In a way, I'm kind of surprised this wasn't posted to Tildes yet, as a remaster of a game frequently cited as one of the best of all time would probably warrant. From IGN: [...] Personal thoughts...
In a way, I'm kind of surprised this wasn't posted to Tildes yet, as a remaster of a game frequently cited as one of the best of all time would probably warrant.
Deus Ex Remastered is on the way, and it already has a release date of February 5, 2026, for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X | S.
Aspyr Media and Eidos-Montréal announced a refresh for the original Deus Ex video game during the September 2025 State of Play today. It comes with a trailer, teasing a re-release for a classic that is only a few months away from launch.
[...]
The newly established Deus Ex Remastered Steam page shares a few more details about what longtime fans and newcomers can expect. The 2000 video game has been given a facelift that includes new elements, such as reimagined lighting, dynamic shadows, water physics, particle effects, and new textures. Players will also notice some updated character models in today's new trailer, with Aspyr promising the remaster comes with better lip-sync animations and ragdoll physics, too.
Quality of life changes in Deus Ex Remastered range from autosaves and faster loading to achievements and cloud saves. There's also controller support on PC, as well as multi-screen support.
Personal thoughts
As a massive fan of the original game, my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Aspyr doesn't exactly have the best reputation when it comes to remasters (see: NWN2, Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection); I was hoping that a studio such as Nightdive would work on this, but apparently that wasn't an option.
The original had what could be considered dated graphics even for its release year of 2000. This looks like someone ported the game over to the Doom 3 engine and added "shiny realism", remastering the graphics from 1999 to the far-off year of 2004. $30 for a game with awful textures is the gutpunch, considering the original is usually on sale for like a dollar and has a lot of mods that make the graphics look at least a bit more decent.
I doubt the "faster loading" will actually be anything useful, considering the original loads extremely quickly on my laptop.
Other than that, most of the upsides are included in several popular mods already, so this seems to be integrating those changes into a mainline game, which is cool, I guess, but it's still expensive for what it actually is.
The only positive hope I have for this is the notion of multiscreen support. I wonder how that'll work and if it'll be of any use at all.
I was hoping for a proper remaster; this probably won't be it. Now, I'm hoping to be proven wrong.
Saw this yesterday and didn't think about posting it here for some reason. Since the original release, I've bought and rebought Deus Ex probably half a dozen times, easily one of my favorite games...
Saw this yesterday and didn't think about posting it here for some reason.
Since the original release, I've bought and rebought Deus Ex probably half a dozen times, easily one of my favorite games of all time.
I'm content to see how this all plays out, but right now this looks like total ass. JC looks like post plastic surgery Ray Liotta. This is just... There's no need for this and no need for it to be so atrocious looking. Everything is shiny.
I would tend to agree, Aspyr don't inspire much confidence to begin with and the look of the 'remastered' graphics here really isn't helping their case. My only hope is that this could be a...
I would tend to agree, Aspyr don't inspire much confidence to begin with and the look of the 'remastered' graphics here really isn't helping their case. My only hope is that this could be a half-assed attempt from Eidos at testing the waters to see if there is enough interest to justify resurrecting the series properly.
I need the second half of Mankind Divided, seriously.
Somehow the idea of a Deus Ex Remaster with Doom 3 Shiny Realism is more appealing to me than another Unreal Engine 5 remake. It's absolutely baffling but Idk im up for it
Somehow the idea of a Deus Ex Remaster with Doom 3 Shiny Realism is more appealing to me than another Unreal Engine 5 remake. It's absolutely baffling but Idk im up for it
Excellent. They took an entirely playable 25 years old game, made it look like a 20 years old game (edit: lol, I didn't entirely read the top comment which seemingly had the exact same impression)...
Excellent. They took an entirely playable 25 years old game, made it look like a 20 years old game (edit: lol, I didn't entirely read the top comment which seemingly had the exact same impression) and want our money for that. This is exactly what I dreamed of.
