Square Enix Tries Being Cool And Embraces Fan-Conversion Of Original Deus Ex

from the machina-me-happy dept

Deus Ex is a video game series built around the theme of human-augmentation and its effects on people's underlying humanity. It is published by Square Enix, a company built around the theme of trying to piss off fans at every possible turn. Whether it was the nuking of a fan-translation that had already been three years in the works, the company's loving embrace of stupid DRM, or cease-and-desist-ing an entirely harmless Final Fantasy fan-film out of existence, it's always appeared that Square Enix might just be some kind of corporate monster that can only sustain itself on the tears of its biggest fans.

But maybe they had their heart augmented or something? I don't know, but this story about Square Enix not only allowing a major fan-made total conversion to the original Deus Ex game to exist, but actually going out of its way to endorse it, is a rather profound about-face for the company. The conversion is entitled Revision, and it's pretty damned impressive.

Revision, which went live on Steam a few hours ago, is more than just a set of new textures, but holy cow, it has that. It’s not only a visual upgrade, either. Revision has a bunch of different mods, such as Human Renovation, which fixed glitches, re-balanced augmentations, modified the AI of various NPCs, and a whole bunch more. Fans have been slowly improving and tweaking Deus Ex for a number of years, but if you’ve been afraid to download a bunch of random mods, Revision is your catch all solution.

I haven't played it yet, but I sure as hell will. Having said that, the visual and gameplay updates are of a quality that you'd expect from a group of fans with a great deal of love for the game. This is normally when Square would step in and dash the sandcastle just for fun, but it's gone a different route, going so far as to issue a press release at the time that Revision went live on Steam.

Today Square Enix and Eidos-Montréal continue to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the release of the original Deus Ex® by authorizing a fan-created mod for the first Deus Ex game originally released in 2000. Called ‘Revision’, the mod by Caustic Creative overhauls the environments and soundtrack of the original Deus Ex and is available to download for free today on Steam®.

Huh. Deus Ex is all about conspiracy theories at its heart, so maybe there is some nefarious purpose behind Square doing this? All kidding aside, it's nice to see once-controlling companies embrace their fans and those fans' labors of love this way. After all, what's the harm? At worst, this will drive players of the new games to go buy the old ones and give them a spin. Everyone wins.

Filed Under: copyright, deus ex, fan art, fan conversion, fans
Companies: square enix