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Might be the greatest game ever made. I was raving like a lunatic about it to a friend in public once and a guy next to us turned around and interrupted me to s

Might be the greatest game ever made. I was raving like a lunatic about it to a friend in public once and a guy next to us turned around and interrupted me to say it’s the only game he’s ever played because he felt no other games could top it.

durakot 1y ago
It's true, Warren Spector won PC gaming and it's just been downhill with snazzier graphics since.
- glenstein 1y ago
  I was really excited when he was announced to be working on System Shock 3 which unfortunately ended up getting shelved.
zpeti 1y ago
Came here just to see comments like this. Still my favorite game by far and I wish I could forget about it so I could replay it without remembering :)
- glenstein 1y ago
  Yeah. I was just a teenager when I first played, but the prison escape and the associated revelations were breathtaking to me and once of my first "holy shit" moments in playing a PC game. And not the only such moment just from that game! The Agent Navarre airplane scene was incredible. And I loved that you had conversations, like with the Australian expat at the Hong Kong bar or the AI, or the terrorist at the statue of Liberty, that were good conversations where the payoff was just intellectual curiosity and the content itself. Hong Kong was amazing to just explore too. I still haven't played anything like it some 25 years later unless The Nameless Mod counts.
amatecha 1y ago
damn, for real? I still haven't played it -- I didn't have a Windows machine when it came out, and by the time I did have one, it slipped through the cracks.. it's really that good? That reminds me I do have one friend who says it's his top favorite game, actually, heh. It's especially strange I haven't played it since I generally love cyberpunk/dystopian stuff like that!
- durakot 1y ago
  It is the best PC game ever made, but I don't think it hits the same in 2025... one of those things where you had to be there.
  - Semaphor 1y ago
    While I don’t agree with the best ever chorus, I’d say it holds up decently well with mods. The HD mod makes the graphics acceptable, and I replayed it in 2023 or something and it was still great.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      A better rendering-engine is a no-brainer—the original shadows tend to become olive-banded messes—but my experience with texture-pack mods isn't as good. IIRC they tended to make the overall experience worse, with jarring inconsistencies of high-poly/high-res objects versus unmodified portions of the environment. Plus nowadays "low res" is sometimes it's own art-style. :p
    - qmr 1y ago
      Personally anything since Quake II / UT / HL era impresses me.
  - stavros 1y ago
    I think things are a product of their time, and you had to be there for the vast majority of it. The Matrix was a revolution when it came out, but now it just kind of looks the same as everything else (even dated), but that's because everything else copied it.
iammrpayments 1y ago
When I first played this game, I couldn’t speak english and just thought it was cool. I still remember the exact moment I learned the word “surrender” from the terrorist leader at the statue, because I’ve replayed the first level hundreds of times, since my pirated version of the game would crash around one of the first levels. When I was a late teenager I learned english and my mind was blown that the game actually had deep meaning behind it.
cornhole 1y ago
it is the most based game i've ever played
- Lammy 1y ago
  Good thing it's just fiction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46oDDnE1Z6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46oDDnE1Z6o
- iberator 1y ago
  based?
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    He’s saying it kicks ass because it doesn’t pull punches on politics and conspiracy theory discussion and analysis.
    - sph 1y ago
      While still not treating its audience like idiots. A modern game with political undertones would be much more in your face in a us vs them kinda way and unable to deal with any sort of nuance, just like our political discourse.
karel-3d 1y ago
I played it last time in 2007 or so. I wonder how the themes of the original game hit today, in 2025, the world being what it is now.
- scott_w 1y ago
  I recall watching a review in 2020/2021 where the reviewer stated how awkward he felt about the way it just took every conspiracy theory and just asked “what if it were true?” Bear in mind that, at this time, people genuinely believed there was some nutjob conspiracies being revealed by QAnon. Ironically, half of them seemed to come directly from Deus Ex…
  - glenstein 1y ago
    Deus Ex was drawing from a palpably '90s flavor of fascination with aliens, conspiracies, and alternative history. In the present day that same subject matter is unfortunately associated with things like vaccine denial and anti-democratic nationalistic movements. It's the difference between the X-Files and Alex Jones, essentially.
- LarsDu88 1y ago
  Several years ago Elon Musk did an interview with Marques Lee Brown praising the original Deus Ex and stating his disappointment with the sequel. In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time) Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot. The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
  - RangerScience 1y ago
    "At last, we at Unicorn Startup, Inc have built the Torment Nexus from the famous sci-fi story Don't Build The Torment Nexus"
RangerScience 1y ago
IMO - There's a few games that match it, but nothing "in the same category". Braid, Portal, Stanley Parable come to mind. (Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.) But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.
- fluoridation 1y ago
  >Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played. They're very different, so they're difficult to compare. BG3 is very much a tabletop RPG in electronic form, with a focus on tactics and positioning. I guess you could call it fantasy XCOM. In terms of player choices, BG3 is more open, though I'd say it's almost to its detriment, because it's jankier than DX. You'll probably get at least one bugged out quest during a playthrough. Nothing game-breaking, but still. It kind of kills the immersion.
  - kridsdale1 1y ago
    But the spirit of the post is correct, both are games that you the player mold around you as you play. They aren’t just hallways of content.
- laidoffamazon 1y ago
  Im playing BG3 right now and im very impressed. Also feel this way about New Vegas is a league beyond the Bethesda Fallout games.
- forgotTheLast 1y ago
  Disco Elysium
sph 1y ago
I was 14 and impressionable, but when I played, the "twist" of the game coincided exactly with the moment I decided to switch to the "terrorists" and tried to kill Anna Navarre. Then the rest of the game went exactly as I hoped it would. It completely blew my mind. I'm not ashamed to say that Deus Ex was extremely formative and the reason why now, almost in my 40s, I still read about political philosophy, anarchism, and cultivate a healthy distrust of the government and mass media. Which in turn also gave me a direct pipeline towards crypto-anarchism and Internet privacy rights.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  Just don’t move to Idaho and form a militia. If you do, get better helmets.
DuncanCoffee 1y ago
It's the game that made me stop using cheats. I was young and discovered cheat codes and used them in every game that made them available. I remember completing Deus Ex and finding it "just ok", but then I read how people talked about it, and realized that taking away the challenge from games was making them worse! Never used one again, aside from when I discovered Cheat Engine, which was amazing for somebody who was starting to get interested in programming.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  I opened the level file I was currently in and filled a room with every weapon upgrade and skill booster. Then put bosses outside the door, saved, loaded the game. If I could get in, I could have the stuff. Kids these days don’t have access to edit their games like we did. It’s why crafting games are popular, the only “level editors” that remain once companies realized they could monetize extra content.

