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.