Seriously, I am a firm hater of pretty much all remasters, maybe with the exception of Infinity Engine enhanced editions, but even those could perhaps by served by GemRB (if the enhanced editions didn't demotivate the community from working on it) and the new characters added in the enhanced editions are usually ass.
I played through most of Deus Ex in the last 2 years for the first time, decided to do a not entirely vanilla run with a couple easily available community mods, and it was entirely playable (and excellent). No need for a remaster.
Ok, I’ll bite. The all-time best graphical style for video games, the ideal balance between fidelity, artistic expressiveness, and development effort, is what was state-of-the-art about 20 years...
Ok, I’ll bite. The all-time best graphical style for video games, the ideal balance between fidelity, artistic expressiveness, and development effort, is what was state-of-the-art about 20 years ago. Specifically 2003 to 2006, the latter half of the sixth console generation. The heyday of DirectX 9. If you’re remastering an early 3D title, this is what you go for.
The 2003 to 2006 span is the goldilocks zone. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. If you go earlier, you’re sacrificing graphical fidelity for a retro vibe. That can work, but it’s an affectation. It usually doesn’t serve a remaster, which is supposed to honor the original vision rather than reframe it as kitsch.
The problem is that earlier hardware was full of compromises. The PS1’s depth handling was novel, using manual sorting instead of a Z-buffer, and its use of fixed-point math gave it that signature texture wobble and polygon jitter. The N64 had proper Z-buffering and filtering, but its texture memory was tiny, so everything looked muddy. The Saturn was worse, with dual CPUs and two graphics chips awkwardly bolted together, making 3D development a nightmare. And on PCs, well, this meme is extremely accurate. Pre-DX9 graphics were fractured across Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D, and assorted vendor APIs. Some games had card specific builds, and some games only worked with one or a few cards. It was the wild west.
If you go later, you run into the opposite problem. First, there’s the three or four year stretch where every game was brown because Gears of War taught us all that dirt and grime = realism. Even once color came back, the dawn of HD consoles demanded so much more detail and content. Ubiquitous DVDs and broadband meant ballooning asset sizes. Suddenly you needed massive textures, higher poly counts, more shaders, mocap, full voice acting. From that point forward, making a game look good wasn’t about clever design within limits. It was about raw production scale.
Yes, games have gotten prettier since. Bigger, more detailed, more cinematic. But at the end of the day, the graphics style of 2005 has everything you need to be clear and expressive without drowning in production bloat.
I play a ton of old games (including Deus Ex) and I don't get this at all. Though the most important thing is unrelated to my disagreement - I think the remaster makes Deus Ex look like a bad 20...
I play a ton of old games (including Deus Ex) and I don't get this at all.
Though the most important thing is unrelated to my disagreement - I think the remaster makes Deus Ex look like a bad 20 years old game, from the trailer it kind of reminds me of cheap fan made "HD texture packs" from before neural upscaling, though not as bad, it's just a very exaggerated meme. The issue is that to me it looks low effort, not that it looks newer.
But anyway, onto your argument.
Well made games from any era beginning with about the year 1990 looked great. I really like the look of Ultima Underworld or Might and Magic III - VII. Thief is really lo-fi, considerably more than Deus Ex, but it looks excellent (played it for the first time about five years ago I think). Arguably the years 98 - 2000 were some of the strongest in terms of PC gaming ever. Unreal Tournament is still completely fine, so is Quake 3, Infinity Engine RPGs as well (coincidentally they're great games overall, but I'm talking about the graphics and its relation to gameplay).
Of course, this continues into the era you name, I agree with the popular opinion that Half-Life 2 still looks great for example. But it doesn't end there. The STALKER trilogy came out after that, used DX10, it gained a cult following and arguably was made even better when modders did some work on its graphics engine and assets.
