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> ‘You can make any game you want, you can take as long as you want, and money’s not an issue’. > ‘Just run the studio, we’ll pay the bills and keep you isolat

> ‘You can make any game you want, you can take as long as you want, and money’s not an issue’. > ‘Just run the studio, we’ll pay the bills and keep you isolated from anything that’s happening up here in Dallas’. I don't think this can happen today and I also believe this is the reason we don't see anything close to the original Deus Ex.

arcturus17 6y ago
Anything close in what regards? There are amazing games coming out all the time.
- flohofwoe 6y ago
  Amazing to look at, but not innovative. There's very rarely that combination of a big AAA game combined with gameplay innovation these days that Deus Ex (and some other groundbreaking games in the late 90's) represented. The big blockbuster games cost so much money to make today that those who provide the money are extremely risk averse, so you get rehash after rehash after rehash of proven formulas with shinier graphics. All the (gameplay and storytelling) innovation happens in smaller indie games. Some of them actually have incredible production value, but rarely the marketing power of AAA productions by the big publishers. It's much like Hollywood in the 70's vs Hollywood today. (some edits to make it clear that I'm talking about innovation outside the pure rendering technology, that's where AAA productions are leading, no doubt).
- trabant00 6y ago
  The game pushed the envelope in a lot of ways. At the time I was simply shocked by how immersive the game was, from the backstory present in everything to the freedom you had as a player to approach situations. Sure, today we have those things in a lot of games, but they are formulaic, dumbed down and became stale with overuse. Today you can really only see innovation in indie games - which have limitations because of their resources. Deus Ex was a innovative triple A. Above thoughts are ramblings, I know. Truth is I don't know what I would like to see in a modern equivalent. And that's how I want it too, I want to be surprised, overwhelmed, I want to see the best in the business come up with something I can't even imagine. Instead I get remakes and ubisoft like formula "open world" full of busy work and chores.
- zacharycohn 6y ago
  At the time, DE was mindblowing and revolutionary. There had never been anything like it.
smacktoward 6y ago
One reason it can't happen today is because it never ends well. Ion Storm was a huge disaster; it produced Deus Ex, but it also produced Daikatana, one of the truly legendary bad games. The studio mismanaged itself so badly that by 2001 the whole thing had collapsed except for Warren Spector's team in Austin, who soldiered on for a few more years before giving up.
- trabant00 6y ago
  True. But also true that that's what it takes to release groundbreaking stuff. Failure is a very possible outcome. I think the price of Daikatana is well worth the existence of Deus Ex. Ofc no investor would ever take a risk like that these days. Sad reality for me as a consumer.
ekianjo 6y ago
> anything close to the original Deus Ex. Note that the original Deus Ex led to the pretty poor Deus Ex 2: Invisible War, that nobody talks about today. Deus Ex was more of an exception that anything else.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  Deus Ex 2 was not a bad game. Most of the complaints centered around the negative effects of consolization (small maps, reduced detail, universal ammo system) more than anything else.
  - clarry 6y ago
    But if you can get past the consolization and peer into the story & writing.. it's nowhere near the level of Deus Ex. Most of it feels like generic scifi mumbojumbo that's there to justify the action (much like Tom Clancy's, e.g. Splinter Cell). There's hardly any of the red pills that seem applicable to today's real-world politics, few references to historic figures and factions.. I'd say it's a thoroughly mediocre game. Still, I've played through it at least two or three times, which is two or three more than the number of times I've played through DX:HR! EDIT: Also I find it funny that they wanted to make it "family-friendly" and removed blood & gibs, but you can still massacre an academy full of kids. Happened on my previous playthrough..
ixfo 6y ago
I think it can, just not so often - there's a lot of empowered indies out there. ZA/UM and Disco Elysium springs to mind.
laumars 6y ago
The issue these days isn't so much time nor money but rather the difficulty in standing out from the pack when so much of game mechanics has already been discovered. Each breakthrough in technology has been followed by iconic "first of it's era" games, eg: - Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot and others with their demonstration of how to translate a platformer to a 3D world - Tomb Raider with it's "even the scenery can be explored" - Shenmue with it's 3D open world and concept of fully immersing the player in the role - Half-Life, System Shock and others with their emphasis on story and setting But these ideas have been well explored and so games like Alien Isolation, which is a great game, aren't held in such high esteem. The solution to that is to look outside of the traditional gaming paradigm. Look at indie games and see what they're creating -- there's some really great indie titles out there. Look at games that utilise new technology like VR (ok, technically VR has been around since the 90s but it's only really becoming mainstream now) and you'll see some stand out titles there too. If you're only looking at games like Deus Ex then it could be easy to miss all the other stuff going on.
- clarry 6y ago
  >> I don't think this can happen today and I also believe this is the reason we don't see anything close to the original Deus Ex. > The solution to that is to look outside of the traditional gaming paradigm. I don't think indie & VR gimmicks are the solution to lack of games that are close to the original Deus Ex. It's not revered for original superb mechanics; most of everything it does was done before. It's that it put them all together and did so many things right to create a polished, immersive experience with a compelling story (rather footed in reality as opposed to all out scifi/fantasy), strong plot focus (as opposed to disconnected mass-produced side quests), rich level design, lots of choice and player freedom, great music, replay value.. Hardly anyone is doing that. But, evidently, a lot of gamers want that. > If you're only looking at games like Deus Ex then it could be easy to miss all the other stuff going on. I just don't see anything that really compels me. Stuff is going on, and it's mostly not worth my time (or does a terrible job marketing itself).
