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The most underrated Deus Ex game is criminally cheap on Steam, even though you all deserve to pay more after being so mean about itApr 16, 2024 - PC GamerSometimes, in our arrogance, in our ignorance, by some ugly quirk of fate, we reject the gifts we are given. We cast down beauty and topple perfection. We spit on art and forget that what is popular is not always right, and what is right is not always popular. You know, like when everyone pretended that Deus Ex: Invisible War wasn't an absolute, bona fide banger... Read more.Deus Ex: Invisible War has the best ending in the seriesApr 8, 2021 - PCGamesNDeus Ex is a series about breaking into buildings. What makes it great is that it lets you work out exactly how you want to do that and gives you a ton of tools to execute your plan. Each game presents you with a series of architectural contraptions - puzzle boxes, really - full of guards to deal with (or sneak past), cameras to avoid (or hack), and bite-sized stories to find among the paperwork and email inboxes. A single locked door has a multitude of workarounds: you could hack a nearby computer to find an email that contains the password you need, or you could upgrade your prosthetic arms to lift a heavy box that conceals a nearby vent that lets you bypass the door entirely. For most of the games in the series, this sense of freedom in overcoming the many obstacles that block your way lasts right up until the end. Then it all collapses in on itself when you reach the ending. Even the first Deus Ex, which excels at giving you a variety of both choices and characters to deal with - and at recognising the choices you make with in-game reactions - stumbles at the final hurdle. Read the rest of the story... Which game deserves a No Man's Sky-style comeback?Jul 28, 2018 - PC GamerNo Man's Sky has managed to rediscover some of the hype it had back in 2016, when it disappointed us (and some other people maybe?) a little. With a peak of over 40,000 concurrent players the day the Next update arrived—now up to 80,000 on the weekend—there's clearly a resurgence of players and interest. Chris likes what he's seen of the expansion: "It's time to try it again." Not everyone will, of course, but it's an interesting case study for a game staging a comeback, as it were. This week's PCG Q&A, then touches upon that subject. Which game deserves a No Man's Sky-style comeback? The answers can be pretty broad. It can be any singleplayer or online game that didn't quite reach its potential, or the audience it deserved. Maybe it was a patch or expansion away from being really good. We want to read your answers in the comments below. Samuel Roberts: Dawn of War 3 Will a Warhammer 40,000 game ever be this lavish again? Dawn of War 3 got a pretty cool response at launch, and we'll never get DLC for it that adds the Necrons, Imperial Guard or so on to the fight. I think there's a great game somewhere in its extremely busy mix of MOBA and RTS, and I'd love to see it remixed into something more of a traditional RTS with an extra faction to see if that'd get any traction. It sounds like the Dawn of War series is very much in the past for Relic now, though, and with my pessimistic hat on, I expect the next 30 years to be filled with 5 and 6/10 Warhammer 40K games that will never look this shiny. James Davenport: The Bureau: XCOM Declassified Remember the original trailer for The Bureau? A first-person X-Files still needs to happen, and it needs to be as weird as possible. Sentient goo creatures and strange pylons didn't make the cut in the final release of The Bureau, a disappointing shooter instead featuring XCOM's familiar humanoid aliens. And as great as No Man's Sky Next is, its impressive math still can't spit out truly bizarre creatures. I can't recall another game since The Bureau's early trailers that intended to toy around with incomprehensible lifeforms in 'enemy' AI. Prey got closer, but I'm more enticed by the quaint domestic setting of '60s suburbia as a foil to the unworldly, disruptive alien forces taking over the world right under our noses. With a near decade's worth of advances in graphics technology, now's the perfect time to give goo another go. Tim Clark: Destiny 2 (wow, what a shock) Office please, this is entrapment. Of course I'm going to answer Destiny 2. But pray hear me out for but a moment before taking to the comments section, 'trash game' rebuttal in hand. In the intervening year between launch and now, Bungie has been genuinely hard at work righting many of the baffling endgame design wrongs it made, to the point that—even right...The History of Ion StormFeb 16, 2018 - PC GamerThis article was originally published in two parts across PC Gamer issue 313 and 314. