Was wracking my brains trying to figure out the location here. There's not too many in DX:MD - Prague, Dubai, Switzerland and London - but I didn't recall encountering a scene like this in the only one that fit the terrain (Dubai). Turns out this is actually from an expansion called "A Criminal Past" set in Arizona that I wasn't aware of - https://deusex.fandom.com/wiki/Penley_T._Housefather_Correct...
I enjoyed the game, interesting depiction of future Prague too. There's some slightly iffy voice acting and interesting pronunciations (pronouncing Václav as "Vaklav" instead of "Vatslav"), which is interesting since there's clearly some Czechs involved (see "Picus") :D
edit: I should explain the "picus" thing for non-DX and/or non-Czechs. There is a media company in the latter two Deus Ex games called "Picus". This is close to a rude word in Czech: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%AD%C4%8Dus. Also fun fact, I was told "čus, píčus!" (pron choos, peechoos, first word is a loanword from German "tschus") meaning roughly "hey, ya fucker!" was how you say "cheers" when I first arrived here. It can be how you say cheers, but only to good friends who you know enjoy talking like that :)
I played DX:MD just before Cyberpunk, and it made Cyberpunk feel so dead and barren in comparison. The levels of interactivity and exploration in MD's Prague were crazy off the charts in direct comparison.
Discovering an entire underground little civilization in the sewers and tunnels I could have equally just easily missed etc. really made me feel like I was discovering things just for me. Cyberpunk instead felt like clinically crossing off items on the map/quest tracker todo list; aside from the fantastic visuals, just looking around on your own offered basically no rewards at all in the game.
Similar feelings around NPC interaction and AI.
Add the fact that Cyberpunk's "hand-holding you through the environment" approach feels more and more lacklustre and grindy as the game develops, as they clearly ran out of resources to do all of the custom animations and setups they have in the first couple of hours to at least make it feel big and cinematic. The emergent/more sim-heavy/sandboxy approach of the DX games is more even there, and things tend to feel deeper rather than shallower over time, I think.
Deus Ex (like Thief) is a classic example of a genre called "immersive sim" or "systemic game". Basically games with an unusually high environmental/NPC interactivity. Not many of these games have ever been made. Apparently they don't sell so well. Cyberpunk 2077 is just a fairly normal RPG, so you can't really compare them.
Having high detail vertical slices of worlds is not an imperative in immersive sim games, but practicality often dictates it.
There's a lot of arguing about what constitutes an immersive sim (i.e. NPC interactivity is not one), but the two common concise definitions are "if you can open a door in several inventive ways (including bypassing it) and more generally, if you have so many complex systems in a game that they interact in unexpected ways. Purists also require first-person perspective, but others would also count Hitman or EVE Online.
There are also "sandboxy" games like the open world Zelda, with a chemistry/physics system and multiple-solution puzzles, but wouldn't quite fit the prototypical immersive sim, as there is
still fairly limited NPC interaction. Maybe those count just as systemic games in the wider sense.
I asked Spector about his 'immersive simulations' comment some years back:
"I just prefer games that are less puzzle oriented or "single-solution" oriented and games that offer deeper simulations. Simulations allow players to explore not just a space but a "possibility space." They can make their own fun... tell their own stories... solve problems the way they want and see the consequences of their choices."
Maybe precursors to todays sandbox game environments then.
I never really got how I.mersove Sims fail to capture a market considering the sheer number of people that enjoy similarly detailed SciFi/fantasy work.
Everything got more expensive. They pumped out Deus Ex in under 2 years with a staff of less than a hundred FTE.
As a child I was ecstatic when I learned the gaming industry had eclipsed the movie industry. Now I know what that meant: we went from Reservoir dogs to Marvel Endgame.
They're very expensive games to make and the audience is comparatively small. The audience might also just be hard to capture since it's not too easy to explain an immersive sim and the appeal to someone.
Another problem is that people absolutely love large open world games. Which can't really be combined with a meticulously designed immersive sim. So designers have not much choice if they want to sell things.