  - laumars 6y ago
    > I don't think indie & VR gimmicks are the solution to lack of games that are close to the original Deus Ex. I don't think flatly calling all indie and VR games as "gimmicks" does justice to some of the more innovative creators out there. > * It's not revered for original superb mechanics; most of everything it does was done before. It's that it put them all together and did so many things right to create a polished, immersive experience with a compelling story (rather footed in reality as opposed to all out scifi/fantasy), strong plot focus (as opposed to disconnected mass-produced side quests), rich level design, lots of choice and player freedom, great music, replay value..* I was gaming back then as well. It was mostly the mechanics people seemed to talk about at the time (and the graphics too). In any case, story driven games have existed long before Deus Ex and still exist now. > I just don't see anything that really compels me. Stuff is going on, and it's mostly not worth my time (or does a terrible job marketing itself). I see these kinds of comments all the time and frankly a lot of it is rose tinted glasses. You will naturally favour the games you grew up with. As it was, I grew up with text adventure games and crappy 8-bit conversions of arcade games so as much as I enjoy modern games I'm often still going back to Pac-Man and it's ilk because 3D is too "modern" for me. Like with how people harp on about how cartoons aren't as good as when they were kids, people make the same arguments for computer games too.... but that doesn't mean it is true.
hibikir 6y ago
Money not being an issue can still happen: See Valve, which have a money printing machine in Steam, along with a few long living, lucrative games. Work on Half Life 3 never really stopped , and we had a 13 year wait between Half Life Alyx and Half Life 2, episode 2. Sources say that the internal standards for a Half Life 3 are so high, it led to many restarts and a lot of work being thrown away. But the real reason we don't have games that run as long as Deus Ex is that the cost of reworking what was already there have exploded since those days. If you are predicting a 3 year release cycle(not unheard of to this day at large publishers), and you are delayed by 2 extra years, the hardware you are targeting is different, and the amount of art you have to upgrade or completely remake is crazy compared to Deus Ex. With teams being far larger than they were to meet a 3 year plan, marshaling a modern AAA game team to rework large parts of a game has little to do with managing to do the same with a team from the late 20th century. A linear increase in team size gets you a geometric increase in coordination costs. That said, we still have small teams that might work on a game for a very long time, but they have to aim far lower technically, or in scope. You can make a beautiful, shorter game with a small team, like Outer Wilds. You can also make a 2d game, and tweak your game to perfection, like Stardew Valley. At those sizes, saying "when it's done", and letting yourself change direction and scope is fine. But try that with the Red Dead Redemption 2 team, trying to be at the forefront of everything. Without a far more rigid plan, you can go into a Duke Nukem Forever spiral (and DNF was a far smaller team!)
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  An important note with specifically Stardew Valley and a lot of the indie games coming out nowadays is that they release early; they work for up to a year, then release the game in Early Access to start the flow of money coming in so that they can both keep working on the game and get a lot of instant feedback. I don't think that approach would work well with story-driven games, but for e.g. Stardew Valley and a lot of the infinite gameplay indie games being made nowadays it's ideal. Also, they will add features all the time, so people will come back to them on a regular basis (e.g. Factorio, KSP).
  - detaro 6y ago
    Some story driven games do it through chapters, more or less finishing a first section of the game that's only tweaked by later updates.
satvikpendem 6y ago
It really depends on the developer. Look at Star Citizen. Self funded to 300 million dollars and still it seems to be stuck in development hell, with Chris Roberts creating yet more feature creep. I say this as a fan of the game but even I can concede that he wants to make the ultimate space simulation game which just isn't feasible with how long it would take in reality.
- vsareto 6y ago
  Someone's going to be first on that front, it's more attainable today than ever. Elite Dangerous is doing space legs + combat next year.
- barbasosi 6y ago
  I don't know how Star Citizen is going to hold off against Elite Dangerous. It's probably great for Chris to actualize his dreams, but he should realize he's doing in on somebody else's dime. Let's be honest, the space sim has generally one viable gameplay loop formula (the 4Xs, as a puny individual and then as a collective). I've played a few, and by far I liked ED the most (in its execution) and even then, it devolves into farm fest. Which I assume Star Citizen is going to turn out anyways. In the coming ED update they would be similar in terms of features. I'm saying it's not making me want to play Star Citizen at all (unless if I backed the game, that would be a different story).
asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago
We get games in that spirit once every couple of years, actually. Prey (2017) was a fine successor to the Deus Ex tradition, for example.
- ahuth 6y ago
  Prey was an excellent game that I really enjoyed. To me it's not quite the same, since it's not as dense with people/NPCs. The only games that I can recall really coming close to Deus Ex are... Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Disclaimer: I never played the first Deus Ex, but I got more of a Bioshock vibe from Prey (2017), and that one had a somewhat original take on the FPS genre by adding scarcity. Great setting too.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Was it? You're not the first I've seen say something like this, but in both setting and mechanics I found it much more akin to System Shock 2.
- barbasosi 6y ago
  I don't know, I don't see the similarity. I didn't really like Prey (or any prop hunt games for that matter). It's a new genre mix. I guess I can see the appeal.
sershe 6y ago
Well, you have to remember than another game sorta like that was Duke Nukem Forever :)