Skyrim came out a bit later and as much as I dislike Bethesda for how they do writing and gameplay, they created a beautiful semi-stylized world within the limitations of PS3/X360 that, traditionally with the exception of faces, mostly still looks good today, it's functional, practical and non-cluttered.
I do think that sometime in the last decade or so it gradually became a bit absurd with the installation sizes and it doesn't always bring much to the game. But even there very clear exceptions exist. Kingdom Come Deliverance is absolutely exceptional in creating an image of medieval Bohemia. The forests and meadows truly bring the feel of bohemian countryside and couldn't be done with previous tech.
Arma: Reforger does the same except in a more modern time and there the technology is incredibly useful because only thanks to it we're getting a milsim where camouflage actually works like camouflage because the material shading, lightning engine, day of time and weather changes etc. are finally getting close enough to reality that these things works approximately like they should.
I don't have more time to expand on this, but despite where mainstream gaming has been going (I'm unhappy with that as well), I think it's clear that many of the advantages of modern technology are excellent and tremendously useful to bring new and interesting visions in gaming, and I also believe that many of the pre-DX9 games look and feel great.
Man I agree with those so much, it's cool to see my exact thoughts written down. I recently picked up a PS2 and have been thinking how the graphics were great and fit the need perfectly. So much...
Man I agree with those so much, it's cool to see my exact thoughts written down. I recently picked up a PS2 and have been thinking how the graphics were great and fit the need perfectly. So much visual, artistic style in the games. Modern huge production games look realistic, but the almost never hold my attention like a PS or Vita game.
Well this is all rather disingenuous, don't you think? Noe one is arguing that 2005-games always had a bad graphical style or were ugly. But anyone who's been gaming long enough remembers the era...
Well this is all rather disingenuous, don't you think?
Noe one is arguing that 2005-games always had a bad graphical style or were ugly. But anyone who's been gaming long enough remembers the era and how many games had weirdly smoothy characters, shiny surfaces everywhere and overall just looked a little off an not cohesive. Even popular games like The Matrix: Path of Neo suffered from this, but there are countless other examples like Catwoman: The Game or Aquamna: Battle for Atlantic.
That's what people are justifiably comparing this to. Not the likes of Resident Evil 4 or Half-Life 2, but shovelware crap and even good games with generic "realistic" art styles that was piled on to both the consoles and PCs of the generation.
Only tangentially related to your post, but RE 4 is my go-to example of “good looking 2000s game”. Insane how good it looked given the hardware it ran on (GameCube) — the CRT iMac I owned back...
Only tangentially related to your post, but RE 4 is my go-to example of “good looking 2000s game”. Insane how good it looked given the hardware it ran on (GameCube) — the CRT iMac I owned back around 2000 was roughly equivalent in horsepower (same PowerPC G3 400mhz CPU, even) and nothing it was capable of running looked anywhere near as good.
I agree, but I'm not sure what I would call it, it's more of a remake that completely reimagines some parts. And as a very rare thing it wasn't made for easy profit, on the contrary a big part of...
I agree, but I'm not sure what I would call it, it's more of a remake that completely reimagines some parts. And as a very rare thing it wasn't made for easy profit, on the contrary a big part of the development was done with the intention of releasing it for free.
Like what V17 said, Black Mesa is a full-scale remake. IMO, a remaster is when the base game's visuals are there, but updated. Better resolution, QoL features, maybe some polish overall but no...
Like what V17 said, Black Mesa is a full-scale remake. IMO, a remaster is when the base game's visuals are there, but updated. Better resolution, QoL features, maybe some polish overall but no fundamental changes. A remake like Black Mesa is where they start from the ground up, making new models, textures and animations that re-create the old.
This Deus Ex one feels like some kind of weird middle-ground where it's too distinct to be a remaster, but too undeveloped to be a remake. Worst of both worlds situation IMO; the original animations being used with updated models feels awkwardly janky. I've never played Deus Ex before and this just makes me want to play the original. Even Warcraft 3 Reforged made me want to play it before it released and we saw the flaws under the hood.
