Older PC games were wild. Developers had all these ideas, and down there on the keyboard were as many buttons as one needed to be able to translate those ideas into gameplay. As time went on a standard control scheme for most genres emerged, but to move to that standardisation, there were growing pains. Take Deus Ex for example. It uses what now is the classic WSAD to move. It even uses Q and E to lean, space to jump, and X to crouch… but then things get weird. Reloading your weapon is semi-colon. Zooming in with a sniper scope is left square bracket, and the most important button in the game, quick save, is the plus key on the numpad. Because this is a PC game, buttons can be remapped, but there’s something compelling about a strange control scheme, especially when you get used to it. What starts off as nonsensical or unconventional morphs into a sense of uniqueness and identity over time. Deus Ex is like that. It seems to take itself rather seriously, but the plot is pulpy nonsense, bringing in elements of the Illuminati, AI constructs, and Area 51. The gameplay is infiltration and violence, but the immersive sim nature of the game allows for unexpected outcomes while playing. It’s that unexpected nature of the game that interests me. Exploring the immersive sim aspect of Deus Ex, in conjunction with how much I used the quick save and quick load keys. That’s the crux of what this video is about. It’s just going to take a little while to get there. Enjoy.
My Experience Playing Deus Ex
Deus Ex is a game of choices. Even in the year 2000, that was not revolutionary. All games are technically games of choice. The player is making decision after decision, often split-second decisions. Success or failure is mostly decided by the merit of these decisions. So how is Deus Ex different? It’s in how it was created. In an interview developer Warren Spector talks about how he played an early build of Thief: The Dark Project, a game designed around stealth. He came across a section he could not defeat by sneaking. He wished that he had some combat options to get past this hurdle, and then be able to return to the playstyle required. Obviously since Thief is built around stealth, the development team were adamant in not giving the players combat options because they feared that most players would not choose to play stealthily. Even though Warren Spector had been mulling over the idea for Deus Ex in his head for years, this feels like the genesis of what made the game so unique when it was released.
And yet it’s not as simple as Deus Ex being a merging of stealth and FPS gameplay. There’s RPG elements in there too. When the game starts, the player is asked to spend experience points to mold the protagonist JC Denton into the kind of super soldier they’d like him to be. Such an upfront decision is why I’ve played a lot of RPGs with walkthroughs over the years. I have this fear of spending my points poorly. Considering how long most RPGs are, it’s always weighed on me that I could get 30 hours into a game and find out that not only have I stopped myself from progressing further, but I just had a sub-optimal 30 hours. I started Deus Ex with a walkthrough for this reason. I wanted to set myself up right and understand how the game worked. I stopped following it just after JC returns from Hong Kong, thinking that I understood the game by this point, and that I’d be able to enjoy the rest of it on my own. It certainly helped me build my character successfully. See, the RPG elements are not only in the choices the player makes to specialise their Denton, but throughout the game, the player discovers aug canisters (augmentation upgrades giving Denton’s nano-infused body additional powers). Each canister allows the player to choose from two augmentations, and then similarly to JC’s skills, these augs can be upgraded throughout the game to become more effective. Augs don’t enter the game until after the first level, Liberty Island, which while imposing as an introduction to Deus Ex, is there to give the player an idea of the type of playstyles they can choose from. Do they want to play lethally, or non-lethally?
This is the appeal of Deus Ex. Does the player want to play Cyberpunk Thief, or Cyberpunk Half-life? I find non-lethal play more rewarding, so I decided that was what I would go with. The thing about Deus Ex though is you don’t have to “stay in your lane”. While I started my game trying my best to play non-lethally, as the game kept going I found myself in situations where violence felt like the appropriate response. Whether I was becoming tired of playing stealthily, whether it was who I was up against, or whether it was how the game just kept going, I soon played Deus Ex in a hybrid style, and I have a feeling most players (at least most first-time players) adopt this approach.
Even using lethal force, I never became comfortable with how Deus Ex plays. It always felt like the plan I had to overcome the obstacle in front of me was wrong. There were multiple times that I thought the story was moving towards a climax only for the game to continue. This happened when I went to Hong Kong, at the New York shipyards, in the Paris Cathedral, and then at Area 51. At least in Area 51 I was right in it being the final level. Then there are the endings. When the player first enters the bunkers of the base, there are two options for end game, either plunge the world back into darkness Snake Pliskin style, or kill Bob Page and let the Illuminati take over the world again. Both sounded like terrible ideas and I was afraid all the time I spent in this game world was going to end unsatisfyingly.