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. Jake Hughes was working as a model designer on Starship Troopers when he received a call from Peter Marquardt. Marquardt was an actor—he played the bad guy in Robert Rodriguez’s first film, El Mariachi—but he also had a passion for games. The pair originally met on the set of Wing Commander IV, where Marquardt was shooting for the game’s cutscenes. “He calls me up and he says, ‘Hey, John Romero is making a company and they’re looking for associate producers, come on out,’” Hughes says. “Peter was working on Daikatana, and Tom Hall was needing an associate producer. So I came out and I met Tom, and we connected instantly … because they all knew about Starship Troopers.” A week later, Hughes was offered the job as associate producer of Anachronox, the third game by Ion Storm Dallas. He was one of around 80 individuals invited to join the company at that time. Most were men, nearly all were under 30 years old and their backgrounds ranged from model designers to members of bands such as Information Society. Few of them had worked much in the games industry before. “Tom was actually the only person who had the experience ,” Hughes remembers. “This is, of course, Ion Storm, right? Where ego is a thing.” In March 1997, Hughes made the drive from Los Angeles to Dallas to join Ion Storm. Its lavish office in the penthouse of Dallas’s Chase Tower wasn’t ready yet, so the team used a smaller office in the interim. Hughes’s office cubicle was connected to Romero’s. “I actually got to hear him play deathmatch every night,” he remembers. For Hughes and everyone else involved, Ion Storm Dallas was videogaming nirvana, a company with huge talent, huge investment and huge ambitions, dreamed up by arguably the most famous man in the industry at the time. The honeymoon wouldn’t last, though. Within a year the studio would be plagued by turbulent office politics, a slew of public image crises and a host of development problems from which its reputation would never fully recover. Dream design Ion Storm Dallas was founded on 15 November 1996. Its four founding partners were John Romero, Tom Hall, Todd Porter, and Jerry O’Flaherty. Hall and Romero had previously founded id Software along with John Carmack and Adrian Carmack (no relation), while Porter and O’Flaherty had cofounded a company together which they sold to the publisher 7th Level. “In January 1996 I decided to leave id Software after shipping Quake,” says John Romero. “I contacted Tom Hall while he was at 3D Realms/Apogee and asked him if he’d be interested in starting another game company la...The uncertain future of games like Deus Ex and DishonoredAug 15, 2017 - PC GamerWarren Spector is stuck in Prey. The director of Deus Ex, who has worked on many games since labeled "immersive sims"—in fact, he coined the term in a post-mortem of Deus Ex —has been playing the modern games inspired by classics like Thief and System Shock. But he hasn't finished Prey yet. Or, as he puts it: "The crew quarters are kicking my butt." He's enjoying it though, just as he enjoyed the other recent immersive sim from Arkane Studios, Dishonored 2. "I thought they were both excellent examples of what I think of when I say 'immersive sim,'" Spector says. "They removed barriers to belief that I was in another world and they let me approach problems as problems, rather than as puzzles. I'm really glad Arkane exists and that they're so committed to the genre. Without them I'd have fewer games to play!" Spector's not the only one who'd mourn their loss. Arkane is still around, but there's this uneasy feeling in the air that there's now some reason to worry. Not about Arkane, necessarily, but the immersive sim in general, this genre held up as the shining example of PC gaming at its most smartest and most complex. None of the last three big-budget immersive sims—Prey, Dishonored 2, and Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Mankind Divided—have broken a million sales on Steam. It's always been a niche genre, defined by player freedom, environmental storytelling, and a lot of reading diary entries. How long can they be propped up by the fact that some designers really like making them? Arkane's Prey is the latest in the System Shock lineage. Don't call it a comeback In the 1990s and early 2000s immersive sims seemed like the future, an obvious extension of what 3D spaces and believable physics and improving AI could do when working together. But they rarely sold well. When Ion Storm’s third Thief and second Deus Ex game flopped, the studio closed. Looking Glass Studios, responsible for System Shock, Ultima Underworld, and the first two Thief games, was already gone. The immersive sim went into hibernation for years. Despite the love and praise for games like Deus Ex, they're not easy to sell to players. Jean-François Dugas, executive director of the Deus Ex franchise at its current owners Eidos Montreal, says it can be tough even convincing people to make games that let players deviate from the critical path. "You need to realize and accept that you will build a ton of material that a good part of your audience will miss," he says. "Since you are building possibilities through game mechanics and narrative scenarios, you know that you might not be able to bring all the pieces to the quality level you would like. You have to rely on the effect of the sum of the parts to transcend it all. The GTA series is a great example of that. When you look at all