Perhaps immersive sims would need one real block buster to make the genre more widely known? (Similar to Elder Scrolls 3 or GTA 3 for open world games, Dark Souls for Soulsborne games, Super Metroid for Metroidvanias, etc.) There wasn't ever a real immersive sim blockbuster.
Or maybe it's just not for the masses. Like point-and-click adventures.
I love games that try to find the right set of compromises to have their cake and eat it, too, in terms of combining open world feel with linear, tight narrative and deeply simulated environments.
To me Gothic was one of the milestones: One of the first large 3D open world RPGs that had a chapter structure. As you progressed the main quest line, you would eventually cross chapter boundaries that would toggle major changes in the game world, e.g. whether a given city was in front of or behind the frontlines of a conflict, altering massively who you would find there or what it looked like. While some side quest opportunities would persist over the chapter boundary, other doors would close and new ones would open. All of this did a lot to feel like the game world was meaningfully progressing alongside you, and to show the impact of your own actions on the game world.
As for Deus Ex, even the original had these "hub" locations like Hell's Kitchen, maps you'd return to more than once, in different circumstances, while also taking you all over the world to mission locations. A lot of missions had "establishing locations" where you'd e.g. walk around in a new city a bit before breaking into a corporate HQ found within it. This gave you just enough freedom to make it feel like more than a linear corridor shooter with sim elements, while in reality being planned out and guided enough you had your narrative arcs and peaks. The sequels of course expanded on this with Detroit, Prague, etc.
There's fantastic game design artistry in blending and balancing these concerns. With DX, people usually comment on the sim elements, emergent gameplay, multiple approaches to mission goals, etc., but its story and map structure is IMHO another thing that made that game so groundbreaking and memorable. The immersive sim it got from Ultima Underworld and System Shock, but this careful orchestration of alternating linear and more free-form stretches, of having character arcs, of circling back on itself and revisiting locations, of having narrative beats was new to 3D/FPS games and showed the way.
I have vivid memory of walking into the HQ of the first DX, it was my first experience of an FPS safe zone/hub area. Something felt very freeing about it, and now in later life I realized that it was being given full agency in a game. No constant combat or objective. From a hub you have the agency and breathing room to wander and explore the world building, and a good immersive sim gives you lots to find and do while you wander.
Another great example of the genre (although very different setting) was Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Very detailed medieval world (that felt quite historically accurate) and lots of different ways to solve problems.
Can you explain how this would be a "tragedy of the commons"? I'm not sure I understand how there's a limited resource which each individual is incentivized to extract more than their sustainable share of.
Guessing they mean something more like "lowest common denominator". An otherwise good game without this complexity between systems/AI will sell just as well and cost much less to make.
I’ll recommend the original here. It doesn’t come close in looks, looking like the 20-year-old game it is, even with the fan made HD patches, but the world design, story, and interaction are great.
And FWIW, I spent very little time with Cyberpunk before shelving it.
I randomly chose a Spotify playlist recently called "Programming music". Was a few hours in, and was like, "hmmmm, this music sounds weirdly familiar", checked the playlist, it was a few hours of Deus Ex music! It was perfect to write code to!
I played them the other way round (well Cyberpunk, then Human Revolution and then Mankind) and had the same feeling. Cyberpunk is enormous but relatively hollow in comparison to both in my opinion.
On the other hand, DX has such intricate details precisely because it isn’t enormous, but rather constrained (still big, don’t get me wrong, but definitely way smaller). You can feel how someone poured attention to every nook and cranny, something just not possible on the scale of Cyberpunk. On the other hand, there’s Red Dead 2…
RDR2 is the most confused game I've ever played. They have this great open world and a lot of systems and "immersion" that very clearly years of work have went into, yet very few of those systems interact with each other (or the main plot) in interesting ways and the story is still the typical tired half cutscenes + half linear, highly choreographed gameplay with little room for creativity (no deviating from the exact text on the bottom) that Rockstar has been using mostly unchanged since at least GTA IV.
