The original Deus Ex is perfectly playable today as long as you follow a guide to get it patched up and configured for a modern system. Plus it runs at a rock steady frame rate on any PC today, whereas it didn’t at the time of release (it was very laggy, buggy, and crashed a lot).

The game is definitely meant for mouse and keyboard though. You need some very high precision aiming and a steady hand to cope with the scope wobble (unless you train to master level).

The Enhanced Edition for System Shock makes it perfectly suitable for anyone used to FPS controls, the "remaster" changes so much that it is hardly the same game.

yo my dad sold my ps1 to buy crack, so same basically.

The diversity and quantity of videogames accessible today is crazy.

The only caveat is you have to mostly avoid AAA and other cheap trend seekers to find refreshing gaming experiences. But otherwise, I agree with you.

Never finished Mankind Divided though

Neither did Eidos-Montréal, apparently.

Mankind Divided was the best Deus Ex since the original tbh. Such a shame that we'll never get a sequel.

I played some of Human Revolution but I didn’t like the grind-factor (nor did I like the weird forced boss fights).

The original Deus Ex was so beautiful for the way you gained exploration and progress experience for finding secrets and accomplishing goals. Replacing that with a more “RPG-like” system that rewards hacking every single computer and doing non-lethal takedowns on every single enemy totally ruined it for me.

"AAA" gaming began as a reference to the "AAA" creditworthiness rating, meaning (essentially) "certain to repay the loan" // "certain to earn more than the development costs" (contrarespectively). AAA gaming has always been about the safe bet, the easy money, and the tailored to mass market design.

High budget games can only have so much ROI, so there's kind of implicitly a limit on how much risk is tolerable for investors/publishers. Meanwhile, a game that costs a few million (or even less) could be the next big success, and rake in a massive sum - enough to justify its own budget in addition to many failed attempts to craft a star.

Even more risky is indie gaming, where the cost of development is provided by crazy people that want to produce "fun", and gain money as some kind of (important) side effect. That's where you get the wild "no one (in the know) would expect this to work" ideas, and most of them do fail, just as expected. The ones that are good enough to make it are by nature surprisingly good - indeed, this surprise is why publishers won't go after the same concept under most conditions.

The original game has plenty of characters who are true believers in the government lie: the UNATCO soldiers, the mech agents, and even multiple civilians who either work for or support the government.

The main resistance force, the NSF (Northwest Sessionist Forces), is pretty controversial among the public. People seem to be split between viewing them as terrorists or heroes. Not unlike the way people view antifa in real life!

When the game came out it was very accurate. The vast majority of people distrusted the state, but now they have the algorithms.

Also the original Deus Ex is not easy for non-techie games to just pick up and play. Unless you own old hardware (collector nerds) or you can negotiate the jank on modern hardware (techie nerds) then many old titles are just not accessible.

I think a game like Deus Ex that people still talk about as a classic deserve remasters.

And who knows, maybe Deus Ex has to look like shit in order to be itself? It’s not supposed to be a remake; a remaster just means 1) works on modern hardware, with modern controllers/OSes and 2) most if not all game mechanics, plot lines, level designs, etc feel and play as they originally did, with the exception that there might be some bug fixes or QoL changes to prevent things that are universally agreed upon as being bad/unnecessary.

What I’m getting at is - is it Deus Ex if it doesn’t look janky and weird?