the pieces individually, they’r...It's time for cyberpunk games to remember how to be punkFeb 15, 2017 - PC Gamer At the start of the 1988 adventure game based on William Gibson's genre-defining cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, you wake up face down in a plate of spaghetti. Well, it's synth-spaghetti because this is the future, but that doesn't make it any more comfortable. Like the book's protagonist Case you're a down-and-out former console cowboy who has lost the ability to hack, though in your case it's not due to traumatic surgery but simple poverty. You can't afford a new computer. Hell, you can't even afford to pay for the spaghetti. Author Bruce Sterling summed up the cyberpunk genre as a combination of “low-life and high-tech,” and that's a perfect description of both versions of Neuromancer. Later in the game you have the option to sell your internal organs for cash, and hack a computer at Cheap Hotel—its actual name—to pay the rent. Your life is about as low as they get. In 1993 Syndicate went in the opposite direction, casting you as the CEO in charge of a corporation bent on global domination. In Syndicate you're the villain at the top of the dystopian food chain. While most of the games in the genre that followed explored spaces somewhere in between those two extremes, there's been a tendency for them to focus on the high-tech and not the low-life. They get the cyber, but not the punk. Cyberpunk games are rarely about cool losers. They're usually about cool cops. Hero complex Take the heroes of the Deus Ex series. JC Denton is an augmented agent who works for a UN anti-terrorist organization. Alex D is an augmented agent-in-training at the Tarsus Academy with a bright future in the WTO, and Adam Jensen is the augmented chief of security for a biotech corporation. All of these characters go through learning experiences that show their employers are untrustworthy and their world is more complex than they thought it was, but they all start on the privileged side of the fence. When low-life characters do show up, they're pushed to the periphery. Adam Jensen walks past some punks gathered around a bin-fire in the streets of Detroit so he can overhear a conversation about getting a dog cybernetically enhanced to take part in a pitfight. In the Lower Seattle of Deus Ex: Invisible War, Alex D also meets two people huddled around a burning bin, one of whom is Lo-town Lucy—a pierced punk who provides some basic info on the area while reprimanding you for being an Upper Seattle tourist. She points out how out of your element you are in the poor part of town, but in doing so makes it clear you're out of place in the genre as well. That's not to say that there are no cyborg badasses who learn the law isn't always right in cyberpunk outside of games. Robocop and Ghost in the Shell are both classic examples of this kind of story, but in video games characters like Murphy and Kusanagi aren't rarities. They're the norm. The her...Deus Ex: Invisible War gets all-in-one unofficial patchJan 19, 2017 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunA new unofficial patch has arrived for Deus Ex: Invisible War, bringing widescreen support and a few fixes to the game that I still think would be remembered quite fondly if it weren’t named ‘Deus Ex’. I found Invisible War technically fiddly and sloppy when I replayed it a few years back, and it sounds like the Visible Upgrade patch by ‘snobel’ fixes most of my gripes. It supports modern aspect ratios, including for folks who tape a dozen screens together, has an adjustable field of view, and fixes a few bugs. Oh, and it includes an optional high-res texture pack. Good stuff! … Deus Ex: Invisible War - what's good about the series' worst?Oct 27, 2016 - PC GamerThis article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 297. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. Deus Ex opens on Liberty Island pier. Under the nighttime glow of New York s skyline, JC Denton gets to work, first making his way across the island, then infiltrating the statue and taking out the NSF terrorists inside. As an intro, it s indicative of the game to come: large, open and potentially alienating. No concessions are made. Deus Ex throws you straight into the deep end and challenges you to swim. By comparison, the opening of Deus Ex: Invisible War is a paddling pool. Alex D gets to work, walking through a blue-grey corridor not yet trusted with the tools that would allow her (or him) to break into the rooms of her fellow Tarsus recruits. She enters an elevator, triggering a loading screen. Playing now, on Windows 10, that loading screen forces a quit to desktop. Moments later, Invisible War lurches back to life, and the loading bar completes. It s bizarre, and it happens on many occasions. Invisible War has many loading screens. Like Liberty Island, the intro is indicative of the game to come: condensed and constrained. Invisible War is not a bad game would Kieron Gillen have given a bad game 92% in his PC Gamer review? but it s not a good sequel. It takes Deus Ex s wide open spaces and reduces them to a