Latest news with #DeusEx
New York Times
15 hours ago
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Open Secret Behind the Shadowy Conspiracies in Deus Ex
CD-ROMPCJune 22, 2000 Photo illustration by The New York Times; Eidos Interactive Supported by Critic's Notebook By encouraging the exploration of dark alleys and unmonitored computers, the video game displayed the medium's immersive power. By Yussef Cole Deus Ex, the stealth shooter that turned 25 this year, has not aged well in many ways. It blithely parrots conspiracy theories about the Rothschilds without mention of their antisemitic roots; flattens Hong Kong, a city with a rich culture and history, to warring triads and heavy accents; and wraps its blocky figures and oversize architecture in a Y2K aesthetic. In his long leather trench coat and technical shades, the protagonist looks like he was dressed by the Wachowskis. Yet a bright, creative core does manage to shine through. With a world rich in detail, Deus Ex helped lay the foundation for the immersive simulation subgenre that lets players decide what kind of game they want to experience. Its cities are labyrinthine, crossed over with endless false turns and cleverly obscured hideaways crammed with cached weapons and narrative vignettes. You are rewarded for carefully combing through every dark alley, picking every last lock and poring over even the most seemingly innocuous email inboxes. It's a game about secrets, after all. About shadow organizations that would prefer for people to be satisfied with things as they appear. Deus Ex is set in 2052 and generally follows the genre expectations of cyberpunk, making it just as prescient for our present moment as 'Blade Runner,' 'Minority Report' and 'Ghost in the Shell.' Giant, unaccountable corporations control Deus Ex's society in place of a weakened and corrupted government. Vice and debauchery abound, distractions from the diminished state of things. One mission takes place at a genetic research company called Versalife, whose gleaming upper stories lined with cubicles and office workers hide subterranean labs creating freaks and monsters. It's also producing an artificial global pathogen called Gray Death as part of an effort to further subdue an embattled populace, already terrorized by a militarized police force and forced to eke out a living within inhospitable cities. With our own Covid-19 pandemic and lab leak theories looming large in the rearview, Deus Ex manages to feel more relevant to today's politics than it did at the turn of the millennium. Fears around the Y2K bug feel quaint next to the rapid-fire list of catastrophes that have descended on us since. Deus Ex, which followed immersive sims like System Shock (1994) and Thief: The Dark Project (1998), makes conspiracy its central concern, and not in a superficial way. Inquisitive players get an early glimpse at the shadowy conspiracies taking place beneath the surface — literally, in this case — if they find the underground hide-out of a weapons smuggler in a futuristic Hell's Kitchen. Breaking past the false walls of another character's home reveals the apparent falseness of her supposed loyalty. Nothing in Deus Ex is ever as it seems. God is in the machine and hiding behind several layers of locked doors and hackable computer terminals. It's possible, as the intrepid tactical agent JC Denton, to dash directly to your objectives in New York, Hong Kong and Paris. You can sprint past the confused guards on Liberty Island and make your way straight to a terrorist leader. You can hustle through the home base of the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition, ignoring everyone and not pausing to peek at even one unmonitored computer terminal. But you'll be missing out on valuable items, helpful upgrades and large swaths of the story. The more you snoop out, the clearer the game's themes reveal themselves to be. Going off the beaten path rewards players with a hint at who's really pulling the strings. The technocrats in shining corporate high-rises boast of the future, of guiding humanity toward its own best interest, often against its will. They would like us to look past their militarized security forces, their barricades, their prisons. But the good Deus Ex player knows there is a lot happening outside of the approved view. And armed with an astonishingly flexible man clad in leather and tactical gear, they're going to crouch walk their way straight to the truth. Where its sequels tend to guide players down more rigid pathways — either the stealthy approach of crawling through ductwork or busting through a front door, guns blazing — Deus Ex is never quite so binary. You can use tranquilizer darts and stun batons, or you can opt for heavier weapons, but you aren't forced to follow either path exclusively. Some levels will encourage a quieter approach. It makes sense to approach others more aggressively, such as the exploration of an already wrecked and ravaged sea lab. The elite troops of a secretive cabal are ethically easier to dispatch violently. Other enemies, like the press-ganged sailors standing guard over a container ship you're meant to scuttle, deserve more sympathy. There's little to stop you from mixing and matching styles; the game encourages different approaches and provides the tools to take them. Deus Ex could take a dozen hours to complete. Or a hundred. More than anything else, the game encourages digging deep and taking time. It's the only approach that will provide players a chance at uncovering its many secrets, its hurried confessions, its staggering conspiracies, all hidden in plain sight. Games have become endlessly more complex in the past two-plus decades. But Deus Ex remains a valuable template for a certain kind of approach to games and interactivity. It presents a world that begs to be explored and a narrative that demands our full attention. Unlike many of its contemporaries, Deus Ex was never simply a shooting gallery, there to blast through and just as quickly forget. Its depth and detail, its quirks and idiosyncrasies, are embedded in gaming's cultural memory. The grim setting, with its many parallels to how ours turned out, remains a warning. Note: Deus Ex was released in North America in June 2000. Produced by Alice Fang, Maridelis Morales Rosado and Rumsey Taylor.
