Deus Ex: Influences, Mechanics, Themes and Influence

Context

After years of Utopian science-fiction being subverted by the likes of John Brunner and Phillip K. Dick, a growing distrust of centralizing powers and an over-reliance on technology erupted into a niche aesthetic movement appropriately dubbed “cyberpunk.” Inspired by questions about reality and identity, punk counter-culture, as well as the hard-boiled and Noir detective narratives, cyberpunk took an age-old anxiety of the future and brought it to the present by way of grimy, post-industrial cities policed by increasingly authoritarian forces and invasive technology that marked the lives of every citizen. Protagonists of cyberpunk fiction were usually loners that sifted through the shadows and used technology and an amoral conscience to get their goals. It was a movement that saw the future in a mostly negative light, and was used to display the fears of its authors over things like private-interest media, monolithic trans-national corporations, banks that were too big to fail, indifference to politics by the people at large, consumerism, apathy, and above all a lack of self-awareness.

   Cyberpunk had an immense impact on popular culture, even if the name itself remained relatively obscure. From seminal works like Dr. Adder, Neuromancer and Software, science-fiction took on topics relevant to readers. Instead of the far-future optimism that speculative fiction used to hold, readers now found a desperate and angry cry for change, or outright nihilism towards everything. Films like Blade Runner and Alien gained massive followings due to their adoption of the gritty cyberpunk aesthetic, and served to put, if nothing else, the look of cyberpunk fiction into the mainstream. On the edge of pop culture, entire genres of music were being born that could be seen as being influenced by cyberpunk media – adopting the abrasive, in-your-face attitude that the genre exemplified. In short, cyberpunk moved into many avenues during the mid-to-late 80s. It was a sign of the times that such an eccentric movement resonated so well, but it meant that this literature, these films and these genres of music would be a large influence for the next generation. And while cyberpunk fiction resonated with most media, it would be catered to best by a still-emerging art-form: video games.

   Video games of this time were still in their infancy. There were plenty of great games to be found, and even mature titles all the way back in 1983 like Ultima III would appeal to people looking for a depth of story and immersion. Still, games wouldn't hit their full stride until the early 90s, when a smorgasbord of titles would prove that games could take on relevant issues and be culturally significant while retaining an amount of engagement and player agency that goes beyond looking at a screen or turning a page. It was during this time that we saw titles like System Shock, Syndicate and XCOM: UFO Defense. Games steeped in science-fiction influence that could be enjoyed casually, or prodded for deeper meaning if you care to do that sort of thing. Games like these pushed the medium forward with good mechanics [for the most part] and interesting environments and atmospheres to draw inspiration from.

   It was also during this time that some of the fundamental issues of cyberpunk fiction were becoming more relevant in society. People living in the mid-90s were reliving the disillusionment of their parents from the 70s. They saw their government as corrupt and increasingly war-mongering. They (somewhat) rejected the mass-media and consumerism of the 80s. The entire decade was marked with cynical judgment and ironic, detached enjoyment. People wanted mass-produced, excessive violence in their movies and every teenager was relishing in a period of pop culture nihilism. If you weren't disappointed in your country, your peers, or humanity in general, then you were just another sheep.

This was the environment in which Warren Spector, the man behind none other than System Shock, pitched an idea for a game that was “Underworld-style, first-person action. But this is no fantasy. It's today. The real world” and called it Troubleshooter. As he continued development, the name changed and the pitch became more sales-friendly, but the idea stayed the same: a game that was a grab bag of first-person shooting, role-playing, action-adventure, and an all around immersive simulation. This was Deus Ex.

Story & Gameplay

Deus Ex is set in the near-future where a number of conspiracies of secret societies and cover-ups happen to have been true. Terrorism has become a major issue in the West as an increasingly oppressive United Nations presses for more militarized police and crackdowns on civil rights in the name of safety. In response, groups like the National Secessionist Forces have raised arms in rebellion, engaging in guerrilla warfare across the U.S. Meanwhile, places like Hong Kong stay free of government intervention and as a result become the havens for large, organized triads.

   The name itself is indicative of its nature: it's part of the phrase Deus Ex Machina, or "God from the machine." Indeed, this is a reoccuring motif in the entire series. Power from technology, to the point of godhood. Where all else fails, technology has the power to save.

