Deus Ex Franchise - Immersive Sims

Hyper Vigilant Dumbass said:
I don't know if this is well known or even known at all, but I took a look at people who worked on Deus Ex because of the writing and truth nukes in the game and found out that Warren Spector, the director of Deus Ex, is Jewish. I also learned that Austin Grossman one of the writers for the game is also Jewish. Grossman's mother Judith wrote "How Aliens Think: Stories by Judith Grossman" this is a piece of the excerpt from the amazon store page:
"Meet, for example, Clara Diamant, "a rising academic star in her early thirties," who seems a model of innocence while studying and espousing postmodern theories of perversion. Or Robby, whose love for a young boy dying of tuberculosis is viewed through the uncomprehending and yet uncannily suspicious eyes of his wife. There is also the narrator of "A Wave of the Hand," who gradually comes to realize that her father is a woman. (She takes this bit of news remarkably well.)"
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It was the jews all along :stress:
 
BONECRUSHER said:
Remember there's ways to break into certain rooms/areas without actually needing to expend picks/multitools.
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Yeah, I've been using explosives to blow up doors more often to compensate, though there's been a few times I had to reload when I misjudge the explosion radius. I do appreciate that the plasma gun doesn't suck anymore, though I'm going all-in on low-tech this time.
 
M3xus said:
Yeah, I've been using explosives to blow up doors more often to compensate, though there's been a few times I had to reload when I misjudge the explosion radius. I do appreciate that the plasma gun doesn't suck anymore, though I'm going all-in on low-tech this time.
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if you want to fuck shit up you use the PS20, plasma gun was always your secondary lockpick because of the fuckhuge AOE in vanilla that PS20 doesn't have for some reason.
and if you dupe shit always go with scrambler grenades to get inside walls and shieet, IlliterateChild did some good videos on exploiting the game.
 
30+GameOvers said:
Think again, I am talking about the System Shock remaster here. Nightdive isn't innocent, nobody is.
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All this chat got me to finally pick up the (SW) Dark Forces remaster (especially since it's on sale for like $16).

So far... not bad. It's still got that 2.5 feel but has a lot of smoothing to things and interface updates (like using the mouse to look around). I think the medpacks have been changed but I haven't found my old instruction book nor strategy guide yet. (Though you can go to the Internet Archives and play the original game in your browser if you really wanted to do side-by-side comparisons.)

Man fun times.
 
Chuckwagon said:
Spector didn't have much to do with the writing and Grossman was IIRC one of the two writing contractors, responsible for the NPC barks and a little editing but none of the story & conversations. That would have been the job of Sheldon Pacotti, the lead writer, who wrote 8,500 out of the approx. 10,000 lines of dialogue in DX (Grossman wrote about 1,000 lines for comparison).

Pacotti, as far as I know, is not Jewish. Then again, virtually nothing is known about him, as IIRC he never seemed to give out any personal details (much less anything that could've fit into an Early Life section) in any of the few interviews he did over the years. This absolute prophet of God did return to write DXIW's main plotline but pretty much fell off the face of the Earth afterward - certainly he wasn't brought back as a writer or even a consultant on the Adam Jensen games - and I've heard from time to time that he's a professional writer but haven't been able to read anything else he wrote. He was still alive at least 10 years ago, since he showed up to play & comment on DX1 alongside Spector and Chris Norden (one of the programmers) back in 2015, but that & his brief appearance as a minor NPC in Nameless Mod (developed 2002-09, so he must've made his small contribution of voiced lines to it sometime in the mid-2000s) are all that I've heard & seen of him outside of DX1 itself.
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Sheldon Pacotti also wrote a few novels and has his own little indie game studio:
https://sheldonpacotti.com/
https://www.newlifeinteractive.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=68
https://www.youtube.com/@NewLifeInteractive
 
Maniacal Foreigner said:
Sheldon Pacotti also wrote a few novels and has his own little indie game studio:
https://sheldonpacotti.com/
https://www.newlifeinteractive.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=58&Itemid=68
https://www.youtube.com/@NewLifeInteractive
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Nice find. I already knew about the books (in that Speedy 3D interview from 2000 I linked, on the second page he mentions having written Demiurge in 1994-5 and released it for the first time in 1996; you can even read the first two chapters & the preface he wrote for the 2000 edition on an archive of his site) but his 'New Life Interactive' studio still being active is news to me. The last update to their website seems to have been in 2015 so I thought they were long dead, cool to see they've still been uploading videos to Youtube as recently as a month ago.

