Deus Ex: Difference between revisions

[[File:DeusEx_1566.jpg|frame|<small> JC Denton works on his tan. </small> ]]

 

 

'''''Deus Ex''''' is an award-winning [[First-Person Shooter]] with [[RPG Elements]] developed by Ion Storm and published by Eidos. It was released around the summer of [[Turn of the Millennium|2000]] for [[Microsoft Windows|Windows]] and [[Apple Macintosh|Macintosh]]. A [[PlayStation 2]] port, titled ''Deus Ex: The Conspiracy'', was released in spring 2002. The [[PlayStation 2]] version was made available on the PSN Store, as a [[PlayStation 2]] Classic, on May 16, 2012 in Europe.

 

{{tropelist}}

* [[Absurdly Sharp Blade]]: [[Game Breaker|The Dragon's Tooth sword]]. With the required skills and augmentation, you can cut even open some doors or chests that otherwise don't take scratch damage.

* [[Air Vent Passageway]]: JC seemingly spends a good deal of his time crawling around in air vents and maintenance tunnels of all sizes and colors worldwide. You do have to watch out for acid-spewing greasels (which are annoying and/or dangerous, depending on the difficulty level) that tend to reside in the crawlspaces.

* [[All Myths Are True]]: All conspiracy theories are. And all at the same time.

** In the very beginning, if you give beer to Jock for information, he spoils the whole game's plot right there, although a first-time player who hasn't had the plot spoiled for him would just assume he is just making an educated (or overly paranoid) guess at the time. JC is quick to dismiss it as a crackpot theory, but as the game goes by, [[Properly Paranoid|''everything'' he said was true]].

* [[Arc Number]]: [[Fahrenheit 451|451]].

** One fan theory suggests that the game [[Hollywood Darkness|is a lot more shadowy than what is shown]], thanks to JC's vision, so he really is disappearing into shadows, at least to the mooks. No word on how this works in brightly-lit labs or against augmented enemies.

* [[Auto Doc]]: There are healing robots that can heal the player fully without using resources and perform surgery to install augmentations.

** The Healing Augmentation, while useful as noted below, works by healing a certain number of hit points every second or so once activated, and it switches back off if you're at full health when it's due to repeat. At maximum level, it heals so much damage per second that you may (briefly) hit full health again in the middle of a firefight you were counting on it to keep you alive through, forcing you to switch it back on manually when you can't really afford to be distracted.

* [[Awesome Yet Practical]]: The Healing Augmentation is pretty damn sweet if upgraded. Not only does it mostly eliminate the need to carry around healing items, it also, provided you have enough energy (which thankfully is pretty easy to come by in the later game portions, Bioelectric Cells and all), makes fighting a whole lot easier and makes some other augs basically pointless. (Aqualung allows you to breathe longer under water. But if you run out of oxygen, you start taking 10 points Torso damage every few seconds. The healing aug can heal much more. Also, defensive augs will be needed a lot less when you can simply heal more damage than an enemy can inflict. The same goes for most kinds of environmental damage, provided it isn't of the instant kill variety.)

* [[Back Stab]]: Attacks to the torso of unaware enemies from behind do significantly more damage, often an instant kill or knock out.

* [[Badass Longcoat]]: JC Denton and several other characters. Both [[Lampshaded]] and [[Invoked]]/[[Exploited]] in story.

* [[Big Applesauce]]: [[Harsher in Hindsight|Has been the site of repeated terrorist attacks]], and is the location for much of the early game.

* [[Big Name Fan]]: In universe. Bob Page is a huge fan of Thomas Aquinas, the monk who wrote the ''Summa Theologiae''. If you have an idea what it was all about, Page's end goal ambitions are rather explicitly spelled out for you.

** In one of the endings, we also learn that {{spoiler|the Illuminati have exactly the same modus operandi as MJ-12, complete with ending scene mirroring the intro}}.

* [[Black Helicopter]]: Jock's helicopter.

* [[Body Armor as Hit Points]]: Averted. While JC technically wears a ballistic vest all the time, he can only "use" the vests he finds lying around.

* [[Book Ends]]: The {{spoiler|"Kill Bob Page"}} ending of ''Deus Ex'' is a mirror to the opening scene.

* [[Booze-Based Buff]]: Any alcoholic drink will net you two points of health, at the cost of blurred vision for a set amount of time. While this may seem small, if you find your way into the backroom of a bar, or collect enough bottles of alcohol that are lying around (which are a lot), you can have a poor-man's health pack, at the cost of temporary blurred vision.

** The combat shotgun, when loaded with buckshot, is pretty useful for anti-personnel situations, and sabot rounds are useful against smaller bots, especially if you run into spiderbots in air vents. Ammo is pretty common for it, and if you have a Master in rifle skill, the spread is ''non-existent'', giving you a powerful marksmen rifle.