Yea, it’s so pointless, lol. I can rant about this all day but here’s me holding back—two points: Videogames have been looking almost the same for like 10 years now. I know there’s ray-tracing and...
Yea, it’s so pointless, lol. I can rant about this all day but here’s me holding back—two points:
Videogames have been looking almost the same for like 10 years now. I know there’s ray-tracing and whatnot but… come on, Uncharted 4 came out in 2016. So in order to keep that race alive, console makers, channels like Digital Foundry and bored teenagers on social media shifted this discussion to two numbers: Resolution and frame rate. One result of this is “4K remakes” that blow up single polygons that were supposed to blur into the background into razor sharp triangles, looking sterile and synthetic. But it’s more pixels, so that’s how we measure “graphics” now, right?
Secondly, Deus Ex always looked bad. It has bad art direction, wooden animations, weirdly drawn textures, oddly proportioned, square-shaped level architecture and a color palette committing to an odd contrast of gray and garish primary colors. I thought that back in 2000.
So the lazily upscaled “remake” works doubly bad. It does not fix any of the problems in art direction and makes the sad, empty polygons of its environment look even more sharp and unnatural. It’s the worst of both worlds. The original Deus Ex, played at 1024x768, at least looks retro and authentic, with pixels taking up as much space as they are supposed to. I really don’t get what I would get out of a higher res version (that includes the many community mods out there, btw.).
I think their good remasters are perfect as remasters. Mostly just the original games ported and touched up with some modernities like wide screen support, modernized control schemes, mouse look...
I think their good remasters are perfect as remasters. Mostly just the original games ported and touched up with some modernities like wide screen support, modernized control schemes, mouse look and uncapped framerate. Just lowers the friction of replaying these games (or for me, when it comes to Forsaken and Doom 64, trying them at all).
I usually look for those things in old games as well, it's just that so far I always found them among free community mods where necessary, so I see no reason to pay for that. I agree having that...
wide screen support, modernized control schemes, mouse look and uncapped framerate
I usually look for those things in old games as well, it's just that so far I always found them among free community mods where necessary, so I see no reason to pay for that. I agree having that is nice and useful though.
There were no such projects for Forsaken or the original System Shock. The free source ports of ROTT are not good, in themselves outdated and buggy. The Doom 64 remaster is the continuation of...
There were no such projects for Forsaken or the original System Shock. The free source ports of ROTT are not good, in themselves outdated and buggy. The Doom 64 remaster is the continuation of Doom 64 EX which the Nightdive programmer worked on before he joined Nightdive; just a more complete version of the same work.
What it boils down to then is whether you are interested in playing these games. If you're not interested, of course their remasters must seem pointless to you. If you are, they're great for the reasons we both agree on. But that's not so much a comment on remasters as it is on your taste in games.
Deus Ex is excellent indeed. No actual need for a remaster. IIRC, the BG EE editions feature new (recreated from scratch) assets, because the originals were destroyed in a flood. So they do create...
Deus Ex is excellent indeed. No actual need for a remaster.
IIRC, the BG EE editions feature new (recreated from scratch) assets, because the originals were destroyed in a flood. So they do create some additional value.
Honestly would love to see a remake of that one. It's been decades since I played it, but removing the constant loading points would probably go a huge way towards fixing that game.
Honestly would love to see a remake of that one. It's been decades since I played it, but removing the constant loading points would probably go a huge way towards fixing that game.
Has that not been done? Thief 3 had the same problem and same engine and it was easily fixed by the community. The only reason it was done in the first place was because the original X-Box had a...
Has that not been done? Thief 3 had the same problem and same engine and it was easily fixed by the community. The only reason it was done in the first place was because the original X-Box had a tiny amount of RAM when compared to PCs of that time and I guess developers didn't want to make the game so obviously superior on PC.
It is possible that the modding community around Invisible War is too small, so nobody did it, but do look around and maybe you'll find something.
