that you can use. Some of my favorites are the Remote Drone and the healing mod. Some are useful and others not so much, but I do think it does depend on how you play. Other parts of the RPG were increasing your computer skills, better rifle, pistol, explosives experience, hacking skills and lockpicking skills. Others that aren’t necessarily as useful was better swimming and better hazard resistance.
Story wise, you play JC Denton, a new recruit to UNATCO which is about policing America and going against terrorist groups such as the NSF (or National Secessionist Forces) and Silhouette in France. You get your first mission at the Statue of Liberty and you meet some of the people as you go and talk to one of their leaders. If you talk to the leader long enough, he’d give you quite a bit of information that may sound familiar today but was considered just basic conspiracy theory in 2000s. The mission continues with another mission in Battery Park and Castle Clinton. As you go about the story, you will get information on a variety of conspiracies that were around at the time like the Grays, the “aliens” that supposedly came from Area 51.
The main story is linear, but you can create little parts of the story by doing different things in different ways which will make the conversations change due to that. An example would be, is when you kill Ana Navarre since you have to eventually kill her, but when? Will it be near the beginning on the plane, or will it be in a parking lot? If you let her go for her to run off at the parking lot, you will have to defeat her at UNATCO (if I remember that correctly).
Also, changes will be made in the game by some of your decisions. Here is an example that I commonly use: JC needs to go to the ‘Ton Hotel due to a hostage situation. When you get in, you have to go to another place to get there. You can either just go there and get into the ‘Ton and take care of the terrorists that have the hostages. You then talk to Mr. Renton, the owner, and he tells you that his daughter Sandra might be in trouble. So, you can look for her. As you go into your brother Paul’s room at the ‘Ton and do some stuff there, you can go out the back and find Sandra at a nearby alley with someone in a gang harassing Sandra. You have the option then to either kill him or just make him go unconscious. She of course thanks you and you then can go elsewhere.
The other way is when you start up, you will be close to the Underground bar. You can go in and have a couple of conversations with the bartender and a guy that is looking for Ambrosia for his wife who has the Gray Death — a disease that is occurring and only Ambrosia seems to be the cure. You can then have a conversation with Jock who will be your pilot in a bit, but he gives you some conspiracy thoughts about Area 51 and the Echelon system. After that, you meet up with a girl that tells you about Sandra and being in the alley. So, you go out the back door and you see Sandra. You can do either way again with the gang member and then go upstairs to Paul’s room at the ‘Ton. You then can take care of the terrorists that have the hostages and talk with Mr. Renton. When you talk with Mr. Renton, he does state about his daughter but JC replies that he’s seen her and taken care of the guy that was harassing her.
Another consequence and change of story would be to NOT save the hostages and bring a different story with no Mr. Renton. I’ve always had a hard time doing that since I mostly play in as a good guy in games when possible, so I’m wondering now if Sandra would hate JC for not saving her dad. She probably would still leave to go to California and meet up with her later in the game. This is different from many games in the sense that usually you must take care of the hostages or else it was game over.
This example of differences in your own basic story was something that felt different to me at the time since it was something new. Nowadays, this is nothing new and many games have done this and even better. To me, I felt that Deus Ex started something that inspired new games to be able to do these changes in story. It is minor but at the same time still has its differences. There are also differences between killing and making them unconscious or just not being seen at all. In the first mission, your brother Paul would tell you two different things to you depending on if you killed or not. I believe you can kill one or two but after that, he will tell you that he was not happy that you killed a lot of people for the mission. If you were able to get the enemies unconscious, then he will congratulate you for your discretion. Another time later in the game, you have an option of killing or not killing a drug dealer. If you killed him, a man named El Rey will give you free information and give you a LAM. If you didn’t kill the drug dealer, it will cost you. So, in this game, there are consequences and knowing what they are helps. If there is something that you didn’t do or can’t do, you will have to find other ways to find information which usually there are other ways to move on. You are given options on how to play the game, you can play as a stone-cold killer or you can be a pacifist and make them all unconscious. The only ones that you will not be able to do this are the bosses and once you get them down to 0 health, they explode anyway. As from above, there are times when what you do will have a certain consequence to your part of the story.
One of the things that I liked about Deus Ex, was that even though it was set in 2052, the feeling of the environments was mostly as if it was today or even earlier. This made me feel like it was still somehow in current time. According to Warren Spector, the creator of Deus Ex, stated that he wanted it first to be in the current time and it was eventually decided to be in the future. Obviously, they didn’t have time to make it more futuristic looking. I think only a few certain things looked a bit more futuristic like the computers and monitors and some of the devices that you have to hack. Otherwise, it didn’t really look very futuristic, but it has been known that Deus Ex is also dystopian and that would seem to explain the many homeless and diseased in the game. When they did Deus Ex Invisible War a few years later, it looked much more futuristic in some of the places you went to.
The PS2 version of Deus Ex had an additional part of the title, Deus Ex: The Conspiracy. The in-game CGI for the beginning and ending stories were changed with a different CGI. It did look better than the original graphics, but as long as it kept the story intact, it would then be good. According to Warren Spector, they looked at a variety of conspiracy theories at that time and decided that all the conspiracy theories were true. The funny thing is, that some of them seemed to be spot on. They also looked at trends and used those trends to some conspiracies and even NPCs having an opinion about a certain conspiracy.
