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.