console-friendly size. Normally I wouldn t blame consoles for dumbing down a PC game. In this case, however, it s impossible not to see the compromises created by its Xbox release. Deus Ex is able to use its large spaces to create a sense of realism through sparse but effective environmental detail. The streets of Hell s Kitchen are wide, and littered with barrels, crates and garbage bags. In Invisible War, the locations feel cramped and chunky. Seattle the first hub feels more like a mall than anything else. What should be a major US city is instead an underwhelming series of cramped corridors and staircases. The first time I played, I didn t realise I was outdoors. It s about as underwhelming a cyberpunk dystopia as I ve ever experienced. Other locations, Cairo and Trier, Germany, are more recognisably urban, but still just narrow streets for NPCs to stand in. When I replay Deus Ex, I still feel immersed by the environment. That s not the case in Invisible War. Despite the graphics looking better than in Deus Ex, it s aged worse. The problem is compounded by the number of NPCs able to exist in each environment. Seattle s Club Vox seemingly one of only two businesses operating in the upper city limits has more staff than patrons. Nevertheless, Seattle is an enjoyable slice of intrigue and backstabbing. Ion Storm makes effective use of limited space by offering a nested stack of sidequests each contact simultaneously someone else s target. It starts when a WTO employee tells me to infiltrate Club Vox and find proof of the owner s tax evasion. While there, the owner asks me to ass...Pip And Alice Chat: What Is Deus Ex Anyway?Aug 22, 2016 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunWith Deus Ex: Mankind Divided coming out on Tuesday (read our review), Pip comes to Alice with an important request. Pip: ALICE! Alice: Hullo there, old chum! What’s cracking? Pip: The internet under the strain of all the Deus Ex: Mankind Divided reviews popping out of their embargo wombs, through the various CMS birth canals and into the digital world, I should think. On a related note, I have a question… Alice: You evidently already know where babies come from, so what can I help you with? Pip: Alice, I don’t get Deus Ex. Explain to me Deus Ex. … Revisiting Deus Ex: Invisible War, one of PC gaming's biggest disappointmentsAug 16, 2016 - PC GamerThe Statue of Liberty doesn t play a huge role in either Deus Ex or its sequel, but I ve still come to think of it as the symbol of those games. It book-ends the series-as-was, prior to Human Revolution. The first mission of Deus Ex, the last mission of Invisible War. In the first game, it s a symbol of ambition: one of the largest and most intricate game spaces designed up to that point, full of secrets and ways to chart your own path. In Invisible War, it s more a sign of submission, where the sequel s many concessions to the original Xbox hardware are all on display. The inferior aesthetics that make every location look the same. The map split into chunks because the system can't keep it all in memory. The once natural choices now stated outright, blunt and simplified. Everything that the original map did so well, its return trip fails miserably to match. Such is the risk of following up one of the best games ever made. Looking back all these years later, the question isn t whether or not Invisible War was a better game than Deus Ex, because the answer is a flat no. It just isn t. Coming second to one of the greatest games of all time would hardly be a shame, though. Now that the disappointment has faded, and a new incarnation of Deus Ex has gotten its own sequel, is it time to re-evaluate Invisible War for what it is, rather than what we hoped for 13 years ago? It d be great if the answer was yes, but replaying it now, Invisible War has aged about as poorly as a game can. Much of this is, again, the result of having been designed for the original Xbox, though the bland futuristic setting and inferior writing somehow make it feel like both the big budget sequel and cheap straight-to-video knock-off of the first game. The 20XX files Invisible War raises the stakes by going 20 years further into the future and tries to drive more of the story through characters and relationships, but it never quite manages to land the quantum leap or compensate for the issues those choices introduce. Invisible War s hub areas are poorly conceived locations, tiny and bereft of detail. Easily the worst is the Cairo Arcology, home to the great and good, which feels like it s modeled after an airport departures lounge and features an open recruiting booth for the Knights Templar. It s explained that they re simply advertising where the people they want to recruit are, but its conspicuous placement still feels a world away from Deus Ex s gritty conspiracy theories. The frustration is that Invisible War isn t a lazy sequel by any stretch. It s desperate to reinvent both itself and the series, and to find the next big leap. It tries so hard from the very first moment, an awesome intro that sees the entirety of Chicago wiped out by a nanite weapon. It goes out of its way