The developers even created their own conspiracies about the game. First was JC Denton himself. The idea was the JC was considered Jesus Christ. According to Warren Spector, he admits that this was about a phrase he used on a friend of his named Denton and that many times he and others would say Jesus Christ Denton! Supposedly, that is where it came from. Another was the door code 451 or 0451 conspiracy that is in all the games from the original developers from Looking Glass Studios, which Warren Spector and many of his group was a part of. This was the door code for Looking Glass and in various games like Deus Ex, Bioshock, and Prey have a reference in 0451 or 451. So, this wasn’t an actual reference to Fahrenheit 451 book as many have thought. The biggest conspiracy they made though was the fact that when you started in the beginning of the game, you saw New York and all the buildings in the background. Two buildings were missing, and they were the World Trade Center buildings. According to Warren Spector, someone had decided to take them off due to needing space at the time.
There were three different endings that you were able to do near the end of the game. One was the Illuminati ending where things would basically stay the same and the Illuminati will rule the world with you and have control of what people do and think about things. The second ending was the Helios ending (my favorite) which had JC go with an AI that wanted to combine with you. JC and the AI then help the world with information and plan for more work between human and mechanical. The last ending was the Dark Ages ending which is to take down the AI and the connections to Area 51 and break the control of the government and leaving city states to be in control over themselves. This was different for any of first-person shooters but not necessarily for RPGs that sometimes have had other endings.
As I’ve played multiple times and for many years, there are times that I’ve felt I’ve done a few things differently and felt like I haven’t had that kind of experience even though most likely I have, and I just don’t remember. The game felt to me like it was very interactive and felt like I was in the world and being able to use the world. Unlike many other games, the basic feeling of being in the world but didn’t necessarily feel very interactive. Red Faction was like that in the sense that there was a world feeling but not as interactive as Deus Ex. I still love the Red Faction game and keep playing that also. The thing too about Deus Ex is that you can play the game at the minimum of about 15–20 hours in somewhat fast run or you can play with many different experiences and be over 30 hours. For this time period of 2000 or 1999, most first-person shooters that I’ve played were not like this, except maybe Half Life which I also played on PS2. I also like the music of the game, especially the track UNATCO, which I use for my phone.
What is interesting to me, is that because of my experiences with Deus Ex, I used to use Deus Ex as my way of comparing other games with it. Many were so hyped with Halo when it came out and I just felt like going back to Deus Ex instead. Sure, the graphics were better, and it had some good story, but it just didn’t feel much different from most shooter games. I wasn’t seeing Halo like how others were seeing Halo. This was also true with Deus Ex: Invisible War and Halo 2. I couldn’t even complete Halo 2 because I just didn’t care for it and went back to Invisible War to play. I think at the time with all the hype of Halo, made me jaded in not seeing the good of the shooter as it was. At the time, I was starting to expect more out of shooters and when certain shooters years later showed some of promise of being a bit different, I really enjoyed those games when I could. It looked like certain developers were trying new ways of doing games and see how well to do them. They changed up in a sense of a bit more freestyle in the game and doing things a bit differently. There were a couple of games that did this around the same time period in about 2008–2009, and I was thrilled to see something with a new potential in the future. Yet, when the sequels came around, they turned more just shooter games going from point A to point B like Call of Duty. I do like Call of Duty from time to time for its incredible feeling of story and action, but when you’ve seen potential for more than just a shooter in a series and you see it go back to plain shooter, it felt off for me. The two games, that did something different that I’m thinking, of were Wolfenstein in 2009 and Bad Company that had some freestyle potential but still linear in story, but their sequels Wolfenstein New Order and Bad Company 2 just felt more like just shooters to me that led you from one place to another instead with no real feeling of freestyle of play. From what I found out at least from Wolfenstein 2008, the game didn’t make as much money as they wanted. I guess they felt that since Call of Duty and the like were cash cows and felt that they should do the same. Also, since this was a Wolfenstein game, some Wolfenstein fans (which I’ve played them a lot myself like Return to Castle Wolfenstein) didn’t care for the game as is. This was also evident with the Arkane version of Wolfenstein Youngblood that came out in 2019, which I really enjoyed due to its freestyle and a bit of RPG in it.
I’m glad that the new Deus games by Eidos Montreal were able to keep that Deus Ex feel of linear main story but play your own way as you go. This is also evident with Arkane’s games Prey and Dishonored series, which some of Arkane’s developers worked with Warren Spector at Looking Glass. You can tell in Prey due to the name of the server in Prey is “Looking Glass.” I will probably do another story on Prey at some point. I did do a review of Prey on my Youtube channel.
As you can see, the game Deus Ex really did affect me and how I see games and I’ve been glad that many games seemed to have been inspired by Deus Ex. What are your experiences of Deus Ex? Did you start with the original or have you been playing the more current? Are you wishing more of Deus Ex like I do? On Twitter, I’ve been asking Elias Toufexis, the voice of Adam Jensen, if he was doing a new Deus Ex project, but he just says no. Darn.
Since you’ve gone to the end of this story, I’m sure many of you will reinstall the game in 5…4…3…2…1…