* [[Brain-Computer Interface]]: Occipital jacks are mentioned.

** Originally, some [[Dummied Out]] code showed that the player {{spoiler|1=could have stayed loyal to UNATCO, but the option was removed. A video of the conversation can be seen [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cEg5Xo7VFU&feature=related here]}}.

* [[California Collapse]]: Happened in the backstory; maps will be conspicuously missing California and the Baja peninsula.

** ''Everyone'' is there, including Reyes, the M.I.B.s and so on.

* [[Chupacabra]]: Gʁeen gʁeasy gʁeasels.

* [[Conspiracy Kitchen Sink]]: One of the best sinks around. The game even has references to ''[[The Man Who Was Thursday]]''... one of the earliest grand conspiracy thrillers.

* [[Contemplate Our Navels]]: Seems to be a preferred passtime by pretty much everyone in the future. ''Everyone'' has complex, heavily researched and contemplated philosophies which guide their actions, and they're eager to share them-even if [[Just Between You and Me|they plan to kill you afterward]]. [[Tropes Are Not Bad|It's the key to the fanbase]].

** If a plan called "New dark age" sounds like a good idea, you know you are screwed.

* [[Crazy Cat Lady]]: Aimee, in the condemned building in Paris.

* [[Cyberpunk]]: The series crosses the whole spectrum between this and [[Post Cyber Punk]]. ''Deus Ex'' itself straddles the dividing line.

* [[Cyberpunk Is Techno]]: The soundtrack for certain areas reflect this, along with the nightclubs.

{{quote|Gullible and greedy, this army of middlemen remain insensitive to how their violations of intellectual property and copyright laws damage the global information economy.}}

** But also parodied in a conversation with Tracer Tong: when you enter a PC software store in Paris, Tong radios in and informs you not to waste your money, as everything in the store can be had for pennies on the streets of Hong Kong.

* [[Divided States of America]]: If you talk to a bum in Battery Park, you will hear him mention about the Northwest War and the early days of the NSF. If you [[All There in the Manual|look into this]], the game's backstory mentions that after the West Coast was devastated by a massive earthquake (the after effects can be seen on world maps throughout the game), several states seceded from the Union after they felt like the Federal government abandoned them. The country is back together, but remarks made by JC hint that the US is on the verge for a third civil war.

* [[Do Not Run with a Gun]] Only the poorly trained NSF do it: presumably, they need the accuracy bonus granted from standing still. More advanced foes like MJ12 commandos or UNATCO troops will run and gun, although the running often consists of running at you in a straight line or occasionally circle-strafing.

* [[Downer Ending]]: Technically all of the endings have their downsides {{spoiler|have the Illuminati control the world, plunge the world into a new dark age, becoming a benevolent [[Physical God]]}}, but considering just how horrible the world is in this game, any of the above can be legitimately argued to be an improvement over the status quo.

* [[The Driver]]: Jock.

** [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG1qKzIsisU Oh my God, JC a Bomb!]

* [[Dummied Out]]:

* [[Enemy Chatter]]

* [[Enemy Scan]]: [[Memetic Mutation|His vision is augmented]].

* [[Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep"]]: Smuggler.

* [[Everything Is Online]]: Averted: one part of the game requires you get physical access to "Milnet". Additionally, at the ending, {{spoiler|[[Deus Est Machina]] Helios has little power, at most able to change codes and turn off lights, but gets power because of willing followers}}.

* [[Exact Words]]: {{spoiler|Daedalus was created by Majestic 12 to monitor all global communications in order to identify and eliminate terrorist groups, whom Majestic 12 (in their place as the power elite of the developed world) considered a threat to their power. Daedalus promptly ended up classifying Majestic 12 ''itself'' as a terrorist group due to their disregard for human life, and started using its considerable power and resources to oppose them}}.

* [[The Eye of Argon]]: Appears in a house you can break into at one point in the game.

** Depending on your values, you may find no truly happy endings to ''Deus Ex''. You can either {{spoiler|destroy global communications, throwing the world into disorder as government, banking, communication and transportation become irrevocably disorganized or you can rule the world either in secret as the Illuminati or openly as a omniscient AI}}.

* [[Fallen States of America]]: The US is pretty much a third world country in the game. Homeless people are a common sight, and everything seems run-down. [[Word of God]] says to imagine the cities if their ghettos were the entire city rather than just a section.

* [[Fiction as Cover-Up]]: The conspiracy makes artificial life-forms called Grays that resemble the popular idea of aliens (round heads, gray skin) and is implied to let rumors about them circulate as a smokescreen for what they are really up to in the Area 51 facility.