I never did check to be honest. And it's likely they did it because PC gaming wasn't much of anything at the time, I remember the era well. No one really tried that hard to get stuff working well...
I never did check to be honest. And it's likely they did it because PC gaming wasn't much of anything at the time, I remember the era well. No one really tried that hard to get stuff working well on PC because the market just wasn't there, so I don't think worrying about it being better was a concern.
But yeah, I ought to look. It was just never a favorite of mine, especially given my love of the original, so I've largely forgotten about it.
I hear there's a free, community-made mod that's a full remaster, and even an option to play as a fully-voiced, female JC Denton. Friends have said they like it Deus Ex: Revision on Steam
I hear there's a free, community-made mod that's a full remaster, and even an option to play as a fully-voiced, female JC Denton. Friends have said they like it
One of my favourite games of all time, a true piece of gaming history thats themes become more prophetic every year and I could not have hated the trailer more. Good old Aspyr.
One of my favourite games of all time, a true piece of gaming history thats themes become more prophetic every year and I could not have hated the trailer more.
As much as I love the Deus Ex franchise—never got to play the original Deus Ex—I am not going to be buying this. I simply wrote off Eidos after they gutted Mankind Divided and in general they...
As much as I love the Deus Ex franchise—never got to play the original Deus Ex—I am not going to be buying this. I simply wrote off Eidos after they gutted Mankind Divided and in general they became a terrible company.
And judging by the comments others are making regarding to Aspyr, it only reinforces my decision to not buy it.
God I wish we could go back to the old days when large companies made games because of (mostly) their love for it as opposed to making a line go up for shareholders. Only AAA studio that I can think of still fits the bill these days is Rockstar.
I would certainly suggest buying the OG Deus Ex and then using the free Revision mod available on Steam which tidies the game up, and fixes some bugs and issues. I haven't played using Revision...
I would certainly suggest buying the OG Deus Ex and then using the free Revision mod available on Steam which tidies the game up, and fixes some bugs and issues.
I haven't played using Revision tbf but I've heard good things. The OG DX is still a ton of fun as well.
In a way, I'm kind of surprised this wasn't posted to Tildes yet, as a remaster of a game frequently cited as one of the best of all time would probably warrant.
From IGN:
[...]
Personal thoughts
As a massive fan of the original game, my disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
Aspyr doesn't exactly have the best reputation when it comes to remasters (see: NWN2, Star Wars Battlefront Classic Collection); I was hoping that a studio such as Nightdive would work on this, but apparently that wasn't an option.
The original had what could be considered dated graphics even for its release year of 2000. This looks like someone ported the game over to the Doom 3 engine and added "shiny realism", remastering the graphics from 1999 to the far-off year of 2004. $30 for a game with awful textures is the gutpunch, considering the original is usually on sale for like a dollar and has a lot of mods that make the graphics look at least a bit more decent.
I doubt the "faster loading" will actually be anything useful, considering the original loads extremely quickly on my laptop.
Other than that, most of the upsides are included in several popular mods already, so this seems to be integrating those changes into a mainline game, which is cool, I guess, but it's still expensive for what it actually is.
The only positive hope I have for this is the notion of multiscreen support. I wonder how that'll work and if it'll be of any use at all.
I was hoping for a proper remaster; this probably won't be it. Now, I'm hoping to be proven wrong.
Saw this yesterday and didn't think about posting it here for some reason.
Since the original release, I've bought and rebought Deus Ex probably half a dozen times, easily one of my favorite games of all time.
I'm content to see how this all plays out, but right now this looks like total ass. JC looks like post plastic surgery Ray Liotta. This is just... There's no need for this and no need for it to be so atrocious looking. Everything is shiny.
I would tend to agree, Aspyr don't inspire much confidence to begin with and the look of the 'remastered' graphics here really isn't helping their case. My only hope is that this could be a half-assed attempt from Eidos at testing the waters to see if there is enough interest to justify resurrecting the series properly.