News.com.au
27-07-2025
- Entertainment
- News.com.au
Drone strikes, hover cars: $4bn game's wild 2025 predictions
The game's most talked-about feature was its multiplayer map called Aftermath, arguably the best in the franchise, which updated in real time, tracking kills and team scores. With everyone live-streaming their lives nowadays and receiving instant news alerts, what once felt groundbreaking is now just another Tuesday. Picture: COD Wiki In Call of Duty: Strike Team (2013), the action takes place in 2020. The mobile-only game mixed traditional warfare with technological enhancements like drones and exoskeletons - a nod to ongoing military innovations. Picture: YouTube Crysis 2 (2011) sets its story in 2023, but Crytek (developer) was a little more ambitious with his vision than COD, portraying dystopian New York overrun by biotechnology, nanotech and a giant alien race. Picture: Facebook You'd probably only stumble upon this kind of universe at Area 51. Picture: Reddit Jumping a bit further ahead, titles like Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) and Homefront (2011) (both set in 2027) tackled hot topics being debated today; the ethics of human enhancement and cybernetic upgrades. Picture: Xbox set in 2028, delivered an early warning about a crime-plagued Detroit and a tough future for law enforcement. Picture: Steam Then there are games like Watch Dogs: Legion, set 2026–2030, which explored an AI-driven society and dove into the chilling reality of hacking. Picture: Reddit Further out, Detroit: Become Human (2018), set in 2038, and Crysis 3 (2013), set in 2047, gave us androids and augmented soldiers questioning what it means to be human. We love a robot identity crisis. Picture: YouTube Berlin's cyberpunk thriller State of Mind (2018), set in 2048 and the iconic Deus Ex (2000), set in 2052, dove into dystopian futures where identity and freedom are questioned due to powerful governments controlling human minds. Picture: YouTube/MobyGames Halo is one of the highest-grossing franchises of all time, grossing over $US10 billion ($A15.2b). It's clear that the wildly unrealistic adventures really do sell. Picture: YouTube And if you enjoyed watching Justin Timberlake race against the clock in the film In Time and wished you could hit the brakes on time itself, then Syndicate (2012), set in 2069, is right up your alley. Picture: Reddit
The Verge
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Verge
Happy 25th birthday, Deus Ex!
Happy 25th birthday, Deus Ex! It was either yesterday or today, and I'm feeling almost nostalgic enough to boot up the original game and sneak around the Statue of Liberty while enjoying one of PC gaming's all-time great soundtracks.