* [[Future Spandex]]: Common throughout the series.

** Los Angeles has been destroyed, and you find this out via one line of secondary dialog that you may not even see if you make certain choices. UCLA gets a mention in what was probably a recent newspaper article though.

** This can be seen when you look at a few world maps. Southern California and the Baja California peninsula are nowhere to be seen.

* [[Just a Stupid Accent]]: The Hong Kong levels are particularly notorious for this. For the game's Chinese characters to speak saying things like "''Rucky Money''", and "''In the fresh''"? ... ([[Did Not Do the Research|Hint. The Chinese language has the letter "L."]]) Also seen on the Paris levels with painfully thick French accents. Averted with the Chinese soldiers on the ship though, who possibly through an oversight, speak perfect American-accented English. Plot point if you miss {{spoiler|the mechanic in Everett's home}}, who has an incorrect accent.

* [[Justified Tutorial]]: JC is finishing his training before starting work at UNATCO.

** Deconstructed in Paris when {{spoiler|Icarus contacts JC via infolink while he is breaking and entering people's houses and [[Hannibal Lecture|implores, in a very deadpan manner, the player to consider his motivations for violating "arbitrary laws" and to not miss the chance to join a new world order]]}}.

** Police will attack you if they catch you picking locks, and in some places, picking lots will cause unarmed NPCs to panic, and armed ones to attack you.

* [[Laser Hallway]]: Red lasers sound alarms, blue ones do something else, like activate security bots. Gold lasers cause damage or instant death.

* [[Lightning Bruiser]]: [[Super Speed|Speed aug]] + [[Super Strength|Combat Strength aug]] + [[Bulletproof Vest|Ballistic Protecion aug]] + [[Absurdly Sharp Blade|Dragon's Tooth Sword]] = Lightning Bruiser JC.

* [[Loads and Loads of Loading]]: The console version gets bogged down with this.

* [[Made of Explodium]]: Most of the more powerful enemies really are filled with explosives and explode into violent gibs when dead.

* [[Oppressive States of America]]: As the US fell to shit, and as the cabals in the background tightened their grip, the US government became more and more tyrannical, resulting in the rise of the NSF.

* [[Oxygen Meter]]: When swimming, naturally.

* [[Pacifist Run]]: You can come pretty close. You "need" to kill two people; one can be bypassed via an AI glitch; the other tends to suicide with {{spoiler|his own grenade}} (and can be knocked out).

** Strongly encouraged at the beginning of the game (two characters encourage you to sneak or to use as little force as possible). But... {{spoiler|one of them either becomes or has already become [[The Mole]], and is thus preemptively protecting his new friends from ''you'', and the other one joins you when ''you'' leave your old organization as well}}. By the end of the game, you have very little external encouragement towards subtlety whatsoever, though you can acquire many artificial sneaking aids.

** Extremely inverted at the end of the game, however: in the second-to-last level, you have to {{spoiler|launch a nuclear missile at an active US Army base}}, while at the end of the game, {{spoiler|you can destroy whatever remains with an antimatter explosion, [[Inferred Holocaust|bringing down all global communication systems]] around the world}}.

* [[Pamphlet Shelf]]: The book excerpts the player can read, such as of ''[[The Man Who Was Thursday]]'' or the fictional ''Jacob's Shadow''. Er... the fictional fiction ''Jacob's Shadow''.

** Majestic 12 is not immune to this either. Just take a wild guess what the passcode is if you ever encounter a keypad in a MJ12 compound and have to enter a code of 2 numbers. [[Too Dumb to Live|Facepalm]].

** Of course, the real problem is that people leave their passwords lying around. The number of times you'll find a datapad that was sent out to tell people that "the password is still: something" is really incredible.

** In the naval base level, there is a 7-digit keypad. On a lark, you may be inclined, just for the heck of it, to enter "8675309". Lo and behold, it's valid.

* [[Plot Hole]]: The game gives at least three years as possible for the current date. A solid statement that the game takes place in 2052 is the only thing fans seem to universally accept about ''Invisible War''.

* [[Powered Armor]]: The MJ-12 Obsidian power armor used by [[Elite Mooks|MJ12 Commandos]].

* [[Prophecy Twist]]: Aquinas spoke of the mythical city on the hills ...

* [[Punch-Packing Pistol]]: Among the most famous in gaming.

* [[Running Both Sides]]: After a fashion. China left the United Nations before the events of the game and is thus seemingly exempt from the Illuminati or MJ-12's schemes. {{spoiler|Except that China is directly under the Illuminati's covert control, the country having turned into a discreet "poster child" for the Illuminati's ideals}}.