I will say it's a hell of a trip to find this guy complaining about the music industry trying to kill Napster and early torrenting in ye olde days of 2000 and even earlier, but at the same time never going full retard commie and instead promoting microcapitalism, cutting out the corporate middleman in favor of directly paying only the actual content creator (so on top of all his other prophecies this nigga managed to predict Patreon, SubscribeStar, etc. back in 1999-2000) & so on. I think shit's gotten way worse than even he could have predicted especially re: the corporatization, sanitization and consolidation of the Internet, but truly this latter-day Elijah of gaming was and still remains based beyond belief.
 
dx-meme10.jpeg

Anyway, if you have a few minutes to kill then I can't recommend reading the preface to Demiurge's 2000 eBook edition enough, it's a very rare glimpse into the real politics & mindset that Pacotti put into DX1 and is also pretty much the ONLY time I've seen him actually discuss his views in even limited detail (in interviews like the Speedy 3D one I linked, he talks about his RL political leanings for maybe a few sentences at best). Even here it's not like he outright tells you he's a Democrat or Republican, but there's enough of an insight offered that you can see a good amount of the thinking the mind behind Deus Ex put into the world he set up & his writing choices.

The court battles being fought this year over .MP3 files are just the beginning. The pace of change in the entertainment industry will only accelerate, and within ten years the entrenched powers may well throw up their hands and go sliding down their mountains of mud into an angry ocean. The capitalist system faces its first genuine threat since communism — a shift in the means of production so unexpected that even Marx may be sitting up in his grave and raising his bushy eyebrows. In ten years we will know whether legislation will be strong enough to preserve the capitalist business model, or whether the means of production itself will ultimately impose its own phenotype on our institutions.

A complete transformation of civilization is surely decades away and probably more. In Demiurge, global democracy and capitalism are thriving in 2996, exactly 1000 years after I finished writing the book. Our economic system may very well last that long — and may, in truth, be the most efficient and universally beneficial way to organize ourselves — but its apparatus, evolved during the Industrial Revolution to accommodate the manufacture and distribution of physical products, will increasingly rely upon legislation to preserve structures that would otherwise not survive in the "New Economy." The copyright battles over .MP3's are the examples of the day. A second copy of a song file is "free" in an economic sense because it takes no work to create it. Financial compensation for the artist is possible only if the community accepts an external set of rules that allow the definition of a "price" as a second-hand representation of the work that went into recording the song.
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I don't know how many of this thread's readers still remember politics on the Internet of the late '90s up to the mid-2000s, but my recollection is that an actual defense of the Western capitalist system as 'not that bad guys' & moderate reform thereof was unpopular even then. There were already commies, anarchists and other stripes of leftists online to be sure, but they weren't nearly as widespread & entrenched in positions to lord over and censor others as they are today; still many more politically-active netizens of the time were instead techno-libertarians who promoted radical change (usually of an extremely deregulatory nature) instead of reform and tended to have wildly :optimistic: takes about the future (most similar to the Helios ending in DXIW - technology being this simultaneously all-liberating and all-uniting force until we reached singularity, then utopia, was a nigh-universally popular trope then IIRC).

So this would actually have been not only more realistic but a fairly bold stance for Pacotti to publicly take back in the day. It would also explain why he actually made an effort to afford some upsides to the Illuminati ending and make the endings balanced instead of blatantly favoring one of the oppositely positioned utopian endings (Dark Age vs. Helios), and though I still disagree, it was enough of an effort that I can disagree respectfully.