I need the second half of Mankind Divided, seriously.
Somehow the idea of a Deus Ex Remaster with Doom 3 Shiny Realism is more appealing to me than another Unreal Engine 5 remake. It's absolutely baffling but Idk im up for it
Excellent. They took an entirely playable 25 years old game, made it look like a 20 years old game (edit: lol, I didn't entirely read the top comment which seemingly had the exact same impression) and want our money for that. This is exactly what I dreamed of.
Seriously, I am a firm hater of pretty much all remasters, maybe with the exception of Infinity Engine enhanced editions, but even those could perhaps by served by GemRB (if the enhanced editions didn't demotivate the community from working on it) and the new characters added in the enhanced editions are usually ass.
I played through most of Deus Ex in the last 2 years for the first time, decided to do a not entirely vanilla run with a couple easily available community mods, and it was entirely playable (and excellent). No need for a remaster.
Ok, I’ll bite. The all-time best graphical style for video games, the ideal balance between fidelity, artistic expressiveness, and development effort, is what was state-of-the-art about 20 years ago. Specifically 2003 to 2006, the latter half of the sixth console generation. The heyday of DirectX 9. If you’re remastering an early 3D title, this is what you go for.
The 2003 to 2006 span is the goldilocks zone. Everything you need, nothing you don’t. If you go earlier, you’re sacrificing graphical fidelity for a retro vibe. That can work, but it’s an affectation. It usually doesn’t serve a remaster, which is supposed to honor the original vision rather than reframe it as kitsch.
The problem is that earlier hardware was full of compromises. The PS1’s depth handling was novel, using manual sorting instead of a Z-buffer, and its use of fixed-point math gave it that signature texture wobble and polygon jitter. The N64 had proper Z-buffering and filtering, but its texture memory was tiny, so everything looked muddy. The Saturn was worse, with dual CPUs and two graphics chips awkwardly bolted together, making 3D development a nightmare. And on PCs, well, this meme is extremely accurate. Pre-DX9 graphics were fractured across Glide, OpenGL, Direct3D, and assorted vendor APIs. Some games had card specific builds, and some games only worked with one or a few cards. It was the wild west.
If you go later, you run into the opposite problem. First, there’s the three or four year stretch where every game was brown because Gears of War taught us all that dirt and grime = realism. Even once color came back, the dawn of HD consoles demanded so much more detail and content. Ubiquitous DVDs and broadband meant ballooning asset sizes. Suddenly you needed massive textures, higher poly counts, more shaders, mocap, full voice acting. From that point forward, making a game look good wasn’t about clever design within limits. It was about raw production scale.
Yes, games have gotten prettier since. Bigger, more detailed, more cinematic. But at the end of the day, the graphics style of 2005 has everything you need to be clear and expressive without drowning in production bloat.
In other words, I Want Shorter Games With Worse Graphics and I’m Not Kidding.
I play a ton of old games (including Deus Ex) and I don't get this at all.
Though the most important thing is unrelated to my disagreement - I think the remaster makes Deus Ex look like a bad 20 years old game, from the trailer it kind of reminds me of cheap fan made "HD texture packs" from before neural upscaling, though not as bad, it's just a very exaggerated meme. The issue is that to me it looks low effort, not that it looks newer.
But anyway, onto your argument.
Well made games from any era beginning with about the year 1990 looked great. I really like the look of Ultima Underworld or Might and Magic III - VII. Thief is really lo-fi, considerably more than Deus Ex, but it looks excellent (played it for the first time about five years ago I think). Arguably the years 98 - 2000 were some of the strongest in terms of PC gaming ever. Unreal Tournament is still completely fine, so is Quake 3, Infinity Engine RPGs as well (coincidentally they're great games overall, but I'm talking about the graphics and its relation to gameplay).
