Having played Deus Ex 3 (a few years ago), Deus Ex 1 (this past week) and as much of Deus Ex 2 as my current computer will handle (also this week; probably about three minutes' worth, if it was running at or above minimum viable frame rate) I find it fascinating that Ion Storm hit on a formula in 2000 which is still 100% intact (read: not iterated on, as a game design) a decade later in Human Revolution.
I mean, I get that they tried fucking with it for Invisible War and people remember that with enormous bile, but still. Do we think that DX1 accidentally hit on a perfect game design that can't be improved on? Do we really? Because DX3 brings, iirc, a significant graphical facelift and some cover shooter mechanics, and that's it.
Ah, but there's the rub, isn't it; that graphical overhaul. It costs too much just to make a level in that art style; experimenting with gameplay sounds risky, especially when people remember DX1 so fondly anyway.
Two things that stand out to me, though —
- The UX of playing DX1 is rough, but DX2 released only three years later, and the welcome!-you-are-in-a-room; please-demonstrate-you-can-look-at-things, good, now-pick-up-an-item, good, now-open-the-door, good, style of opening gameplay is...well, I don't think they had it quite right, it's nakedly patronising, but in only three years the industry had moved on to the slick conveyor-belt intro plus integrated turorial plus expository loredump that is essentially unchanged in, say, Bioshock four years after it, or DX3 four years after that. Or, y'know, [waves hand at video games].
- Actual branching narrative in AAA video gaming is financially intractable. See: both art costs and Gamers™ constantly, emotionally bankruptly judging things principally by hours killed per dollar. A game with three hours of Content™ and an actual bona fide narrative fork in the middle means a two-hour play time for both Gamer™ A and Gamer™ B, both of whom are going to review bomb you on Steam for it being an hour shorter than your publisher's PR "promised" and both of whom have content they didn't see, might never see, which from a pure capitalist perspective is just wasteful. In other words, the classic DX "get all the way to the end and there's a three-button outro cinematic apocalypse menu; yay! Meaningful choice!" structure is not just wholly rational but the only possible way to do things, by the standards of video game production.
It just. I dunno, it strikes me as sad-funny that out of all the problems of the original game, Industry Progress In General took care of the UX ones and of the others, the ones the franchise opts to tackle are: Explicitly None. Human Revolution might as well be DX Remastered, for all the ideas of its own it actually has.