Deus Ex still amazes with attention to detail 20 years
Games

Deus Ex still amazes with attention to detail 20 years after its release – the player was killed by a piece of paper

portal PC gamer drew attention to inaugural streamer StickmanSham, which he did on his first playthrough of the 2000 model cult RPG shooter with stealth elements Deus Ex.

    Image source: Eidos Interactive

Image source: Eidos Interactive

Games like Deus Ex belong to the immersive sim genre, characterized by a simulated world that can overcome any obstacle in a variety of ways. Including those not provided by the developers.

StickmanSham also knew about this variant of the game when, instead of hacking the terminal, he tried to jump over security lasers near the smuggler’s lair and climb two iron crates neatly stacked on top of each other.

What the streamer didn’t anticipate was that the garbage bag he threw away from the fire (he touched the burning barrel) would shatter into random pieces, including scraps of paper. That’s remarkable in itself, but then comes the most interesting part.

One might think that in a 2000 game the pieces of paper would be sprites or models with no collisions, but not in Deus Ex: the piece of paper turned out to be a very real object in the world that hit the safety laser and triggered the activation of the turrets .

The StickmanSham character lived on for a few seconds after this event, and the streamer himself was deeply impressed: “It’s my first time playing Deus Ex and I just got humiliated by the craziest physics interaction I’ve ever seen.”.

The legendary attention to detail is one of the reasons why immersive sim mastodons like Deus Ex remain a buzzword almost 23 years after their release despite frankly weak sales numbers.