   This is a world molded out of paranoia and fear. During development, headlines in the real world of India and Pakistan were passed through Ion Storm's office and made the baseline for cynical predication of the future of that region. Global warming has raised the sea level to the point that London has seasonal flooding and New York has spent millions constructing artificial levees and pumps. The Earth itself is becoming more hostile as civilized society drives closer than ever toward total annihilation.

   You play as JC Denton, a nano-augmented soldier who, along with your brother, are among the first augmented humans to be indistinguishable from normal people. Both of you are given the support of the strongest force in the world. You're also both UNATCO agents [United Nations Anti-Terror Coalition], and the game begins with you finishing off the remains of a failed NSF assault on the Liberty Island headquarters. This first mission displays the choice and consequence that Spector emphasized so much in his pitches, and it does that well. You're given a multitude of options to approach your goal, and problems you encounter feel like more than just developers trying to slow you down. The situations Denton finds himself in are consistent with a real world. There are no swinging chambers of death or chain-suspended crates in a room with a bottomless pit for some reason. This reinforces the feeling of being in a real world.

In a plot that is best described as “James Bond meets The X-Files” Denton travels far and deep into the heart of a conspiracy that is at times larger than life. Despite that, you'll find yourself in bars, back alleys, apartments and corporate workplaces more often than not --  "high tech, low-life." In these settings you'll be shown one of the most impressive sides of Deus Ex: world-building. Various newspapers detailing current events, books in NPCs apartments conspicuously thumbed to a page or quote that is just relevant enough to the situation you're in. Characters will discuss issues at scripted moments. You can engage many people on their motives and, as you're forced to move through the world, will even decide the outcome of many of these people's lives. Nowadays this is almost a given in any triple-A action-adventure game, but at the time all of this side-information was masterful.

   Another thing this game does well is atmosphere. Despite all of the environments taking place at night, there is a surprising level of variety in the level design across the game. Each city feels unique enough to be distinguished from one another. One of my favorite aspects of this game, while probably unintentional, is the over-arching motif of brutalist architecture. Images like this, this and this evoke a sense of confinement just as much as the idea of a totalitarian regime does. One of the only parks you ever see – the now-appropriately named Battery Park, feels intensely oppressive just by the nature of its low population-density and brutalist architecture. It's as if the concrete slabs are mocking the bushes that they're choking out of the frame. To add to this effect, the fact that NPCs are usually spread thin (again, I know it's more out of restriction of processing power than actual intent) makes once recognizable cities like New York even more alien.

   Getting back to the gameplay, Deus Ex also excels at providing the player with levels that are linear enough to make sense in the context of the fast-paced and interesting story, but large enough to allow for dynamic gameplay that diverges heavily from player to player. There are various guns, skillsets, equipment, toys and just nonsensical items to use. Ranging from practical, lethal and efficient sniper rifles to absurd Guided Explosive-Projectiles guns that have no use in the field other than to rain blood. Combined with an inventory system designed to carry whatever you want across the entire game, and a light RPG-upgrading system, and you have a variability that is only multiplied on top of the level of ways you can approach any given goal. And you can approach in many ways. Most, if not all objectives have at least three ways to be completed. Social coercion, technological prowess, guns-blazing attitude, stalking the shadows or even just opening a vent and crawling through to the other side. At the time of its release, none of this was found all in a single game.

   Above all, the mechanics of Deus Ex reinforce the story-driven aspects of the game while also providing engaging opportunities in variance from play-style to play-style. This is not to say the gameplay is always fun: things like lock-picking and hacking feel tedious and unnecessary, and while sneaking it can become painfully clear that the AI has a ridiculous myopia that should be looked at by their employers, as it leads to a huge oversight in most of the early levels [the later levels make up for this by having a far greater number of NPCs and use better patrols and alert systems].