Today, with decentralized systems like Napster and Gnutella, the individual crook does not need to make a capital investment, nor does he need to make the large number of copies that would attract lawsuits or police. He can operate with relatively low risk, downloading a few '80's punk tunes every few days and nothing more. If millions of people behave the same way, we suddenly have a law enforcement nightmare.
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YesChad.png

Copyright — as wise and beneficial as it may be, and as much as this author, in publishing an eBook, would like to see his own work protected — may in fact be an institution too expensive to maintain in the digital age.
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Well, I thank you for your honesty Mr. Pacotti, and your willingness to consneed that although you do like copyright laws for opportunistic reasons, they may not be tenable in the age of torrenting.

I do think that a technology that allows individual artists to securely distribute their work without the interference of media conglomerates will be a great benefit to society.
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Praise Jesus, he returns to baseddom.

The real enemies here — if we must pick sides — are the lackluster middle-aged bureaucrats who serve as the gatekeepers of taste for everyone on the planet. Or, rather, the stockpiles of capital that allow mediocre businesspeople to cram lousy movies like Armageddon down our throats.
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Haha, not only did this hit the nail on the head well ahead of the enshittification of absolutely every last media industry today, but I bet Pacotti had no idea just how much worse that shit would get over the next 25 years. DX1 was made by a core team of about 20 people (including Pacotti) + 2 or 3 contractors (including Austin Grossman) on a budget that must've been microscopic relative to modern games - so small that a $5 million profit kept the studio, Ion Storm Austin, afloat for five years longer than the ill-fated Dallas branch which shat out Daikatana - but today in the age of Forspoken, Dustborn, Concord, Dragon Age: The Veilguard and so much more, studios with teams that number in the hundreds routinely burn $100+ million budgets on zero-effort woke slop that's guaranteed to bomb on release.

Their devs, far from being pretty quiet about their real-life politics as Pacotti was, openly take sadistic delight in pouring gas on the imminent inferno by shitting on 'the chuds' and getting into political slapfights on social media, then play victim when their game doesn't sell. At the same time they also aggressively sand down the edges & remove pretty much everything actually interesting & thought-provoking about their works due to the cancerous combination of Current Year politics and Tumblr-esque 'cozy' or safe space culture, with Veilguard being easily the worst offender in recent memory representing this trend.

Yet even those who get laid off, like Failguard's head tranny Andrew 'Corinne' Busche, usually fail upwards into other companies (in his case Wizards of the Coast). Corporations like EA & Microsoft still insist on shoveling insane amounts of money into these obviously flaming dumpsters year after year after year, no amount of games going down like Fat Man seems to have deterred them until extremely recently. Even putting politics aside modern games are also insanely bloated & unoptimized (look no further than the DX1 demake for a topical example), full of clunky & buggy-at-best gameplay and microtransactions which will fleece your ass harder than VersaLife ever could - and yet these problems are never resolved, if anything they just get worse with time, though gamers complain about them incessantly. Game journos are as far from 'speaking truth to power' and actually holding bullshitting companies accountable as 2018 AG37 is from the Sun. And so on, so forth, I don't think Pacotti specifically predicted (or wanted to predict) that.

And for all that, other entertainment industries are also pozzed as badly as or even worse than gaming - movies & comics are absolute Chernobyls to gaming's Fukushima or Three Mile Island, music well let's just say I think Pacotti would have a lot more reasons to hate Metallica than their chimping out over Napster today, etc. Tl;dr I hope you were a 'glass half empty' person, Pacotti. Because as bad as things may have looked in 2000, I can promise you it's going to get worse. Much worse.

The key word is "capital." Capital won't go away, nor will the promotional advantage it affords artists, but it will no longer be necessary for commerce. Artists will have options other than assimilation by AOL-Time-Warner. They won't have to suck down that ten percent commission; they will be able to keep one hundred percent of gross, if they choose. Why would a writer give away ninety percent of the revenue of a book to pay loggers, paper mills, printing presses, truckers, managers, and the pimple-faced kid behind the counter at the local bookstore when he no longer has to? To be sure, there will always be advantages to signing up with the Big Boys, but the very idea of bigness will face direct competition from microscale enterprises, some, like Pacotti Publishing, consisting entirely of a single shmo who claims to be an entertainer of some kind.
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Still remains a dream, Mr. Pacotti. But it's a good dream at least, pulled a good deal closer into people's reach with the advent of platforms such as Patreon and SubscribeStar (at least until politics & sanitization progressively fucked the former over), and far nicer to think about than the nightmares today's Powers That Be are trying to push on us.
 