Of course, this continues into the era you name, I agree with the popular opinion that Half-Life 2 still looks great for example. But it doesn't end there. The STALKER trilogy came out after that, used DX10, it gained a cult following and arguably was made even better when modders did some work on its graphics engine and assets.
Skyrim came out a bit later and as much as I dislike Bethesda for how they do writing and gameplay, they created a beautiful semi-stylized world within the limitations of PS3/X360 that, traditionally with the exception of faces, mostly still looks good today, it's functional, practical and non-cluttered.
I do think that sometime in the last decade or so it gradually became a bit absurd with the installation sizes and it doesn't always bring much to the game. But even there very clear exceptions exist. Kingdom Come Deliverance is absolutely exceptional in creating an image of medieval Bohemia. The forests and meadows truly bring the feel of bohemian countryside and couldn't be done with previous tech.
Arma: Reforger does the same except in a more modern time and there the technology is incredibly useful because only thanks to it we're getting a milsim where camouflage actually works like camouflage because the material shading, lightning engine, day of time and weather changes etc. are finally getting close enough to reality that these things works approximately like they should.
I don't have more time to expand on this, but despite where mainstream gaming has been going (I'm unhappy with that as well), I think it's clear that many of the advantages of modern technology are excellent and tremendously useful to bring new and interesting visions in gaming, and I also believe that many of the pre-DX9 games look and feel great.
Man I agree with those so much, it's cool to see my exact thoughts written down. I recently picked up a PS2 and have been thinking how the graphics were great and fit the need perfectly. So much visual, artistic style in the games. Modern huge production games look realistic, but the almost never hold my attention like a PS or Vita game.
Well this is all rather disingenuous, don't you think?
Noe one is arguing that 2005-games always had a bad graphical style or were ugly. But anyone who's been gaming long enough remembers the era and how many games had weirdly smoothy characters, shiny surfaces everywhere and overall just looked a little off an not cohesive. Even popular games like The Matrix: Path of Neo suffered from this, but there are countless other examples like Catwoman: The Game or Aquamna: Battle for Atlantic.
That's what people are justifiably comparing this to. Not the likes of Resident Evil 4 or Half-Life 2, but shovelware crap and even good games with generic "realistic" art styles that was piled on to both the consoles and PCs of the generation.
Only tangentially related to your post, but RE 4 is my go-to example of “good looking 2000s game”. Insane how good it looked given the hardware it ran on (GameCube) — the CRT iMac I owned back around 2000 was roughly equivalent in horsepower (same PowerPC G3 400mhz CPU, even) and nothing it was capable of running looked anywhere near as good.
The iMac G3 had a considerably less capable GPU than the Gamecube
What do you expect for the Matrix game? It was made by Shiny, after all.
Black Mesa is kinda nice.
I agree, but I'm not sure what I would call it, it's more of a remake that completely reimagines some parts. And as a very rare thing it wasn't made for easy profit, on the contrary a big part of the development was done with the intention of releasing it for free.
Like what V17 said, Black Mesa is a full-scale remake. IMO, a remaster is when the base game's visuals are there, but updated. Better resolution, QoL features, maybe some polish overall but no fundamental changes. A remake like Black Mesa is where they start from the ground up, making new models, textures and animations that re-create the old.
This Deus Ex one feels like some kind of weird middle-ground where it's too distinct to be a remaster, but too undeveloped to be a remake. Worst of both worlds situation IMO; the original animations being used with updated models feels awkwardly janky. I've never played Deus Ex before and this just makes me want to play the original. Even Warcraft 3 Reforged made me want to play it before it released and we saw the flaws under the hood.
Yea, it’s so pointless, lol. I can rant about this all day but here’s me holding back—two points:
Videogames have been looking almost the same for like 10 years now. I know there’s ray-tracing and whatnot but… come on, Uncharted 4 came out in 2016. So in order to keep that race alive, console makers, channels like Digital Foundry and bored teenagers on social media shifted this discussion to two numbers: Resolution and frame rate. One result of this is “4K remakes” that blow up single polygons that were supposed to blur into the background into razor sharp triangles, looking sterile and synthetic. But it’s more pixels, so that’s how we measure “graphics” now, right?