   Around one-third of the way into the main story, you find a lot of major shifts happening in the game. Questions about your supposed gifts are brought up, and you wonder where the loyalty of many characters lies. It's a messy plot that lends itself to conspiracy and deception. Again, born out of fear and paranoia, this game has moments of convolution that are only stemmed by the concise dialogue and quick-pace of the story that allows for some of the weirder aspects to be forgotten. Events happen on a grand scale and while you're in a special place of this history, at times you feel more powerless than you'd think. A large segment of the game is spent running [figuratively] and that feeling of persecution stays with you even into the later sections of the game where the lives of numerous people are on your shoulders.

Themes

While the gameplay is entertaining, the real thing I think Deus Ex manages to do well is ask questions fundamental to cyberpunk media, like: What does it mean to be human? Can we trust large governing bodies with our liberty and interests? Is globalization worth it if it means losing cultural diversity and having more powerful governing bodies? How far can technology take us? Should we feel guilty for the way things have gotten? Can and should we rely on democratic ideals to lead us forward, or is there an alternative that's worth looking at?

   These questions aren't new. The first one has been around as long as humanity itself, and even ambivalence over technology is a long-standing tradition. Still, Ion Storm managed to propose these deep-seated questions in a medium that was still struggling with being taken seriously by some people. The fact that they that while still retaining a game that is fun to play and is hailed as one of the bigger influences in action-adventure and FPS games says a lot about the entire team behind Deus Ex.
   Throughout the course of the story, Denton meets a cast of characters that fall on various sides of the questions mentioned above: self-made businessmen haphazardly embracing technology because they think it will give them more power; scientists that question their place in the advancement of knowledge, and if it is worth it even advance knowledge if it stays in the hands of the rich; aging super-soldiers unwilling to be called obsolete and weary of the once-bright future; dancers, prostitutes, bartenders and homeless people down on their luck in various ways. They all have stories, and while the dialogue between characters is often sparse and monotonous, their characterization is done in a way that goes beyond this limitation.
   At it's heart, Deus Ex tries to present freedom and technology in the modern world, and how they could persist or perish. Such broad and, in some ways vague concepts are hard to pin down in just one piece of media. And while the game can't cover every aspect of these themes, they are invariably tied to Deus Ex. Nanotechnology is a driving force behind your own biology. Transhumanism is accepted reality for mostly everyone. Constant surveillance dismantles the very idea of freedom. People are chafing from the authority pressed onto them. The chance to be free, be it through money, gadgetry or violence, is the motivating factor for an overwhelming amount of the characters Denton meets. To this degree, Ion Storm successfully presented a world not unlike our own, a few decades into the future. It doesn't try to definitively answer any of the questions it brings up, but Deus Ex does make the case that these ideas are worth discussing because they're only going to become more relevant as technology progresses.

Influence & Conclusion

Unlike what Bioshock was to System Shock 2, Deus Ex hasn't had a complete spiritual successor. Instead, Ion Storm's 2000 game has had a profound but much more implicit effect on games as a whole. Many of Deus Ex's features are not born out of it alone, but Deus Ex did manage to connect and present things like choice and consequence, story-reliance, dynamic gameplay, secondary world-building and atmosphere in a way that felt new, and gained massive commercial and critical success. As a result, the next generation of games has had subtle hints of Deus Ex influence. Mass Effect focused more on the choice and consequence. Half-Life 2 [the sequel to a game that in turn, had heavily influenced Deus Ex] put an extreme amount of effort into building atmosphere through aesthetics and mood. Even games like Fallout 3 took the genre-blending and emergent gameplay that allowed for such variable stories from player-to-player, and put it on top of a successful game series known for it's story and role-playing ability.

   Deus Ex has had an immeasurable effect on the gaming world, through its respect for player intellect, mature approach to story-telling, dynamic gaming mechanics, and engaging themes reinforced through design, gameplay and story. Though somewhat dated today, I still find Deus Ex enjoyable to play even without HD mods, if only because it is capable of making me think about myself, my passions, the world around me, and the future that we're headed towards. Above all, that's what resonates with me most about Deus Ex, and it's why I hope more game developers take a page from Ion Storm's book when they're working on projects in the future.

Here's some additional links worth checking out if you're into Deus Ex:
Warren Spector's post mortem on Deus Ex
Gamasutra's Deus Ex entry in their Top 12 Games of the Decade
My favorite track from the game
Completely optional, non-spoiler conversation in Deus Ex