Its called Deus Ex: Revision.
Big overhaul to the graphics, people seem to love it. Its free. No charging for this mod.
I have mixed feelings to be honest. I know they put a lot of effort into it, some parts do indeed look much better, but other parts now look "over designed". Maybe "
beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but I personally think Hong Kong would have looked better keeping the original dark color and "run down" look (with new HD textures) rather than turning it into a
flood-lit over-saturated "carnival day" which kinda destroys a lot of the dark foreboding feel of being in a strange locked-down city during a pandemic for the first time... I also don't see the need to replace the soundtrack. The original's is perfect exactly as it is.
Reading through some of the comments on moddb, they're also not doing themselves any favors on the voting scores / reviews by apparently releasing it only on Steam when it's obviously one of those 15 year old games (like the original Thief's) where most copies in circulation are owned on original retail CD / GOG. Nothing wrong with releasing it on Steam as an option, and it can be installed with other platforms with extra steps, but we've already seen earlier on in the year how much backlash Steam-only-platform-lock-in attempts generated from the larger modding community in general and they could have avoided a ton of negative votes here with very little effort, a bit more common sense and a whole lot less "platform politics"...
Edit: Reading Steam reviews shows they've changed a lot more, eg, removed the "globe in the hand" intro (which perfectly sets the "Illuminati tone" right from the start) and simply replaced it with exactly the same conversation in an office... That's about as far removed an "improvement" for Deus Ex's intro as I can think of. Optimization is also abysmal (20fps on a GTX960 for a UE1 game when the other DX HD mod (New Vision) runs at 90fps on a 750Ti and stays a lot "truer" to the original)? The difference isn't texture quality, it's over-spammed clutter that virtually breaks the UE1 engine. Level design has been altered to be easier (eg, more barricade covers added in Hell's Kitchen, extra augs in the cemetery area, etc).
It's a nice attempt, but feels way "over-designed" to me. I prefer New Vision's "muted improvements" and certainly the original's color palette in several areas. They should have spent way less time on "new" soundtrack (that every other person is asking how to disable) and
trying to stuff more glow-in-the-dark trees into every concreted urban area than Skyrim forests (the lighting & saturation are
way off in that shot and it looks far worse than the original's (bottom right cutout) "creepy moonlit" ambiance) and more trying to reduce the age-old huge jarring effect of
"pretty HD environments + ugly character models can be less immersive than simply playing the vanilla original without any elevated expectations". Likewise, why should a
Metro that's been given an increase of 30x more lighting on the walls & ceiling now look twice as dark with a "black hole" for a ceiling?
This stuff still looks like some of the elementary mistakes made on some early Skyrim lighting mods where the obsession with "pitch blackness" requires reducing light output & surface reflections to almost comical proportions where
a few of your girlfriend's votive scented tea-lights will light up an outside path better than
several hundred watts of in-game industrial lighting can a single room... :biggrin:
"Needs less work". Literally. Keep the HD textures, ditch the lighting overhaul "improvement"...
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