to offer more choices on its main path than Deus Ex, with multiple factions to work for at any point instead of a forced transition from government yes-man to rebel agent. This time, we re not dealing w...Have You Played Deus Ex: Invisible War?Dec 19, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunHave You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. We’d remember Deus Ex: Invisible War more fondly if it weren’t named Deus Ex, wouldn’t we? So let’s imagine that. Released in 2003 by Ion Storm, Invisible War is a flawed but pretty fun FPS action-RPG, where we get to be a swanky cyborg larking about in that grim cyberpunk future. … Is Deus Ex Still The Best Game Ever? The ConclusionApr 29, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunThis took rather longer than we thought. But after five entries, and two weeks, I’ve come to my conclusions. You can read the whole saga here, if you’ve not yet caught up, as I chronicle my experience of replaying Deus Ex – a game I’ve always maintained is the Best Game Ever – fifteen years later. Was I wrong? Is it even possible for me to be wrong? Read on. … Is Deus Ex Still The Best Game Ever? Part Five: Living, Playing, EndingApr 23, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunMy chronicle of returning to Deus Ex fifteen years later, to see if I’m right when I tell anyone who comes near that it’s the best game ever, is nearing its end. You can read the whole saga here. In this fifth part I contemplate the significant change in approach in the last third of the game, and then make my choice for the ending. … Is Deus Ex Still The Best Game Ever? Part Four: Fratricide, Gratified And DissatisfiedApr 21, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunAnd so continues my chronicle of returning to Deus Ex fifteen years later, to see if I’m right when I tell anyone who comes near that it’s the best game ever. You can read the whole saga here. In this fourth edition, I once more fail to save my brother, become increasingly frustrated with the limits of the game’s intelligence, and ponder whether real choice is actually usefully conveyed to the player. … Is Deus Ex Still The Best Game Ever? Part Three: Wrongfully AccusedApr 16, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunAs my re-exploration of Deus Ex continues, I find my memories clashing with the reality of the game, as I try to establish if it’s still the Best Game Ever . You can read the whole saga here. It’s accusing me of crimes I didn’t commit, an in turn, I start committing some crimes. … Is Deus Ex Still The Best Game Ever? Part Two: Struggles, Buggles and Reading HugglesApr 15, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunHere continues my attempt to discover if Deus Ex really is the best game ever, like my brain thinks. Part One is here. Today I yet again struggle to get the game working, then struggle to work within the game. But cheer myself up reading some newspapers. … Is Deus Ex Still The Best Game Ever? Part One: Memories And Hardware RenderersApr 13, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunWhen asked, What is the best game ever? I always give one reply. Deus Ex. Back in the days when my passport still allowed me into PC Gamer Top 100 meetings, I would furiously argue that it should be no. 1, and indeed become furious whenever it did not. While I may pick another name if asked for my favourite game, when it comes to best , I always say Looking Glass/Ion Storm s greatest moment. But what if I m wrong? … Deus Ex: Mankind DividedApr 8, 2015 - Community Announcementshttps://farm8.staticflickr.com/7715/17079617175_d2314fafaa_o.png Hey everyone! We are extremely proud and excited to present you today with the announcement trailer for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which is coming soon on PC. Switch off the lights, turn up the volume and make sure to watch it in full screen and 1080p! Watch it on the Steam page. Let us know what you think so far – we're looking forward to reading your comments. Thanks for your support!Deus Ex: Mankind DividedApr 8, 2015 - Community Announcementshttps://farm8.staticflickr.com/7715/17079617175_d2314fafaa_o.png Hey everyone! We are extremely proud and excited to present you today with the announcement trailer for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, which is coming soon on PC. Switch off the lights, turn up the volume and make sure to watch it in full screen and 1080p! Watch it on the Steam page. Let us know what you think so far – we're looking forward to reading your comments. Thanks for your support!Great Expectations: Deus Ex Mankind DividedApr 8, 2015 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunDeus Ex: Mankind Divided has been announced. Adam and Graham decided to activate their social augs and discuss their reasons for being united in excitement for Adam Jensen’s return. Graham: Adam, Adam, get this. I have great Deus Expectations. The title for this (potentially regular?) feature is already paying dividends. Adam: Oh lord, give me the augmented strength to bear this load. …
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