A bit off-topic, but not too much: an old videogame from the mid 90s called Master of Magic (his author, Andy Barcia, also created Master of Orion, 40+ years old in the thread would probably know at least one of these two masterpieces) at some point got a big quasi-remake based on (allegedly) the availability of the source code, it's called Caster of Magic [0] and it's essentially a huge mod that changes a ton of things in the game, and fixes several bugs.
I was a big MoM fan when I was a kid and I followed this development with a lot of curiosity.
I found it interesting that a game which is now more than 25 years old managed to get a thriving modding community, given that modding games wasn't really a thing long ago.
By the way, there's a proper remake in the works, coming out in a couple of months.
Sounds similar to the story of how Transport Tycoon and Rollercoaster Tycoon received patches, particularly thanks to them being made in Assembler from the start and thus easy-ish to modify.
Though plenty of old favorite games in fact get fan patches, especially for graphics—e.g. System Shock (iirc) and original Deus Ex.
Looking at ReVision (a community made re-master of the original, now officially endorsed and available on steam) and The Nameless Mod (A total conversion), looks like modders can do some really spectacular stuff even without the source, patching in their own code at runtime to add new features that the engine didn’t originally support
How much better is ReVision? From what I remember even with all of the remastering it still looked VERY dated. I think people remember the first one with huge rose colored glasses - it was mind blowing at the time and revolutionary in what it inspired but unless I am wrong I imagine going back today would feel very stifling.
I think I may have tried to do ReVision hooked to my TV with a PS4 controller and had a lot of problems - I suppose I could have given up because of that. Not that I even prefer controller over keyboard - I just like sitting on the couch with a giant screen instead
Revision is very bad. There are changes made to levels that don't make sense and completely break the flow, or worse, the tension of the game. The "enhanced" graphics aren't good enough to tolerate that.
I don't really understand how one has the nerve to ‘fix’ levels in a classic game. But at least, I vaguely remember reading that it might be possible to disable gameplay changes in ‘Revision’—haven't tried it myself yet, but I'm planning on only enabling graphics enhancements.
The last time I played DX1 was maybe 3 years ago. It looks dated, ReVision simply takes some of the edges off. But the gameplay is still superior to many games today, having recently tried CP2077, or before Fallout 4, I’d rather play DX1.
Change is subjective (see the other comments about how terrible it is) - but personally I found that ReVision basically turns Deus Ex into “How I remember Deus Ex” - eg. when I first played DX I thought that the levels were huge because there were often two or sometimes three different routes through them; but then by today’s standards that’s practically a corridor; ReVision made the levels feel huge again.
As to the graphics, I remember DX looking fairly "90’s”, and the mods make it… still definitely 90’s, but a bit less painful :)
No, but I'm planning to replay DE one of these days, and even if I use a mod for graphic enhancements, I'm gonna disable any and all gameplay modifications. IIRC Revision allows that.
Perhaps changing the gameplay is more interesting for those who already played through the original a bunch of times and are looking for same-but-different. In the spirit of game randomizers.
This is copying the heart of the work in a way that I don't think any reasonable judge is going to put under fair use. It doesn't transform the original in a "creative" way that deviates enough from the original.
It does not matter if there's no assets - the code is an asset. To my knowledge the only way to "decompile" is to only provide the tool (with no game source code in it), and have the user use that tool to decompile the binary.
DXHR is still sold on steam. Some other popular game decompiles (like OOT) are not, which has reduced the eye of sauron from gazing upon them.
If you're going to make decompiles, better to have it's entire existence detached from you, IP included. A simple discovery request will reveal all your details.
I love this game so much. The game design was magnificent. The art was opinionated and wel executed. Id love and open world version as well but I didn’t feel like the game was overly railed.
I am a twitchy shooter guy but I fell in love with this one almost immediately. Everything about it, besides the technical part, is excellent. Performance was horrible and the same thing happened to Mankind Divided, as well. Great games, horrible technology
People constantly bug @TimSweeneyEpic on Twitter about this topic, including myself, but he never answers. I suspect UE1 has too many third-party licenses that it would not be worth it. Bink from RAD comes to mind.
I would love this. UT99 has aged wonderfully (gameplay-wise, anyway) to this day, but getting it running on modern systems has always been a pain. Ironically, I've had better luck getting UT99 running under WINE in Linux than on Windows 7+.
No idea. Ran fine with no tweaks on 2006-era Fedora. (A pleasant surprise at that time, since that was the era of hand-editing XFree86 conf files to get multiple monitors to work...)
This wiki page suggests you'll need to install the old libraries it expects. https://wiki.debian.org/Games/UT99 I also assume the UI wouldn't scale correctly to the native resolution of hiDPI displays.
UI will fill whatever resolution you throw at it, but it won't autoscale. However, there's a checkbox somewhere in the settings there that enables 2x scaling.
Human Revolution was wonderful, but Mankind Divided had such bizarre pacing… I was ~15 hours into Prague, waiting for the transition to the next locale like in all of the other Deus Ex games, and then the story ended… sigh
That is because the publisher Square Enix forced the developer Eidos Montreal to split Mankind Divided into two games, and then they canceled the second game. Thankfully the IP and developer has been bought by a holding group that actually knows about gaming, Embracer Group.
I agree it's a pretty bad name. But they seem to have an okay track record of buying studios and publishers and letting them be. Then again, maybe they are the villains and they're going to one day direct all of this acquired talent to producing the ultimate cash cow live service free to play bullshit game.
Human Revolution had one of the best gaming preludes. You had no augmentations, and then you get rocked. The opening credits while you're in surgery, chefs kiss. Obligatory "I never asked for this"
Though this site is under appreciated and less than up to date now they produced a fantastic interview with the director and opening sequence director. The additional images and videos make it really shine.