arcturus17 6y ago

Anything close in what regards? There are amazing games coming out all the time.

flohofwoe 6y ago
Amazing to look at, but not innovative. There's very rarely that combination of a big AAA game combined with gameplay innovation these days that Deus Ex (and some other groundbreaking games in the late 90's) represented. The big blockbuster games cost so much money to make today that those who provide the money are extremely risk averse, so you get rehash after rehash after rehash of proven formulas with shinier graphics. All the (gameplay and storytelling) innovation happens in smaller indie games. Some of them actually have incredible production value, but rarely the marketing power of AAA productions by the big publishers. It's much like Hollywood in the 70's vs Hollywood today. (some edits to make it clear that I'm talking about innovation outside the pure rendering technology, that's where AAA productions are leading, no doubt).
trabant00 6y ago
The game pushed the envelope in a lot of ways. At the time I was simply shocked by how immersive the game was, from the backstory present in everything to the freedom you had as a player to approach situations. Sure, today we have those things in a lot of games, but they are formulaic, dumbed down and became stale with overuse. Today you can really only see innovation in indie games - which have limitations because of their resources. Deus Ex was a innovative triple A. Above thoughts are ramblings, I know. Truth is I don't know what I would like to see in a modern equivalent. And that's how I want it too, I want to be surprised, overwhelmed, I want to see the best in the business come up with something I can't even imagine. Instead I get remakes and ubisoft like formula "open world" full of busy work and chores.
zacharycohn 6y ago
At the time, DE was mindblowing and revolutionary. There had never been anything like it.

smacktoward 6y ago

One reason it can't happen today is because it never ends well. Ion Storm was a huge disaster; it produced Deus Ex, but it also produced Daikatana, one of the truly legendary bad games. The studio mismanaged itself so badly that by 2001 the whole thing had collapsed except for Warren Spector's team in Austin, who soldiered on for a few more years before giving up.

