It’s a tale of two immersive sim remasters: Over the weekend, we shared the first trailer for Nightdive’s take on Thief: The Dark Project in the PC Gaming Show, and the vibes couldn’t be better. Nightdive has already shown a strong grasp of Looking Glass’ Dark Engine and visual style in the System Shock 2 remaster.
The screenshots and trailer are extremely promising, showing a “how you remember it” treatment of Thief, lightly touching up its timeless medieval environments while overhauling its infamously low-poly, origami-looking NPCs. There’s also the promise of Nightdive’s customary DVD extras menu of art, preserved prototypes, and development footage.
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Thief Remastered makes for a shocking contrast with Aspyr’s upcoming Deus Ex Remastered, a game of a similar vintage and development lineage to Thief: The late ’90s ferment of Austin, Boston, Ion Storm, and Looking Glass. Aspyr’s first reveal of the project was met with skepticism for its confounding overhaul of Deus Ex’s visuals.
It looks like Deus Ex for the original Xbox, a half-generation’s advancement with a focus on now-dated graphical effects. Deus Ex, but hybridized with its own bloom-y, normal mapped sequel, Invisible War. That’d be an interesting conceit for a visual overhaul mod, but Aspyr explicitly presents Deus Ex Remastered as “the definitive version of Ion Storm’s legendary cyberpunk immersive sim.” We don’t have it in hand, but I would hardly call it “definitive” as a die-hard fan who habitually replays the original.
Nightdive’s work on ‘Shock 2 and Thief are a cut above any HD texture or model pack I’ve ever seen for the games, while retaining full mod compatibility. So far, there’s no word on mod compatibility in Deus Ex Remastered, but Aspyr has a decent record on that front with its Steam ports of classic Star Wars games, as well as its Neverwinter Nights 2 remaster, which I liked and nobody else seems to.
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Aspyr’s work on the Neverwinter Nights 2 remaster struck the right balance: It was largely light touch with the visuals, but it added Steam Deck and controller support, was only $10 more expensive than the $20 version already available on GOG, and, most crucially, made a game with longstanding bugs, performance hitches, and resolution issues run perfectly on modern hardware.
What Aspyr showcased for a remaster of Deus Ex isn’t even close to the same value proposition, though. The original Deus Ex already goes for less than a dollar in Steam sales quite often, and unlike Neverwinter Nights 2 Gold on GOG, Deus Ex largely runs well on modern hardware. Absent some kind of visual overhaul or Nightdive’s DVD extras, Deus Ex Remastered is left begging for a reason to exist.
The Golden Path
What’s most confounding of all is that The Embracer Group owns the rights to both games, and it has effectively A/B tested the response to these projects. Thief Remastered has been getting unanimous praise and buzz on social media—it’s a real love fest in the comments of its trailer on YouTube. Deus Ex Remastered’s own first trailer has a comment section that feels like a funeral, with multiple users explicitly wishing the project had been given to Nightdive.
It’s not too late. I don’t mean to pick on Aspyr here: I’ve enjoyed its prior work like the modern ports of classic Star Wars games or the aforementioned Neverwinter Nights 2 remaster, and the studio’s had a rough couple years. It had the Knights of the Old Republic remake taken away, and was also blocked by Disney from including The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod in its console ports of KotOR 2, leading to a multi-year court case.
But Deus Ex is too important to have a remaster fumbled like this, particularly if there’s any risk of the original game being delisted from storefronts as a result. I want to see this project either canceled or rebooted, ideally with Nightdive taking over or co-developing. It feels like a slim possibility, but Deus Ex Remastered has been indefinitely delayed since that initial reveal, and I choose to believe this world still has the capacity for pleasant surprise.
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