The Deus Ex remaster has met a chilly response from PC gamers thanks to the baffling liberties it’s taking with the landmark RPG’s art style. If that weren’t enough, its $30 price tag ($26 for preorders) only looks more ridiculous when you consider that the entire mainline series—Deus Ex, Invisible War, Human Revolution, and Mankind Divided—can be had for less than $10 on Steam. I’m not including Mankind Divided’s throwaway DLC or the port of dumpy tablet prequel The Fall in this calculation. Sorry to all five Deus Ex: The Fall fans.
The announcement of Deus Ex Remastered made me very sad, a moment of genuine joy and surprise immediately deflated by the piece of work on offer. No one sets out to make a bad game, but I wonder what led to its seemingly sorry state, and if anyone at Aspyr, Eidos Montreal, or Embracer is surprised at the response.
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It looks like Deus Ex remade in its 2004 sequel, Invisible War, a “what-if” Doom 3 mod recreation of the levels, or, indeed, if the the infamous, long-dead Project HDTP was unleashed like a mummy’s curse—HDTP may have a genuine claim to being the first laughably bad retro game “HD texture” rework.
All the footage and screenshots of the remake show a game that eviscerates the original’s memorable vision of the mid-21st century, replacing it with shiny, aggressively normal-mapped surfaces lifted straight from the OG Xbox/360 era, and character models who wandered in from Xavier Renegade Angel.
The Steam/GOG versions of Deus Ex: Game of the Year Edition are priced at $7, but it feels like every time I’ve ever checked the Steam store page, it’s been on sale for exactly 91 cents (seriously, it’s always 91 cents). Other $30 remasters offer genuinely enticing features and upgrades, like Nightdive’s System Shock 2 remaster which folded in and expanded the work of modders, is faithful to the original art direction, and resurrects the game’s primeval co-op multiplayer.
Aspyr’s own Neverwinter Nights 2: Enhanced Edition boasts high resolution UI scaling, game pad and Steam Deck support, and upscaled textures that, while a minimal upgrade, at least leave the original art style intact. That’s also in contrast to an original game that’s $20 on GOG, and not available at all on Steam.
The benefit of making a classic available on more platforms and for more players is undercut by how horribly the visuals have been mangled. The fact that the entire series of original games is not only regularly on sale for less than $10, but literally right as this questionable remaster is announced, only further undermines the product.
PC gamepad and Steam Deck support are already available through mods like Revision and the Deus Ex Randomizer—the former of which is often debated in the community (I’m a purist, myself), but which I think is still an undeniably more appealing and more faithful visual remaster than the upcoming official product. If you want to jump into the series for the first time, it’s not difficult to get these games running on modern hardware: We have a full guide on how to have the best Deus Ex-perience in the 2020s.
I don’t want to be callow or flippant when it comes to the work that’s been put into the remaster, but someone in Aspyr, Eidos Montreal, or Embracer leadership should have had the sense not to reveal the project in its current state, much less put a $30 price tag on it. Deus Ex deserves that much.
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