Yifes, I understand where you're coming from on Deus Ex. But I think you're forgetting the forest for the trees. Nothing Deus Ex did was remarkable by itself, as they were done, in some form, in games before it. And really, the individual features of the game were especially defining by themselves, especially compared to games that specialized in them (IE, Thief and stealth play, various RPGs, etc); but again, that's missing the point of looking at the complete game. Taken as a whole game, the game was executed very well. What was remarkable was the way Deus Ex allowed the player to interpret and play the game as he/she wanted.
...since you know that you can either blast your way through a mission or stealth your way through, the availablity of choice detracts from the game experience.
Well...what did you expect? You're playing an UN special forces operative from the outset. I don't know how old you are, but in 2000 when Deux Ex came out, the kind of open-ended play structure expected from games like Hitman, RPGs, and especially the GTA series was just on the teetering edge of becoming a realization. There were some games that accomplished it before 2000, but they were all isometric RPGs or, again, GTA. It just wasn't technically feasible yet for a FPS game.
Go and google some interviews with Harvey Smith or Warren Spectre after the release of Deus Ex. Just do a google search because frankly I'm too lazy to find them for you. One of the two stated the New York skyline in the opening level lacked the Twin Towers because they had to conserve system resource usage somewhere. It was easier to attribute the lack of towers to a "terrorist" attack. And this was over a full year before 9/11.
Where is the tension and suspense of a proper stealth game when you know that if you fuck up, you can switch some augs and just fight your way through?
Deus Ex wasn't a pure stealth game.
A game like Beyond good and Evil does a much better job of making stealth co-exist with action.
Beyond Good and Evil came out in 2003; and gaming in general changed quite a bit in the time between the release of Deus Ex and BGE.
...the gunfights weren't as thrilling as Half Life, the sneaking wasn't as well done as thief...
Both games were in respective genres that rarely went outside of those genres.
...the choices/RPG elements weren't as meaningful as Fallout
"Meaningful" as in, well, meaning what? The consequences of your actions throughout the game? You just got done saying having multiple choices detracts from a game! And the Fallout RPGs were rife with them. Yes, the choices you make in Deus Ex really don't amount to a hill of beans in the end, especially right at the end when you're given a direct choice of a set number of endings. But comparing that shortcoming to what you can do in the first two Fallout games is simply ignoring the technical limitations of PC hardware of the time.
the world wasn't as immersive or intense as the Shock games
Um, which "Shock" game? System Shock 1 or 2, Bioshock? The same oblique arguments you're making against Deus Ex could be made against either of the SS games.
Bioshock could also be said to be too forceful of its immersion on the player; both figuratively and literally. The player does run around in a city under the ocean, for crying out loud. Personally, I really didn't appreciate the boring gun combat. The forced philosophy and Ken Levine's thoughts on existentialism were grafted from a 100-level Intro to Philosophy course. The supposed freedom to complete tasks as the player saw fit had existed in a number of other quality games for years. And Bioshock came out in 2007.
Arguably, Bioshock (despite the obvious reference in name to the System Shock games from which Bioshock was inspired) is the Deus Ex of the past few years. It's gotten about as much praise and devotion and Deus Ex received when it came out. Deus Ex's sophomoric presentation of politics, conspiracy, and terrorism are equivalent to Bioshock's loose interpretation of Randian philosophy and faux-pas morality schemes.
It wasn't a bad game by any means, just one I thought was overrated.
...the story sucked.
LOL! As compared to what? Taking the game as a whole, the story's structure and telling were very remarkable for an FPS-RPG coming out for the time.
Is Deus Ex better than Crysis? Sure, why not, but neither of them are anything special.
There's very little to compare between the two. To argue which is the "better" game you'd first have to establish some sort of weird-ass standard for which to define "better". After that, and if anyone could be bothered to understand that definition, you'd be left with an inane list of differing qualities that come down to mere opinion or cynicism.
It's a very long way of saying the games are about as comparable as apples and oranges. One game in came out in 2000, the other in 2007.
You'd have better luck comparing Bioshock and Crysis. At least those two came out in the same year.
Ken Levine, now there's a man who knows how to make a fantastic game.
He is one of the rare developer leads whose teams have an unusual amount of freedom to create quality games. But if you look at the list of games he's had a hand in, several have either influenced, or been influenced by, Deus Ex.
Nobody is arguing with you about how certain games do certain things better than Deus Ex (except maybe Jerykk), but your reasons for bashing the game could be summarized to simply saying "I didn't like it. 'Nuff said."
This comment was edited on Aug 27, 2009, 17:00.