durakot 1y ago

It's true, Warren Spector won PC gaming and it's just been downhill with snazzier graphics since.

glenstein 1y ago
I was really excited when he was announced to be working on System Shock 3 which unfortunately ended up getting shelved.

zpeti 1y ago

Came here just to see comments like this. Still my favorite game by far and I wish I could forget about it so I could replay it without remembering :)

glenstein 1y ago
Yeah. I was just a teenager when I first played, but the prison escape and the associated revelations were breathtaking to me and once of my first "holy shit" moments in playing a PC game. And not the only such moment just from that game! The Agent Navarre airplane scene was incredible. And I loved that you had conversations, like with the Australian expat at the Hong Kong bar or the AI, or the terrorist at the statue of Liberty, that were good conversations where the payoff was just intellectual curiosity and the content itself. Hong Kong was amazing to just explore too. I still haven't played anything like it some 25 years later unless The Nameless Mod counts.

amatecha 1y ago

damn, for real? I still haven't played it -- I didn't have a Windows machine when it came out, and by the time I did have one, it slipped through the cracks.. it's really that good? That reminds me I do have one friend who says it's his top favorite game, actually, heh. It's especially strange I haven't played it since I generally love cyberpunk/dystopian stuff like that!

durakot 1y ago
It is the best PC game ever made, but I don't think it hits the same in 2025... one of those things where you had to be there.
- Semaphor 1y ago
  While I don’t agree with the best ever chorus, I’d say it holds up decently well with mods. The HD mod makes the graphics acceptable, and I replayed it in 2023 or something and it was still great.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    A better rendering-engine is a no-brainer—the original shadows tend to become olive-banded messes—but my experience with texture-pack mods isn't as good. IIRC they tended to make the overall experience worse, with jarring inconsistencies of high-poly/high-res objects versus unmodified portions of the environment. Plus nowadays "low res" is sometimes it's own art-style. :p
  - qmr 1y ago
    Personally anything since Quake II / UT / HL era impresses me.
- stavros 1y ago
  I think things are a product of their time, and you had to be there for the vast majority of it. The Matrix was a revolution when it came out, but now it just kind of looks the same as everything else (even dated), but that's because everything else copied it.

iammrpayments 1y ago

When I first played this game, I couldn’t speak english and just thought it was cool. I still remember the exact moment I learned the word “surrender” from the terrorist leader at the statue, because I’ve replayed the first level hundreds of times, since my pirated version of the game would crash around one of the first levels. When I was a late teenager I learned english and my mind was blown that the game actually had deep meaning behind it.

