[redsniper]

Yeah, all the individual components of Deus Ex were rather mediocre by themselves. Clunky gunplay, clunky RPG elements, clunky stealth, etc. They just somehow managed to magically combine together into something much greater.

[BloodEagle]

It had good voice acting, along with a kick-ass soundtrack. Oh, and leveling mechanics.  And player-choice for endings and level completion methodologies.  And a monetary system.  And a cyberpunk setting.  And the ability to become a god.

All individually weak components, really.

[mxlm]

What a shame.

[BlueFlames]

It had good voice acting...

Go listen to it again.  The voice acting was my biggest knock against the original.  Granted, it came in a day when very few games were fully-voiced, but it was bad....Star Wars-prequel bad.

The rest of your points, I'll agree with after a fashion.  The elements you listed worked well for the game because they played off of one another well.  Players could choose their approach to a level, and different approaches would require different augmentations, skills, and equipment to be successful.  You had to think ahead and ration out your money/skill points/aug slots to ensure that you were prepared for challenges as they arose.  Specialization was rewarded, while attempting to flit about from one strategy to another was punished.  It made for a cerebral experience and a satisfying one, when events went to plan.  If the game had given you too many skill points, too much money, or too much flexibility with augmentation slots, then the whole game would have been a cakewalk, branching paths would have gone unnoticed, and the negative aspects of the game would have had more of a chance to stand out.  Sure, it still would have had a leveling system and a currency system and multiple completion methods in each level and the setting, and all that would have come across as unnecessary bits tacked onto a middle-of-the-road, late-'90's shooter.

I just hope that Square-Enix understands all of that.  They've been hitting the bulletted list of Deus Ex features really hard, but if they don't get the gameplay elements to work together well and make an effort to both reward intelligent play and punish stupidity, then this is going to be just another brown, cover-based shooter.

[mxlm]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09vVF-Hvykg

[Rodo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09vVF-Hvykg

LOL

[StarSlayer]

Hacking Preview

[newman]

Wow, that actually looks good. Starting to look forward to it.

[CP5670]

As I said earlier in the thread, this game is going to have issues but could still be very good. I'm looking forward to it.

The original DX did have some problems too, but it did a lot of novel things for its time and as others have pointed out, the whole product came together perfectly. Many of the game's innovations have been copied by newer titles over the years, and some things that might seem common today were revolutionary back then. It was the first FPS with any significant amount of dialogue and in-game text to read, like an RPG or adventure game, and it generally allowed you to interact with the game world and influence the plot much more than previous FPSs. The nonlinear level design had been done in other FPSs (in fact, it was much more common back then than it is today), but in DX the different paths in a level often involved playing the game differently, and each gameplay style had its own advantages. The semi-modern setting with levels in real world locations was also rare in FPSs back then.

And yeah, the voice acting was often horrendous. But the standards on this in games were lower back then. FS2 was one of the few games that stood out in this respect.

[JCDNWarrior]

Deus Ex's voice acting is the best kind of So Bad It's Good. It's not horrendous or noticably bad in my opinion, I absolutely love it actually and feel it fits perfectly. That's also nostalgia talking, but I actually really love it. It would hurt Deus Ex 1 if they'd replace the sometimes crazy accents and some of its dialog to be more 'real', to me. 

Deus Ex 3, I'm really looking forward to see how good it's gonna be. Trying to avoid watching any more trailers though, havent seen the last ones on purpose. Surprise me in a good way, you Eidos. In today's real world there's even more content than before to be found that actually is very sound and perfect as elements, big and small, to a great storyline.

[CP5670]

Some of the main characters' voices were actually not bad at all (I especially liked Walton Simons), but the voices for many minor characters, particularly the Chinese ones, were really, really bad.

[StarSlayer]

http://www.sarifindustries.com/

[BloodEagle]

Flash can die in a fire.

[General Battuta]

So a press build of this game leaked onto the Internet, and immediately, thousands of rabid Deus Ex fans descended on it to find that






by all accounts, it's actually a great game, every bit as immersive and fluid as the original, a worthy successor in every respect!

Now we just need to wait for the Internet to find some bull**** reason to deride it as console garbage. (the GOLD AND SEPIA and COVER SHOOTER qqs are both dead)

[NGTM-1R]

Glorious.

[Kosh]

Good news*





*I'm just glad it isn't going to be a cluster**** like DXIW was.

[General Battuta]

DXIW was a good game, just not a good DX game.

[Mikes]

Yeah, all the individual components of Deus Ex were rather mediocre by themselves. Clunky gunplay, clunky RPG elements, clunky stealth, etc. They just somehow managed to magically combine together into something much greater.

It may appear that way only because you forgot the most important parts.

Story and Immersion... nothing mediocre about that.

[General Battuta]

The story is all right, it's just the fact that it's written as a game story rather than as a book or movie shoehorned into a game that makes it so compelling. A lot of the surrounding writing (or quotes drawn from other sources) are excellent, however.

[newman]

Deus Ex: IW a good game? Certainly, being compared to Deus Ex 1 does not help it's case much; it's #1 on my list of the worst sequels ever made. How does it stand on it's own however? Not so good.
Some people here have noticed that as FPS's go DX's gameplay wasn't exactly the best in terms of pure game mechanics; if you were after pure FPS action you were better off looking elsewhere. The reason why someone would choose to play DeusEx 1 over other FPS's wasn't the superior FPS action, it was because of the story and depth (when I say "depth" I'm mainly referring to customizing everything related to the player, from character stats, to augmentations through equipment and ammo types) the game offered. This is why this game was so brilliant; it knew what it was and focused on it's strong sides, delivering the best it could on those; a brilliant story set in an immersive game world, and plenty of options given to the player when it came to progressing through that world. The other bits it wasn't focused on were mediocre, not bad enough to annoy the player while going through the story.

Deus Ex: Invisible War upset this balance completely, which is why I considered it such a flop. It tried to streamline the fps action but produced a weird, clunky gameplay mechanic that was inferior in almost every way to DX1. It would have been tolerable had the story and general feel of the world been given justice compared to those same elements in Deus Ex 1. Instead we got a story that started out mediocre and spiraled downwards to true stupidity as you went on with the game. The graphics integration was problematic at best and the options given to the player were dumbed down to an extreme. The result was a game that didn't really know what it was; a story based action adventure or a pure fps shooter? It tried to do both and it failed in both segments. This, for me, did not constitute a good game.