I must admit RDR2 stunned me in many ways, but I was still left a little bored. I think for the reason you explained. Occasionally something wild will happen, that fell organically out of the systemic gameplay elements and I will wish the whole game was like that.
I mean, there was a lot going on down there. If you ever find yourself browsing Prague real estate, definitely inquire about secret doors in the basement, trap doors, tunnels, and the like! If there's stuff missing in the pantry, you want to be able to rule out your neighbors.
one major success of the franchise is its depiction of a future that feels genuinely forward oriented. I think they dubbed their art direction 'cyber renaissance' (HR in the remaster comes with a great developer narration) and it genuinely manages to seem novel.
There's also a lot of very smart world-building and writing in the ebooks scattered around the game. From tensions in Australia caused by wildfires and draughts to the antagonists backstory in MD featuring Ukrainian separatism in Belgorod it seemed eerily relevant at times having replayed it last summer.
Hm both the 'a' in "Prague" and "brag" are the same for me, might be an accent thing.
I'll give it a whirl, I promised myself no new games until I finish Elden Ring but maybe I can bend the rules a bit, after all it's a DLC not a "game" ;)
I never played Deus Ex, so I'm judging solely by the published videos and frames. The effect seems quite bad and unnatural to me. In the 1st side by side comparison, for example, the block blends with the terrain in a way that it shows its corners reflection on the terrain. Shouldn't be there some hierarchies coded so that the sand blends with the block base without looking like the block is penetrating into the terrain? Also, the 2nd video example shows some evident perspective errors wrt parallax. If this is the alternative, I would choose any day the basic hard-intersection version.
As everything in engineering it comes down to trade offs. It looks "bad" and "unnatural" mostly because you're given screenshots and gifs at specific angles that make the blending effect the focus and thus more obvious, but during gameplay the overall effect is positive and you wouldn't notice:
For anyone wondering, the images are from the Penley T. Housefather Prison, in the greatest DLC of any game ever (“Criminal Past” in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided).
Upmodded pre-emptively on the assumption you'll do a followup explaining your justification. But I disagree.
I think the best DLC was Minerva's Den, a Bioshock DLC about a man becoming obsessed with his work to the point he destroys his family, which is relevant to anyone that's career-minded and particularly to founders.
I personally enjoyed Criminal Past, if only because its final image finally justified the entire story of DX:MD. Before playing through this story, I had enjoyed DX:MD with the big caveat that there was a huge gaping plot hole. Not anymore :)
Agreed, I still felt DX:MD's finale was underwhelming but at least it made sense.
Potential spoilers:
I felt DX:MD needed a grander conspiracy for it's main storyline, and I thought they had that with the Orchid story beats, but then nothing came of that and the finale felt a bit disconnected. I suspect it ended too soon.
Minerva's Den was one of the best expansions I've ever played, and it's a shame it's hidden as BioShock 2 DLC. (Since it's a fully standalone story with an entirely separate protagonist)
Selling it optionally as standalone DLC that you can launch separately (like Deus Ex: Human Revolution's "The Missing Link") would've been great. But it was released in a time where patch certification, clumsy digital stores, and "Games For Windows - LIVE" existed and standalone/cheap digital releases weren't common.
I think you could produce the same effect without worrying about overdraw/sorting and without translucent materials:
1. Render the terrain to a separate buffer
2. Copy the terrain's depth buffer to the main depth buffer
3. Render all non-terrain objects normally
4. Smoothly blend the terrain buffer into the main buffer based on depth
This sounds similar to the method used in BotW, but allows for depth culling since the terrain is rendered first.
I'm not familiar enough with Unreal Engine shaders to attempt making it there, but I made a demo in ShaderToy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/ct3SDN
To be honest, I find that in most of the screenshots, this is not an improvement, but it looks worse. For the box in the first comparison videos, I definitely prefer the sharp edge. For a few things like the dust storm, the foggy circle, or even the accumulated dirt around the base of the large rock in the hero image, it does look good. For pretty much everything else shown in the article, it feels unnatural and overdone.