Gizmodo
23-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
‘Deus Ex' Did Good Work, and I Wish It Could Do More
For as many long-running franchises were born during the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era—your Assassin's Creeds and Borderlands, to name a few—some old series tried making a return. Among those was Deus Ex, a series of cyberpunk role-playing games which just turned 20 years old and had an unfortunately short-lived return with a duology that under better circumstances, would've been a trilogy. The original game hailed from Ion Storm on June 23, 2000 for PC and eventually PlayStation 2. At the time, its big claim to fame was being the directorial debut of Warren Spector, a producer on System Shock and the Ultima series, and having a mix of role-playing, shooter, and stealth elements. Considered one of the best games of all time and a key example of the immersive sim genre, wherein players have open-ended (and often emergent) solutions to problems crafted by the developers. While Ion Storm helmed the sequel Invisible War, the franchise eventually wound up in the hands of Eidos Montréal, who made its debut with a third Deus after previous attempts at Ion had failed before its closure in 2005. And thus came 2011's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a prequel set decades before the first two games and which focused on mechanical augmentations rather than the nanotech found in its predecessors. As the game opens, augmented humans have become upper class owing to their newfound abilities while regular humans too poor or distrustful to be similarly augmented are lower on the totem pole. Amidst this divide, it falls to the newly augmented Adam Jensen to uncover a conspiracy and investigate the attack on his employer, biotech corporation Sarif Industries. Human Revolution released in a year filled with heavy hitters from well-established franchises like Legend of Zelda and Uncharted. Other than it being a revival, what helped it stand out was how different it looked and carried itself. At a time when sci-fi games were looking at Star Trek or Halo for inspiration, the developers set out to put their own spin on cyberpunk instead of just replicating Blade Runner. That ambition certainly comes through in its visuals, which lean more toward the Renaissance than Japanese or Chinese culture that typically influences stories within the genre. Once players got their hands on it and experienced its mix of first-person stealth and action, the reception and sales were so strong, it seemed inevitable there'd be a sequel after Eidos finished the game's DLC and Director's Cut re-release that featured (among other things) much better boss fights. That followup came with 2016's Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, in which Adam and his task force investigate a train bombing in Prague and its potential connections to the Illuminati. Following the previous game's chaotic event wherein Augmented people forcibly went insane (later dubbed the Aug Incident), they've lost their rights and become forced into ghettos. Mankind is an angrier game than its predecessor, with everyone resenting some person or organization to some extent, and while players choose Adam's responses and actions, he generally keeps a level head throughout. Some have come around on him in the years since, but his unshakeable demeanor can make him come off more wooden and flat than the writers intended. He's at his most fun in conversational boss fights, or when Prague cops try to hassle him only to discover he's way above them on the law enforcement hierarchy. All this anger and unease makes itself known throughout Mankind's story mode. Golem City, a ghetto Adam skulks through in the game's first act, is just full of despair as Augs try to make a life out of a bad situation. Cops are casually everywhere throughout Prague in the first two acts, and by act three, martial law has been enacted. When they're not shooting Adam on sight, they're rounding up anyone out after curfew or imprisoning suspected dissidents. Subtle, Mankind was not, and its writing earned plenty of criticism. Some found its topics and themes undeveloped, others thought the game already stepped in it with its pre-release controversy, which included the term 'mechanical apartheid' and promotional art featuring the 'Augs Lives Matter' slogan the developers insisted predated the 'Black Lives Matter' slogan that began in 2013. Its biggest fault, though, is that it's a middle chapter for a final entry that'll likely never come. After Mankind, Eidos Montréal moved on to Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy and co-developed Marvel's Avengers. Embracer bought it and other parts of Square Enix Europe in 2022, and months later, reports alleged a third Adam-led entry was in the earliest stages of development. Embracer later killed the project and laid off staff working on it, and Eidos Montréal has since become a support developer for the upcoming Grounded 2 and Fable. This past January, Human and Mankind writer Mark Cecere revealed the team intended to have Adam's actions unintentionally create the world of the original Deus Ex, thus tying the two sagas together. At the moment, that's all we know about how the studio's plans for both Adam and the franchise at large, leaving things forever trapped in a cliffhanger. Human Revolution and Mankind Divided were my introduction to Deus Ex, and as such, I'll always have a soft spot for them: they're products of their time, but their atmosphere and immersion remain timeless. Eidos Montréal made a pair of games that were very good at what they did, and while the franchise's DNA can be found in games like Dishonored and Cyberpunk 2077, it's disappointing the studio won't get to close out or expand the story on their terms. On the bright side, the original Deus Ex recently came to PlayStation+, and the series goes on sale often, so it'll always be there for old heads to replay and love, and for newcomers to see what it has to offer. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
Yahoo
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
New PS Plus PS2 Classic Comes With PS5 Trophies
The latest Premium June 2025 classic game comes with PS5 trophies at launch. PS2's has gone live along with the rest of the June catalog, revealing a total of 26 trophies including Platinum. At the time of this writing, we haven't spotted a PS4 trophy list, but we expect to see an identical list soon. Much like other PS Plus classics, Deus Ex: The Conspiracy comes with a fairly straightforward trophy list. Most of the trophies are earned by simply playing the game and completing missions, while the remaining are rewarded to players for basic tasks like picking locks 25 times and activating 10 augmentations at the same time. We're not sure why the PS4 trophy list hasn't appeared on the servers yet as it's unusual for both PS5 and PS4 lists to not go live at the same time. However, there hasn't been an instance where the last-gen platform was left out, so we're pretty confident that the trophies will appear in due course. As a reminder, Deus Ex: The Conspiracy is also available to purchase from the PS Store without a PS Plus subscription. The post New PS Plus PS2 Classic Comes With PS5 Trophies appeared first on PlayStation LifeStyle.