And it kind of did. There is a third ending once the player reaches the final areas. Helios, the AI that was inadvertently created by the player wants JC to merge with it, giving a dispassionate machine that cares not for power the job of guiding mankind forward. Now this idea didn’t sound all too great either, but at this point it seemed the lesser of 3 evils, and as this is a cyberpunk game, the science fiction of an AI taking over the world felt the most interesting to me. Warren Spector said he wanted the final boss of Deus Ex to be a choice about the fate of the world rather than a boss fight, and he wanted the choice to say more about the player than it did about JC Denton. I don’t know if I’d call it successful, but after hours of playing through level after level wanting the game to finally end, such a choice was the narrative motivation I needed as a player to be excited enough to see the game through (you know, if I wasn’t going to complete it anyway for this critique).
Quick Save and Choice
Before I get into why that is, I want to mention one other positive that I marvelled at while playing through Deus Ex. Even as a person who makes mental allowances for old graphics technology in older games (mainly cause I was there to see it happen), Deus Ex does not look good. It’s not able to populate its spaces, and as large as some areas are, they are made smaller by having to carve them out into separate sections separated by load screens. Despite that I always marvelled at the vibe of the game. Through the sound design and architecture, I was able to feel immersed in the areas I was playing through. Whether it was the bar at Hell’s Kitchen, the streets of Hong Kong, or the Paris Cathedral. Facilities like The Ocean Lab or the Vandenberg Air Force Base felt large and foreboding despite that not being the case. Heck the first level, Liberty Island is a great showcase for just how large and imposing these levels can be until you start exploring them. Deus Ex’s scale is an illusion, with the game’s staggering amount of levels adding to its length more than the actual size of any of them.
And of course the frequent load screens serve to make the levels feel larger than they actually are. That and how the internal architecture is often spatially different compared to what the level looks like from the outside. Yes the levels are cut into smaller chunks in order for the game to be able to handle them, but the most frequent load screens the player will see will be self inflicted. I’m talking about quick saving and quick loading. We’re finally getting to what the title of this video promised. So why use the quick save and quick load so much? Ideally it’s used in a safe space so that if the next section of gameplay goes wrong, a player doesn’t have to restart the level. It’s a self-created checkpoint. Since the player has control over it, it has other uses as well. Late in the game with dwindling resources, I would quick save before using a lockpick or multi-tool to see whether or not the rewards behind the locked door or alarm system were worth using the resource. If not I quick loaded and moved on. I would also use this trick to avoid rooms full of enemies that featured rewards I wasn’t interested in. Why waste the bullets if I didn’t need to? For a game that allows the player to approach each problem in a multitude of ways, the quick save / quick load keys allow for experimentation, to see what approach serves the moment best.
This was a shock to the development team during testing. They were hoping that players would pick a playstyle early on and stick to that, but found instead that before each choice the player would save the game, try something, load, try something else, load, maybe try a third thing, then load and pick the best path forward. I guess you shouldn’t be shocked if you give a player an overabundance of choice and then they decide to sample everything before making a decision. It also differs from how I’ve used quick save and quick load in many other games. In Half-life or Thief, it’s because I have to keep trying to get past a difficult challenge in the game. I haven’t worked out the optimal way through (or in the worst case, I quick saved in a bad position, and might need to restart the level). In Deus Ex, it’s because there are multiple ways to approach every problem, so while I could keep attacking the obstacle in one particular way until I make it through (which I had to do on occasion due to an ill-timed quick save), it’s often more adventagous to try and approach the problem with a different mindset altogether.
The Inconsistency of the Immersive Sim
The whole point of stealth is that the player engages on their own terms. So I have a question. Aside from the high stakes tension of reloading a dangerous save, does the ability to quick save remove tension from gameplay? If stealth is all about choosing the right moment, is that undercut by the player having a safety net to fall back on if things don’t go the way they planned? If the levels are giant puzzles to solve with multiple pathways, guard patrols, and thanks to the immersive sim aspect of the game, a score of unconventional solutions, does the quick save diminish the enjoyment of the simulation?