trabant00 6y ago
True. But also true that that's what it takes to release groundbreaking stuff. Failure is a very possible outcome. I think the price of Daikatana is well worth the existence of Deus Ex. Ofc no investor would ever take a risk like that these days. Sad reality for me as a consumer.

ekianjo 6y ago

> anything close to the original Deus Ex. Note that the original Deus Ex led to the pretty poor Deus Ex 2: Invisible War, that nobody talks about today. Deus Ex was more of an exception that anything else.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
Deus Ex 2 was not a bad game. Most of the complaints centered around the negative effects of consolization (small maps, reduced detail, universal ammo system) more than anything else.
- clarry 6y ago
  But if you can get past the consolization and peer into the story & writing.. it's nowhere near the level of Deus Ex. Most of it feels like generic scifi mumbojumbo that's there to justify the action (much like Tom Clancy's, e.g. Splinter Cell). There's hardly any of the red pills that seem applicable to today's real-world politics, few references to historic figures and factions.. I'd say it's a thoroughly mediocre game. Still, I've played through it at least two or three times, which is two or three more than the number of times I've played through DX:HR! EDIT: Also I find it funny that they wanted to make it "family-friendly" and removed blood & gibs, but you can still massacre an academy full of kids. Happened on my previous playthrough..

ixfo 6y ago

I think it can, just not so often - there's a lot of empowered indies out there. ZA/UM and Disco Elysium springs to mind.

laumars 6y ago

The issue these days isn't so much time nor money but rather the difficulty in standing out from the pack when so much of game mechanics has already been discovered. Each breakthrough in technology has been followed by iconic "first of it's era" games, eg: - Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot and others with their demonstration of how to translate a platformer to a 3D world - Tomb Raider with it's "even the scenery can be explored" - Shenmue with it's 3D open world and concept of fully immersing the player in the role - Half-Life, System Shock and others with their emphasis on story and setting But these ideas have been well explored and so games like Alien Isolation, which is a great game, aren't held in such high esteem. The solution to that is to look outside of the traditional gaming paradigm. Look at indie games and see what they're creating -- there's some really great indie titles out there. Look at games that utilise new technology like VR (ok, technically VR has been around since the 90s but it's only really becoming mainstream now) and you'll see some stand out titles there too. If you're only looking at games like Deus Ex then it could be easy to miss all the other stuff going on.

clarry 6y ago
>> I don't think this can happen today and I also believe this is the reason we don't see anything close to the original Deus Ex. > The solution to that is to look outside of the traditional gaming paradigm. I don't think indie & VR gimmicks are the solution to lack of games that are close to the original Deus Ex. It's not revered for original superb mechanics; most of everything it does was done before. It's that it put them all together and did so many things right to create a polished, immersive experience with a compelling story (rather footed in reality as opposed to all out scifi/fantasy), strong plot focus (as opposed to disconnected mass-produced side quests), rich level design, lots of choice and player freedom, great music, replay value.. Hardly anyone is doing that. But, evidently, a lot of gamers want that. > If you're only looking at games like Deus Ex then it could be easy to miss all the other stuff going on. I just don't see anything that really compels me. Stuff is going on, and it's mostly not worth my time (or does a terrible job marketing itself).
- laumars 6y ago
  > I don't think indie & VR gimmicks are the solution to lack of games that are close to the original Deus Ex. I don't think flatly calling all indie and VR games as "gimmicks" does justice to some of the more innovative creators out there. > * It's not revered for original superb mechanics; most of everything it does was done before. It's that it put them all together and did so many things right to create a polished, immersive experience with a compelling story (rather footed in reality as opposed to all out scifi/fantasy), strong plot focus (as opposed to disconnected mass-produced side quests), rich level design, lots of choice and player freedom, great music, replay value..* I was gaming back then as well. It was mostly the mechanics people seemed to talk about at the time (and the graphics too). In any case, story driven games have existed long before Deus Ex and still exist now. > I just don't see anything that really compels me. Stuff is going on, and it's mostly not worth my time (or does a terrible job marketing itself). I see these kinds of comments all the time and frankly a lot of it is rose tinted glasses. You will naturally favour the games you grew up with. As it was, I grew up with text adventure games and crappy 8-bit conversions of arcade games so as much as I enjoy modern games I'm often still going back to Pac-Man and it's ilk because 3D is too "modern" for me. Like with how people harp on about how cartoons aren't as good as when they were kids, people make the same arguments for computer games too.... but that doesn't mean it is true.