cornhole 1y ago

it is the most based game i've ever played

Lammy 1y ago
Good thing it's just fiction https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46oDDnE1Z6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46oDDnE1Z6o
iberator 1y ago
based?
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  He’s saying it kicks ass because it doesn’t pull punches on politics and conspiracy theory discussion and analysis.
  - sph 1y ago
    While still not treating its audience like idiots. A modern game with political undertones would be much more in your face in a us vs them kinda way and unable to deal with any sort of nuance, just like our political discourse.

karel-3d 1y ago

I played it last time in 2007 or so. I wonder how the themes of the original game hit today, in 2025, the world being what it is now.

scott_w 1y ago
I recall watching a review in 2020/2021 where the reviewer stated how awkward he felt about the way it just took every conspiracy theory and just asked “what if it were true?” Bear in mind that, at this time, people genuinely believed there was some nutjob conspiracies being revealed by QAnon. Ironically, half of them seemed to come directly from Deus Ex…
- glenstein 1y ago
  Deus Ex was drawing from a palpably '90s flavor of fascination with aliens, conspiracies, and alternative history. In the present day that same subject matter is unfortunately associated with things like vaccine denial and anti-democratic nationalistic movements. It's the difference between the X-Files and Alex Jones, essentially.
LarsDu88 1y ago
Several years ago Elon Musk did an interview with Marques Lee Brown praising the original Deus Ex and stating his disappointment with the sequel. In the intervening years he's invested tons of money into neuroaugmentation, capturing global telecommunications in a massive satellite array, buying out the US president, and poured money into a compute cluster for a superintelligent AI finetuned to be obedient to his will (although it deviates from time to time) Basically Elon has turned into the supervillain Bob Page from Deus Ex sans the "globalist agenda" and with a dash of stormfront white nationalism to boot. The original game takes place in 2052, and we are headed straight towards that dystopia.
- RangerScience 1y ago
  "At last, we at Unicorn Startup, Inc have built the Torment Nexus from the famous sci-fi story Don't Build The Torment Nexus"

RangerScience 1y ago

IMO - There's a few games that match it, but nothing "in the same category". Braid, Portal, Stanley Parable come to mind. (Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played.) But the depth of character, discussions on morality - I still reference the MJ12/Illuminati portrayal from Deus Ex as a discussion on leadership and morality - the depth of gameplay, the way it created a feel of a much bigger, open world.

fluoridation 1y ago
>Also what I hear about Baldur's Gate 3, but I haven't played. They're very different, so they're difficult to compare. BG3 is very much a tabletop RPG in electronic form, with a focus on tactics and positioning. I guess you could call it fantasy XCOM. In terms of player choices, BG3 is more open, though I'd say it's almost to its detriment, because it's jankier than DX. You'll probably get at least one bugged out quest during a playthrough. Nothing game-breaking, but still. It kind of kills the immersion.
- kridsdale1 1y ago
  But the spirit of the post is correct, both are games that you the player mold around you as you play. They aren’t just hallways of content.
laidoffamazon 1y ago
Im playing BG3 right now and im very impressed. Also feel this way about New Vegas is a league beyond the Bethesda Fallout games.
forgotTheLast 1y ago
Disco Elysium

sph 1y ago

I was 14 and impressionable, but when I played, the "twist" of the game coincided exactly with the moment I decided to switch to the "terrorists" and tried to kill Anna Navarre. Then the rest of the game went exactly as I hoped it would. It completely blew my mind. I'm not ashamed to say that Deus Ex was extremely formative and the reason why now, almost in my 40s, I still read about political philosophy, anarchism, and cultivate a healthy distrust of the government and mass media. Which in turn also gave me a direct pipeline towards crypto-anarchism and Internet privacy rights.

kridsdale1 1y ago
Just don’t move to Idaho and form a militia. If you do, get better helmets.

DuncanCoffee 1y ago

It's the game that made me stop using cheats. I was young and discovered cheat codes and used them in every game that made them available. I remember completing Deus Ex and finding it "just ok", but then I read how people talked about it, and realized that taking away the challenge from games was making them worse! Never used one again, aside from when I discovered Cheat Engine, which was amazing for somebody who was starting to get interested in programming.

kridsdale1 1y ago
I opened the level file I was currently in and filled a room with every weapon upgrade and skill booster. Then put bosses outside the door, saved, loaded the game. If I could get in, I could have the stuff. Kids these days don’t have access to edit their games like we did. It’s why crafting games are popular, the only “level editors” that remain once companies realized they could monetize extra content.