Secondly, Deus Ex always looked bad. It has bad art direction, wooden animations, weirdly drawn textures, oddly proportioned, square-shaped level architecture and a color palette committing to an odd contrast of gray and garish primary colors. I thought that back in 2000.
So the lazily upscaled “remake” works doubly bad. It does not fix any of the problems in art direction and makes the sad, empty polygons of its environment look even more sharp and unnatural. It’s the worst of both worlds. The original Deus Ex, played at 1024x768, at least looks retro and authentic, with pixels taking up as much space as they are supposed to. I really don’t get what I would get out of a higher res version (that includes the many community mods out there, btw.).
I think Nightdive does a good job with remasters, with some exceptions.
They're not bad, but I still think they're mostly unnecessary.
I think their good remasters are perfect as remasters. Mostly just the original games ported and touched up with some modernities like wide screen support, modernized control schemes, mouse look and uncapped framerate. Just lowers the friction of replaying these games (or for me, when it comes to Forsaken and Doom 64, trying them at all).
I usually look for those things in old games as well, it's just that so far I always found them among free community mods where necessary, so I see no reason to pay for that. I agree having that is nice and useful though.
There were no such projects for Forsaken or the original System Shock. The free source ports of ROTT are not good, in themselves outdated and buggy. The Doom 64 remaster is the continuation of Doom 64 EX which the Nightdive programmer worked on before he joined Nightdive; just a more complete version of the same work.
What it boils down to then is whether you are interested in playing these games. If you're not interested, of course their remasters must seem pointless to you. If you are, they're great for the reasons we both agree on. But that's not so much a comment on remasters as it is on your taste in games.
Deus Ex is excellent indeed. No actual need for a remaster.
IIRC, the BG EE editions feature new (recreated from scratch) assets, because the originals were destroyed in a flood. So they do create some additional value.
...invisible war could most use a remaster for modern platforms, methinks...
Honestly would love to see a remake of that one. It's been decades since I played it, but removing the constant loading points would probably go a huge way towards fixing that game.
Has that not been done? Thief 3 had the same problem and same engine and it was easily fixed by the community. The only reason it was done in the first place was because the original X-Box had a tiny amount of RAM when compared to PCs of that time and I guess developers didn't want to make the game so obviously superior on PC.
It is possible that the modding community around Invisible War is too small, so nobody did it, but do look around and maybe you'll find something.
I never did check to be honest. And it's likely they did it because PC gaming wasn't much of anything at the time, I remember the era well. No one really tried that hard to get stuff working well on PC because the market just wasn't there, so I don't think worrying about it being better was a concern.
But yeah, I ought to look. It was just never a favorite of mine, especially given my love of the original, so I've largely forgotten about it.
I hear there's a free, community-made mod that's a full remaster, and even an option to play as a fully-voiced, female JC Denton. Friends have said they like it
Deus Ex: Revision on Steam
One of my favourite games of all time, a true piece of gaming history thats themes become more prophetic every year and I could not have hated the trailer more.
Good old Aspyr.
As much as I love the Deus Ex franchise—never got to play the original Deus Ex—I am not going to be buying this. I simply wrote off Eidos after they gutted Mankind Divided and in general they became a terrible company.
And judging by the comments others are making regarding to Aspyr, it only reinforces my decision to not buy it.
God I wish we could go back to the old days when large companies made games because of (mostly) their love for it as opposed to making a line go up for shareholders. Only AAA studio that I can think of still fits the bill these days is Rockstar.
I would certainly suggest buying the OG Deus Ex and then using the free Revision mod available on Steam which tidies the game up, and fixes some bugs and issues.
I haven't played using Revision tbf but I've heard good things. The OG DX is still a ton of fun as well.