It definitely looks worse and unnatural, because in real life we don't see rocks or trees gradually morph into the ground on a gradient (unless we're on drugs). Where it looks better is in motion, when the harsh rigid angles would otherwise show off their jagged pixels. This blend technique is used where your eyes are hopefully not focused. If only seen in your periphory, the effect is quite nicely done.
I wonder if anybody can relate to my experience. Maybe it is just me showing my age but though I agree the visuals of modern games have become, much, more impressive I much prefer the older style.
Deus Ex is a good example. The original, maybe my favorite game, shows it age. Even at the time it wasn't the most impressive looking game. The environments are simple, must edges perpendicular etc. But it made everything very clear etc. It seems it was more easy to parse for me. Deus Ex:MD looks gorgious, but there is so much going on, everything looks so complex and cluttered that it feels way to busy for me. Also there is often a bluriness to modern games, I cannot quite put my finger on it but it seems it was filmed with a lense covered in petroleum jelly. I much, much rather see jagged edges.
That bluriness might actually be the anti-aliasing, TAA specifically. Pcgamingwiki often shows how to replace it with smaa because of that. Doesn't annoy everyone, but some it does.
I think it was the lighting, everything is so shiny and reflective gave the modern game this weird dreamlike feel whereas the original (also my favourite game which I replay every few years) feels dark and gritty
I agree with both arguments: In my examples it doesn't look natural (and having such a boring box is really a worst-case but serves well to show the effect very clearly), but on the other side it must be seen in context (like others said before). While nature doesn't have "translucent" materials, this soft edge can be interpreted as a transition you can often see in the real world: be it, that a little bit of sand and dust from the ground sticks on the base of the object or just a variation of the ground-height which avoids an unnatural straight line between the two "elements".
It is of course a hack, and it doesn't work perfectly fine when looking so close at the box, but in my eyes it works very well for e.g. the stones. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to overwrite the shader to disable the blending in the game. I'd have loved to show how Deus Ex looks Without this effect.
Video games are all about visual tricks that make them look more pleasant and not as much about physical realism. This looks much better in context when moving vs. the jagged original approach.
I've never liked the sharp object transitions typical of video games, but yes, I think that this technique only really works in specific circumstances.
I think it'd help a lot of the terrain geometry were distorted such that it looks like it's physically interacting with the object it's blending with (e.g. sand resting against the side of the object). If that were added to this technique I think it'd be a lot more convincing.
I agree that it looks bad close-up, but then if you think about the gameplay in that area, you are mostly just walking around and talking to other inmates and not doing much sneaking there, so you aren't up close with the edges at ground level, because you are mostly upright. I remember that area feeling very sandy while I was playing it so I guess the goal was achieved.
When I first looked at the images, I had the same reaction that they don't look realistic. Thinking about it in context though, I think they would be more suitable. The goal of these renderings isn't specifically to have properties that are realistic. The main goal should be for them to make the world seem natural and provide context. In that sense they are better than the sharp renderings which are a bit distracting. In a way I would consider them a bit impressionistic to give the player the right impression more so than an accurate frame-by-frame renderings. The true test should be playing the game with different renderings and deciding which one feels better.
I really want exactly this feature in Blender, it's sorely missing some sort of blending method between intersecting/clipping objects. The best use is always, of course, terrain up against buildings.
I enjoyed the game, interesting depiction of future Prague too. There's some slightly iffy voice acting and interesting pronunciations (pronouncing Václav as "Vaklav" instead of "Vatslav"), which is interesting since there's clearly some Czechs involved (see "Picus") :D
edit: I should explain the "picus" thing for non-DX and/or non-Czechs. There is a media company in the latter two Deus Ex games called "Picus". This is close to a rude word in Czech: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C3%AD%C4%8Dus. Also fun fact, I was told "čus, píčus!" (pron choos, peechoos, first word is a loanword from German "tschus") meaning roughly "hey, ya fucker!" was how you say "cheers" when I first arrived here. It can be how you say cheers, but only to good friends who you know enjoy talking like that :)