Annotated version of an original Deus Ex design doc surfaces

This is cool to see.

I even more enjoyed the oral history of Deus Ex development that it links to from the intro. A really fun, nostalgic, and pretty relateable read. And somewhat in contradiction to this post, has the quote:

> From what I can recall, there was no continuously updated design doc for Deus Ex. If there was, I never saw it and I didn't get access to it.

Another cool excerpt:

> Basic sounds in speech, like "ah" or "ooh" or whatever, they all have frequency fingerprints, basically. Even with the low CPU power at our disposal, I could do a really low-resolution fast Fourier transform to analyze the speech as it was being output to the sound card, chop it up and try to match it with phonemes. Then I could use that to send hints to the animation system to move the lips.

> So I had the artists animate the face bones, of which we only had like two, I think -- it was super low-poly -- and I had 'em go with eight phonemes to animate face poses for. Except, they'd do it on the base pose and I'd blend in the animations on the face in real time based on what the audio does.

… for a game that came out in 2000! Pretty cool.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex...

One famous piece of trivia about Deus Ex is that, if you look at the city skyline during the missions set in New York City, the Twin Towers are conspicuously absent. The real reason for their exclusion isn’t very interesting: something to do with memory constraints. So in the game’s fiction, the Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Deus Ex was released in 2000, a year before 9/11.

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'How deus ex predicted the future'

https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex-predicted-...

I am currently playing Mankind Divided and have been reading into the art direction from interviews with the art director.

I just love the world they have created and the way they utilize it to tell the story. One of their ethos is "show don't tell" and you can see they have really taken it to heart. The locations tell the story just as well as the dialog does.

You simple cannot compare Deus Ex 3 and 4 with Deus Ex 1. Deus Ex 1 is a much different and better game, a lot of thought went into it, the player can do so much more it's not even funny. No other game with Deus Ex in the name comes even close. Play Deus Ex 1 first and come back later, though some may never get into DX1 because the graphics hasn't aged that well.

We used to play Deus Ex 1 in a pair. The game was so different for each player and their playing style that it never got boring. We completed the whole game in this way.

One highlight that I remember was the explanation of mass surveillance being a replacement for less religion in a society. In the past people censored themselves because God was always watching. It was hoped that people would continue to censor themselves because Echelon was always recording and datamining.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw

This was an optional cut scene and not part of the main story -- my friend found this, I never got this cut scene when I played.

I agree that Deus Ex 1 is so special that anything after does not compare. This does not belittle the sequels, its just that the original was so good.