Restoring the Gold Filter in Deus Ex: Human Revolution – Director’s Cut
cookieplmonster.github.io
cookieplmonster.github.io
I would encourage sci-fi fans to give it a try, you can pick it up for cheap nowadays and you won't need top hw to play it (although it won't hurt either).
Edit:
Then entire soundtrack is also on YT [0]
Prey is fantastic too, and is from the same developer (Arkane Studios). It has quite a bit in common with System Shock, which was one of the earliest immersive sims.
That's not even getting into how the extensions/stand alone DLCs complement the main storylines.
TL;dr: If you've got 30-40h go crawling around Dishonored's universe a couple times. (Go Arkane studios!)
The main thing that got very old between the game release and nowadays is that conspiracy theory were a joke in 2000, but twenty years later they are taken very seriously by way too many people, including the current US president.
Also, this kind of game is often called "immersive sim", it has seen a mini resurgence in the last years.
Breath of the wild fits in that genre as well, so does MGS5 or Rimworld. They are all very different from Deus Ex, so it really depends on what you liked in that game.
It's amazing how much that game accurately predicted.
And the story? Timelier every year.
But Deus Ex is one of the few classics that I just can't get to click. It just feels too clunky and ugly, with a lot of the mechanics coming across as ...not to my preferences let's say. Even after I've completed the whole campaign two times over I still just don't "get it". As for the plot getting timelier, to be honest it still just came across as conspiracy gibberish to my ear. I dunno, maybe I'm just not smart enough for it.
Warren Spector said that his initial idea for the game was "what if every conspiracy theory was true?", so that's pretty intentional. So as long as you buy into that conceit, there's a lot of amazingly clever writing in the game.
My favorite conversation in the game is probably the one with the AI Morpheus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw
Among other significant differences, Prey carries on the Shock tradition of having the player generally (if not always) on the back foot in combat, forced by resource constraints to approach even the most trivial engagement with care and wherever possible find alternatives to combat, while DX:HR continues that series' very different tradition of rewarding an even moderately prepared player with the ability to treat fighting as first recourse rather than final option.
That said, and while there's a lot about Prey I didn't so much care for, the microgravity segments are worth the price of admission all by themselves. I've never seen another FPS even attempt such an ambitious style of play as a core mechanic, much less succeed so well at it.
Crysis 1 fits all the criteria of an 'immersive sim', believable world, consistent game rules, pick your own way through, apparently isn't an immersive sim. STALKER despite it's similarities to Crysis apparently is an immersive sim.
The king of open world RPGs, Elder scrolls is an immersive sim (apparently), Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Despite that being heavily scripted and containing mostly linear dungeons. Fallout 3 is an open world RPG on the list too.
Watch Dogs 'should' be on that list, why it isn't doesn't make any sense. I could argue Morrowind or GTA V should be on there, depending on where you draw the line on scripting. The term is a bunch of marketing fluff that isn't connected to sense.
It is a fairly loose concept though, of course. Plenty of games have "immersive sim" aspects. Even games like Breath of the Wild or the latest Hitman games. But there are open world RPGs that don't match the immersive sim philosophy, and immersive sims that don't have an open world.
More subjectively, I have a hard time enjoying AI uprising games where it's explained that the robots explicitly can't feel emotion and yet they inevitably do anyway.
I much prefer the variant where it's clear that they _appear_ to have emotion, but whether or not it's an elaborate trick isn't clear. Ex Machina and Westworld season 1 come to mind.
It feels like moral abdication.
Here's a thing that walks and quacks like a duck, but don't worry about it being a duck, because we tell you not to.
But maybe that's just me being militantly contrarian.
Star Wars occasionally creeps me out too, with its 'these species are okay to murder, these species are not' relativism.
Of course, this tends to only work if the game's story is actually compelling and the gameplay flexible enough. An overactive imagination helps too :)
But I'm honestly not talking about Star Wars droids who are regarded as just intelligent enough to be useful but still expendable.
I'm talking about AI which are so much more intelligent than humans being placed in human suits and outwitting humans by convincing them they feel something they do not.