Interestingly a few people really dislike the intro to both DXHR and DXMD - and contrast it with the original Deus Ex where you effectively just hop in and start running around liberty island. If they added a skip to those sequences or created a "New Game (post-intro)" option on completion that might have been nice.
Both games definitely feel rushed gameplay and story-wise, I always wonder what they'd look like if they got a bit more love
I thought the mankind divided opening was pretty good as well. The terrorist attack really surprised me, and for a few seconds I felt like I was there.
Deus ex is by far my favourite universe, it's such a shame it isn't better developed.
I barely made it past the first 20 minutes before giving up for MD. Somehow the experience was wildly different from the HR despite the mechanics being mostly the same.
One thing I think was a big contributing factor to my enjoyment of the first game was the soundtrack. The first time you enter the Sarif Industries building and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAljZX-9HMI starts playing - chills.
I did the same thing - I was very confused at first. Once you orient yourself though in that initial city and get a bit into it then it becomes very very good. I think I may have been playing years after with all the bugs fixed and the DLC's added and whatnot but I thought they killed it with that game. Still hoping we get another!
I also stop at the tutorial on my first try, then later I tried again, and now I like it more than Human Revolution, it's better in all aspects, except maybe the story for ending abruptly.
> "JC Denton" is said to be a codename, and the player can create JC's true name and pick from a variety of preset appearances.
Hmmm, I don't remember that either—and JC is also sort of a meme with his default appearance (presumably), used as userpics on Youtube and elsewhere. So I guess many just picked the first look offered. Seeing as JC is considered very much a ‘blank character’, there probably wasn't much of a meaningful difference in the choice.
It's easy to miss that you can change the appearance (it's just a couple of little buttons) but you do see his head and shoulders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX_YSpI5a9s
The parent commenter means to say that for most of the game in Deus Ex, the player doesn't see the protagonist. (Can't remember if the cutscenes shown him from a third-person view.)
The cutscene experience was funny if one happened to have both legs shot—so JC crawls around for hours, then stands up during a cutscene, and afterwards plops down again and proceeds to crawl to completion of the level.
I believe there may have been an unfortunate GEP gun incident where I found that out.
I kinda miss stuff like that.
Sadly, when things break like that now (looking at you, Bethesda) it usually leaves the game in an unplayable state, versus reverting to a known-good state.
Fun fact: afaik many games, starting with Duke Nukem 3D, implement mirrors by just having the entire room built out behind the glass, with duplicates of the objects moving on that side. In DN, with some noclip trickery or something, one can move into the ‘mirror room’, or observe the whole level with the double rooms.
Yes, that's why you need to make such a room when making a map with a mirror in Duke Nukem 3D.
Modern games also do a lot of tricks when it comes to mirrors. Real reflections are expensive. Though they're becoming increasingly common thanks to the ray tracing hardware on recent graphics cards.
As a player I recently noticed that in The Last of Us Part 2, when you're in front of a mirror the windows give off an unnaturally bright light to hide that the outdoors area wasn't reflected.
Michael McCann is a genius and deserves way more credit for Deus Ex than he is given, but he was responsible for at least half of the Mankind Divided soundtrack too.
Some of the DLC for Mankind Divided is excellent, though. You should check it out if you haven't.
The worst thing about MD is the stability and bugginess. I recently replayed both, and HR is still (and more-or-less always has been) pretty damn solid.
MD, meanwhile, had intermittent jankiness in the UI including getting itself into states that required a restart to fix, wild swings in framerate, and crashed probably a half-dozen times in my playthrough (which wouldn't be a bad stat for a game in, like, 1999, but is now). I think HR crashed maybe once, but I may be mis-remembering and it was in fact zero times, and that was a much longer play-through.
[EDIT] Oh, one nice touch in MD was how they improved balance on hacking. No more ending the game with 500 pieces of hacking software because it was so easy. No more feeling compelled to hack everything even if you already had a code for it, for the XP. New UI's terrible and (on PC, at least) buggy, though :-(
I played MD recently again, including all the DLCs. It was not unstable or buggy at all. I played under Linux, but am not 100% certain anymore that I played the Linux version and not the Windows version via Proton. In any case, maybe something to test next time you play it.
There is only one DLC I'd call excellent though: A Criminal Past. The others sadly are not great. Desperate Measures might be included now, but is just missing content from the main story, suffering by it being not integrated properly and it saw clearly less design work. System Rift saw even less, it's made cheaply - but not not fun and at least a story of its own. And then there is A Criminal Past, better than some parts of the main game, the only one I'd absolutely recommend.
It does not end in Prague. You leave and come back to Prague a couple of times, each time it’s more locked down and hostile. Finale is weirdly in a convention center in London.
Not sure if this will sway you but the entirety of the MD version of Prague is fictional. Překážka doesn’t exist, the main train station doesn’t look like that, Golem City isn’t a thing, there are no oppressive riot police stalking the streets :-)
The things that put me off Prague aren’t in the game, and likely wouldn’t irritate a tourist
I'd like to officially state for the record that I got through the original DX on hard mode, no lethal weapons and only a few mods. Greatest game ever. Eventually decided Illuminati was the most reasonable ending. Kind of a Milton thing with cinnamon buns.
I was a big MoM fan when I was a kid and I followed this development with a lot of curiosity.
I found it interesting that a game which is now more than 25 years old managed to get a thriving modding community, given that modding games wasn't really a thing long ago.
By the way, there's a proper remake in the works, coming out in a couple of months.
[0]: https://masterofmagic.fandom.com/wiki/Caster_of_Magic