The Blogg

If I were asked to name my five favorite computer games ever, it would not be an easy task. It is quite easy, however, to know that Deux Ex is among them. The revolutionary mashing together of first-person shooter, role-playing game, and adventure game remains almost unique in its awesomeness. A sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, was released 3 years later but was disappointing dumbed-down from the original.

I was thus quite excited to see a notice about the publication of The Nameless Mod, a completely new game built on the Deus Ex engine and philosophy over the course of 7 years by a team of volunteers. As soon as was possible I got myself a working Windows machine, installed Deus Ex, and began playing through the mod.

The creators had very large expectations to meet by working with such an epic system, and I am pleased to say that they exceeded them in almost every way. The game is easily as long as the original. They claim a play time of 15 hours for a normal user or 20 for someone who enjoys exploring. I put an official 24 hours into it, in addition to at least half that many of dying or exploring something and reloading when I found it to be fruitless. That was only a single playthrough and, like the original game, there are enough decision points and factions vying for your services that it sounds like I could go through again and complete few of the same missions. Beyond that, I was only able to use about half of the weapons in the game. It would be worth a replay just to face the same challenges with a vastly different arsenal. The game world is lush with flavoring, from real-life books and music to a fantastic sense of humor about gaming through the fourth wall and the flaws of the original game. Every line (and there are very many of them) is voice-acted at a quality at least as good as the commercial game. If they had put together a few levels and a decent storyline without any of these frills it would have been an outstanding achievement. With them, it is the greatest fan-produced work of entertainment I have ever seen.

The game is not, however, completely without flaws. Very early in the story you are thrown out into a very large city to explore, with a very poor map. This sounds wonderful to people who thrive on exploring an open environment, like myself, but it goes a bit too far. The problem is compounded by the fact that the entire game takes place at night and the city is poorly lighted. It adds to the mood certainly, but it did not take long at all for me to become very frustrated with the tedium involved in traversing this great area with only a tiny flashlight beam for guidance. There were a few points in the game where it was not at all clear to me what I needed to do, and I do not believe this was because I failed to notice clues. In the course of play I encountered two hard crashes, but these are just as likely to be caused by the engine than the modification. At one point in the plot I had an objective to rescue some hostages from a group of terrorists. The hostages were there, but there were no terrorists to be seen and I was never able to accomplish the goal. In another situation I tried to help someone escape from a holding cell and he was hostile towards me. Much later in the game he appeared and had a conversation with me that gave no explanation for his prior behavior.

The setting of the game is inside a web-based forum about Deus Ex. At first glance this seems extremely cheesy, and many of the game mechanics make absolutely no sense in a world of avatars interacting through a message board. Fortunately, the execution is so good that you quickly forget the more embarrassing parts of it and suspend disbelief in the rest.

I need to take a break from it for a while and actually be productive, but I think it is quite likely I will play through the mod again. When I encountered those few confusing points in the game I looked for a walkthrough on the web and was surprised to find that none existed. While there is an IRC channel dedicated to the mod where players can get help, I am toying with the idea of writing one myself. This would be a massive undertaking when I have so many other things I need to be doing, but I may take it on anyway.