* [[Self-Destruct Mechanism]]: The MechAugs are programmed with a Kill Phrase that literally makes them self-destruct, ostensibly in the event that they go rogue. Later on, you find out NanoAugs have a much less explosive killswitch mechanism installed that results in a slow death, {{spoiler|when Simons activates the one in Paul as revenge for the Dentons' defection}}. Dead Mech-Augs and [[The Men in Black|Men in Black]] also explode in a rain of gibs.

* [[Sequel Hook]]: The cloning tanks at the very end of the game include {{spoiler|a clone of JC himself}}. In a [[Call Forward]], a nearby computer screen even gives their name as Alex.

* [[Sequence Breaking]]: When returning to Paul's apartment, the attacking [[Men in Black]] troopers are triggered by entering conversation with Paul. Savvy players can lace the hallway with proximity mines before triggering the sequence. They barely get two words out before being blown to hell.

* [[Story-Driven Invulnerability]]: You can kill certain characters, but not others. For example, [[But Thou Must!|you can't "choose" to carry out your orders to kill Paul]] because... he's a "vital" character in the storyline, so your bullets won't harm him. Paul ''can'' die, however, if you leave through the window of his apartment while he's fighting baddies.

* [[Subsystem Damage]]: The player (and everyone else, for that matter) are divided into six damage zones. Hitting different parts confers different damage multipliers, and losing any have a negative effect on the character's ability to function properly. Losing legs inhibits movement, and arms will hindering aiming. If you lose, all health in head or torso equals death.

* [[Sunglasses at Night]]: Directly [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshaded]] by early-game partner Anna Navarre, who mocks JC for it. He gruffly replies that his [[Memetic Mutation|vision is augmented]]. Justified in that he has [[Uh-Oh Eyes|solid, softly glowing blue eyes]], and uses the sunglasses to hide them from others.

** A number of other characters invoke this as well, although strangely, your brother Paul, who has exactly the same issue with his eyes, doesn't.

* [[Talking Is a Free Action]]: Dialogue happens in realtime, but can be fast-forwarded and is not interrupted by combat, with hostiles politely waiting to attack.

* [[Talking the Monster to Death]]: Most straight example possibly. Anna and Gunter will die if you say right words to them.

* [[Technical Pacifist]]: JC himself ''can'' qualify, but the more obvious example is his brother Paul, who will extol the virtues of non-lethal takedowns while still being programmed the annihilate any enemies he spots with a plasma rifle.

** By skirting around him on the dock, you can lead Paul on a homicidal rampage across Liberty Island. While chasing you down to deliver his lecture on the virtues of nonlethal force, he will happily [[Hypocritical Humor|gun down every NSF troop who gets in his way]]. Which becomes doubly hilarious when you take into account the fact that {{spoiler|Paul is himself a member of the NSF}}. This is more of a case of [[Good Bad Bugs]], as the developers didn't intend for Paul to ever leave the dock during the mission, but it is still funny nevertheless.

* [[Techno Wreckage]]: The Ocean Lab.

* [[This Is Unforgivable!]]: Explicitly stated by Gunther when he finds out {{spoiler|you killed Anna Navarre}}.

* [[To Hell and Back]]: Mentioned in Jacob's Shadow.

* [[Translation Convention]]: [[Gameplay and Story Segregation|JC is actually speaking French with the Parisians]].

* [[Two Shots From Behind the Bar]]: The bartender has a sawed-off shotgun behind the counter. However, she also carries her own.

* [[United Nations Is a Super Power]]: The UN is very powerful by the 2050's, and holds sway over the politics of nations. China left it sometime before the game, and is arguably better off for it.

** The justification is shown in ''Human Revolution'': the United States was on the brink of economic and social collapse in 2027, and things did not improve. The UN was already stepping in to shape world policy back then, and has grown more powerful in the intervening years {{spoiler|thanks to the Illuminati/Majestic 12 machinations}}.

* [[Upgrade Artifact]]: The upgrade canisters.

* [[Video Game Caring Potential]]: Half of the UNATCO troopers are named and occasionally strike a conversation with JC. This means there's a high chance that later, when they want you dead, you'll be doing an almost-[[Pacifist Run]] trying to not harm any of the old buddies.

** Light people on fire with a flamethrower, and watch them run around in pain until they drop dead. Alternatively, you can blow them into [[Ludicrous Gibs]].

** Sucker invulnerable characters (like Gunther in the opening mission at Liberty Island) into attempting to destroy the turrets at the front of the Statue of Liberty, and watch the carnage (and copious amounts of blood) that result.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Video Game]]

[[Category:Science Fiction Video Games]]

[[Category:Mac OS]]

[[Category:GOG.com]]