That's not to say that they don't actually have emotions. They might, as is the case in Westworld. But the emotions they show humans are entirely "perfect acting" used to achieve a goal.
In Ex Machina that goal winds up being surprisingly mundane, which I really loved.
To each their own though.
I've debated this at length with people, because I know it's a popular film, but felt the same way after re-watching it.
It pierces my suspension of disbelief that AI can be created that simultaneously (a) simulates complex behavior & (b) completely lacks self-reflection.
Either give Caleb a character flaw (thus justifying his implicit murder by Ava) or have her successfully escape, reflect in the helicopter, turn around, and end the movie with her conflicted after re-landing at the house.
Otherwise, I don't see how the ending doesn't reveal the entire plot as a Shyamalan-esque mechanical Turk (ha! or inverse, as the metaphor would be). A filmmaker got us to believe a lie by omitting any contrary evidence? How difficult!
To that end, it pales in comparison to the earlier Alpha Protocol, which was ALOT clumsier in many ways, but absolutely nailed the consequences angle.
Example: Both games begin with an encounter with an armed adversary (whether it's a terrorist in both, I don't remember). Both games allow you to kill this gentleman, or spare him. Both games suggest that there will be consequences to doing this, i.e. that there might be more to this person than merely an armed thug.
In Alpha Protocol, if spared, the person can become a recurring contact, and aid you on later missions.
In Deus Ex, if spared, you bump into this person in an alley several hours later, and he gives you a couple thousand dollars. You never speak to him again.
That said, you undersell the consequence aspect in DXHR. Things I remember that had consequences - after your CEO tells you to get to his chopper for the hostage mission, the hostages would be killed if you delayed more than ten minutes, which had a range of impacts on characters' approval of you. Getting to the dialog at the end of the mission could result in death of captor and hostage, death of captor and live hostage, both surviving, death of hostage and live captor - all of which had some effects beyond what you describe, as I'm pretty sure there was a side quest line that depended on the hostage being alive. Malik (the pilot) can be saved after the crash in Hengsha, which changes some scenes slightly later. The endings available change a fair bit depending on who you talk to and what you convince them on in the last chapters. Going to the LIMB clinic for the upgrade could change the difficulty of one of the boss fights and some scenes significantly. I'm pretty sure most of the police station mission can be skipped if you can convince one of your old co-workers to help you. And these are just the things I remember, almost ten years later.
But its dialogue system is absolutely great, and it really feels that your every action has consequences(both positive and negative).
I play this again every few years and am always discovering more. The sequel, Mankind Divided, is better technically but goes full-on into the dystopian scenario of the first Deus Ex, whereas HR was (at the time) something of a reboot and you could play it with the goal of preventing that future. (There are multiple endings, and one or two lead to DX1's future and at least one of the others is more optimistic and does not; the directors chose dystopia for the sequel.)
If you liked Michael McCann's soundtrack for HR, definitely check out his work for X-Com and Splinter Cell: Double Agent; more of the same excellence.
I thought that was a pretty unique take and I found the art direction of the newer Deus Ex game to be bland in comparison.
[1] - https://unrealitymag.com/the-strange-wonderful-ceilings-of-d...
Everything just clicked, perfectly. I just wish it had a few more months of development time - as you can clearly see that Upper Hengsha and Montreal were supposed to be another city-hubs.
EDIT:
I forgot to mention, but the idea that technology inclined areas have golden hue, while those further away have green-tint was great.
It used to be a very abused effect back in the mid-2000s when it first started to become popular with games like Tron, and to some degree DXHR abused it as well to achieve that aesthetic. However, I want to say that it did it tastefully nonetheless.
What's especially crazy is how much of that story line has become true.
The consensus from Steam forum posts is that the Director's Cut version is littered with downgrades throughout: missing gold filter, lower res textures in places, lighting differences, etc. Also there are many patched-out bugs that had regressions with the Director's Cut.
It's still a great game, and I applaud the author's efforts to restore it. I'd wager that the effort to bring this version of the game from Wii U back to PC was a merge from hell and too many things just got looked over.