Before I answer I would like to point out that this thought exercise has nothing to do with difficulty or accessibility. People should be able to play games however they want, with all the allowances that let them enjoy their experience. Now let’s talk about the immersive sim aspect of Deus Ex. Instead of the levels being a clockwork mechanism that the player can work out a perfect pathway though, Deus Ex is more complicated. Yes the levels are giant puzzles to solve, but each giant puzzle is filled up with small puzzles. Small puzzles with multiple solutions. Gaining access to any room or getting rid of enemy resistance can be accomplished multiple ways, but it goes further than just sneaking through or going in guns blazing. The point of the immersive sim is to build in a bunch of systems that simulate realism. There’s a joke that you know the game is an immersive sim if you can go into the bathroom, turn on all the taps and flush the toilet. These systems can interact and react to each other in unpredictable and fascinating ways. I think this is the joy at the heart of the genre and why so many people love playing these games, the unpredictability of playing around with such systems. It’s also at the heart of my frustration with Deus Ex.
If a level is a giant puzzle box filled with smaller puzzles, what does that say about the game and the genre when all of the solutions are inconsistent? Yes I used quick save and quick load to see if using a resource was a net positive, or if it was worth exploring a room full of enemies, but the majority of my saving and loading was in trying to execute an idea. I never had any issue working my brain around a solution to any problem in front in me. What I came up against time and time again is that the unpredictability of the systems in this Immersive Sim meant that no matter how good my idea was, no matter how long I had played the game for, I could never be positive that my plan would be executed without error. I think that would be fine if I wanted to try something unconventional, but no, this was every single time I wanted to take a step forward. Now perhaps that’s not nearly the problem I’m making it out to be because I was consistently moving forward. I finished the game after all. I was able to make this video, but when I think back on my experience with Deus Ex, yes I can recall the vibe, the sound design, particular levels and that choice at the end, but mostly I think about quick saving and quick loading.
Conclusion
A couple of years ago I read Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. The book plays with time, and it’s one of those stories where you only have the full picture of the narrative after you finish reading it, so it almost requires a second readthrough to understand what’s going on. I feel similarly about Deus Ex on a mechanical level. I felt that way about The Witcher 3 as well. “Now that I’ve played through this and know how the game works, a second playthrough would be a lot more enjoyable because I now know what I’m doing”. Sadly, if I were to play Deus Ex again, I doubt things would be different. Yes I know more about how I’d want to build JC Denton up from the start, with which skills and augs to choose. Yes I know how I’d approach each level, where to go to complete my objectives and the best way to do so. I might even play around with the game a bit and see if I can change some of the narrative outcomes. The point is, I’d be better equipped to play the game and have a better time playing the game, but I think my core experience would be exactly the same. Thanks to the unpredictability of the simulation, I’d still be quick saving before each step forward, and quick loading when my attempts to put my plan into action enivitalby fail. Plus Deus Ex was just too damn long. I’ll say this, now that I’ve completed the original, I’m more excited to play through all the other games in the series. Yeah, even Invisible war, even Mankind Divided. Maybe sometime in the next couple of years. Thanks for watching.
Questions, thank yous, and what’s next
But what are your thoughts? If you’re one of the many folks who love Deus Ex, how do you get past the inconsistency of execution? What ending did you pick, and what is your reasoning behind it? What is your preferred playstyle? Let me know down in the comments. I’d like to take a moment to thank the developer interviews and game analysis that helped inform this video. Let's Play Deus Ex with Warren Spector, Sheldon Pacotti and Chris Norden, GDC’s Deus Ex Port Mortem, I’ve Played Deus Ex. She Hasn’t. Now We’re Playing It Together by Kirk Hamilton and Leigh Alexander, and Deus Ex - An Entire Series Retrospective and Analysis by NeverKnowsBest. Links to these works are in the description. At the end of my last video I said I wanted to take a break before I tackled Virtue’s Last Reward. I have now taken that break. Coming up next will be the continuation of my playthrough of the Zero Escape series. I’m looking forward to revisiting this one, so I hope you will all join me for it. Finally, if you enjoyed the video, I’d appreciate a like, a comment, and sharing it with your friends, and until next time, I hope you’re all having a wonderful day.