hibikir 6y ago

Money not being an issue can still happen: See Valve, which have a money printing machine in Steam, along with a few long living, lucrative games. Work on Half Life 3 never really stopped , and we had a 13 year wait between Half Life Alyx and Half Life 2, episode 2. Sources say that the internal standards for a Half Life 3 are so high, it led to many restarts and a lot of work being thrown away. But the real reason we don't have games that run as long as Deus Ex is that the cost of reworking what was already there have exploded since those days. If you are predicting a 3 year release cycle(not unheard of to this day at large publishers), and you are delayed by 2 extra years, the hardware you are targeting is different, and the amount of art you have to upgrade or completely remake is crazy compared to Deus Ex. With teams being far larger than they were to meet a 3 year plan, marshaling a modern AAA game team to rework large parts of a game has little to do with managing to do the same with a team from the late 20th century. A linear increase in team size gets you a geometric increase in coordination costs. That said, we still have small teams that might work on a game for a very long time, but they have to aim far lower technically, or in scope. You can make a beautiful, shorter game with a small team, like Outer Wilds. You can also make a 2d game, and tweak your game to perfection, like Stardew Valley. At those sizes, saying "when it's done", and letting yourself change direction and scope is fine. But try that with the Red Dead Redemption 2 team, trying to be at the forefront of everything. Without a far more rigid plan, you can go into a Duke Nukem Forever spiral (and DNF was a far smaller team!)

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
An important note with specifically Stardew Valley and a lot of the indie games coming out nowadays is that they release early; they work for up to a year, then release the game in Early Access to start the flow of money coming in so that they can both keep working on the game and get a lot of instant feedback. I don't think that approach would work well with story-driven games, but for e.g. Stardew Valley and a lot of the infinite gameplay indie games being made nowadays it's ideal. Also, they will add features all the time, so people will come back to them on a regular basis (e.g. Factorio, KSP).
- detaro 6y ago
  Some story driven games do it through chapters, more or less finishing a first section of the game that's only tweaked by later updates.

satvikpendem 6y ago

It really depends on the developer. Look at Star Citizen. Self funded to 300 million dollars and still it seems to be stuck in development hell, with Chris Roberts creating yet more feature creep. I say this as a fan of the game but even I can concede that he wants to make the ultimate space simulation game which just isn't feasible with how long it would take in reality.

vsareto 6y ago
Someone's going to be first on that front, it's more attainable today than ever. Elite Dangerous is doing space legs + combat next year.
barbasosi 6y ago
I don't know how Star Citizen is going to hold off against Elite Dangerous. It's probably great for Chris to actualize his dreams, but he should realize he's doing in on somebody else's dime. Let's be honest, the space sim has generally one viable gameplay loop formula (the 4Xs, as a puny individual and then as a collective). I've played a few, and by far I liked ED the most (in its execution) and even then, it devolves into farm fest. Which I assume Star Citizen is going to turn out anyways. In the coming ED update they would be similar in terms of features. I'm saying it's not making me want to play Star Citizen at all (unless if I backed the game, that would be a different story).

asdfasgasdgasdg 6y ago

We get games in that spirit once every couple of years, actually. Prey (2017) was a fine successor to the Deus Ex tradition, for example.

ahuth 6y ago
Prey was an excellent game that I really enjoyed. To me it's not quite the same, since it's not as dense with people/NPCs. The only games that I can recall really coming close to Deus Ex are... Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Disclaimer: I never played the first Deus Ex, but I got more of a Bioshock vibe from Prey (2017), and that one had a somewhat original take on the FPS genre by adding scarcity. Great setting too.
throwanem 6y ago
Was it? You're not the first I've seen say something like this, but in both setting and mechanics I found it much more akin to System Shock 2.
barbasosi 6y ago
I don't know, I don't see the similarity. I didn't really like Prey (or any prop hunt games for that matter). It's a new genre mix. I guess I can see the appeal.

sershe 6y ago

Well, you have to remember than another game sorta like that was Duke Nukem Forever :)