In case you haven’t seen it:

My first thought was “well, that certainly looks like a texture pack, and not a good one.” But then I thought some more…

The dev’s page doesn’t say much, but the Steam page describes it like this:

The definitive version of the legendary cyberpunk immersive sim, modernized with visual upgrades, modern enhancements, and quality-of-life improvements for a new generation of operatives.

And it isn’t just a texture pack, apparently; it adds autosave and achievements. That doesn’t automatically mean they “modernized” the writing (as at least a couple fans have worried about) or fucked with the gameplay…

…but why does that Steam page say it needs 20 GB of disk space? Deus Ex fit on a CD back in the day; add a couple of texture packs, and it’d be somewhere around 2 GB.

And 4 GB of minimum RAM? 16 GB recommended? What did Aspyr do?

Aspyr’s record lately is… somewhat mixed. Sure, the company has been around long enough to have worked on the Deus Ex Mac port in 2000, but how many people there now remember that? How much care did they take?

Apropos of maybe nothing, here’s Angry Joe on Aspyr’s Battlefront Classic last year:

Unacceptable. Ruined my whole weekend. ‘Bout to go on an Angry Rant. You’re about to see me play this, having a little bit of fun at first, and then the game just implodes in on itself. I have no idea how you can screw up something so easy. […] This game is decades old, and you fucked it up.

And that texture pack? The original Deus Ex wasn’t known for its gorgeous graphics even when it was released, but… the remastered Leo Gold looks like he’s made of plastic. Shiny plastic.

Also, Deus Ex Remastered is listed at $30, and you can preorder it for $27. To put that into perspective, Deus Ex is $7 on Steam or GOG, except it’s quite often on sale; at time of writing, it’s $3.49 on one and 97 cents on the other. And those texture packs I linked to above are free.

What is that $30 paying for? Autosave? OK, but not worth that much. Achievements? I don’t care and don’t want Aspyr fumbling around trying to insert achievement triggers into the mission scripting. Running on modern machines? Kentie’s mod still works and takes maybe two minutes to download and install.

Maybe the remaster will come out completely fine and at a much more reasonable price, but I have no confidence in that whatsoever.

P.S. Aspyr is a direct subsidiary of Embracer Group, which infamously killed off an in-development Deus Ex game last year. How often that gets brought up in February, when Deus Ex Remastered comes out, remains to be seen.