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Chuckwagon said:
takes about the future (most similar to the Helios ending in DXIW - technology being this simultaneously all-liberating and all-uniting force until we reached singularity, then utopia, was a nigh-universally popular trope then IIRC).
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I've mentioned this before, but the Helios ending in IW has a really fucking creepy undertone to it that everyone seems to miss. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. I'd argue the best ending in the first DX is Illuminati, because you reset the system back to before everything fell completely to shit and you can influence it from behind the scenes to be better, which JC would, in spite of Everett's shittery. Dark Ages obviously is garbage because nothing would stop humanity from just rebuilding the global network and re-establishing the old structures, it'd just cause a fuckton of chaos and death initially, and Helios is entrusting the fate of humanity to a machine that could very well be lying through its teeth. Invisible War is more gray with its endings, but I still feel like the least bad one is the Illuminati option, unless you consider humanity becoming survivalist bugmen that can live anywhere via the Omar acceptable.
 
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BONECRUSHER said:
I've mentioned this before, but the Helios ending in IW has a really fucking creepy undertone to it that everyone seems to miss. It's not all sunshine and rainbows. I'd argue the best ending in the first DX is Illuminati, because you reset the system back to before everything fell completely to shit and you can influence it from behind the scenes to be better, which JC would, in spite of Everett's shittery. Dark Ages obviously is garbage because nothing would stop humanity from just rebuilding the global network and re-establishing the old structures, it'd just cause a fuckton of chaos and death initially, and Helios is entrusting the fate of humanity to a machine that could very well be lying through its teeth. Invisible War is more gray with its endings, but I still feel like the least bad one is the Illuminati option, unless you consider humanity becoming survivalist gods via the Omar acceptable.
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Personally I think the best argument for the Illuminati ending is how little time seems to pass in-universe from start to finish. You unravel MJ12's decades of scheming (which itself hijacked the Illuminati's centuries of even more schemes) around the planet in what feels like a week at most, probably less. For sure you must've worked for, then betrayed UNATCO and fucked off to Hong Kong with Jock in no more than about 48 hours, because JC's killswitch was supposed to kill him in 24 hours; you also probably did everything in Hong Kong in the span of 24 hours in-universe, because if he survived the battle at the 'Ton Hotel, Paul (who had his own 24hr killswitch) reappears alive & mostly well at Tong's office after you do your business with the Triads & VersaLife. I don't think it's unreasonable for JC to want to just kill Bob Page and call it a day, could've saved thinking about blowing up the global electronic infrastructure or becoming a cybergod for tomorrow, shame that forces him into working with the obviously treacherous Everett.
 
Chuckwagon said:
shame that forces him into working with the obviously treacherous Everett.
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Sure, but consider the fact that JC already took out Bob Page and destroyed MJ12, which was far more advanced and capable than the Illuminati at this point. Everett can't do shit wtihout JC smashing his conspiracy to pieces as well.
 
Miller said:
The HL2 Cinematic Mod? It was a meme at the time because of how shit it was, lol
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FULLY MODELED.
oh no its pipkun said:
you should watch the giant bomb quick look where they were kvetching about the voices. i have to hot link it because the giant bomb page errors out and it's not on their yt channel.
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you owe me 10 null coins for that, the original video is almost 1GB.
 
Battlefield42 said:
It was the jews all along :stress:
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At this point it doesn't matter if Spector is Jewish or not, he cucked out when it came to Deus Ex and later games anyway. If you go around sobbing how horrible it was to kill child NPCs with a rocket grenade and your later video game output is...disappointing, to put it nicely, then it doesn't matter what the early life says.

I suspect that Deus Ex Remastered will take out the fun stuff like the line about JC's women's restroom adventures as "unprofessional" and that annoying Chinese kid will be invincible.
 
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