The Stack

And so I’m on to Hell’s Kitchen (or a small fragment of it, anyway), on the west side, just south of Central Park. This is traditionally a poor immigrant neighborhood, and is depicted as such in media, but in reality it’s been mostly gentrified for decades. It even goes by the name “Clinton” now to try to shed the old name’s slummish connotations. I recall the Netflix MCU Daredevil series was set in Hell’s Kitchen (because you basically couldn’t do otherwise, the character is as strongly bound to the place as Batman is to Gotham City), and used the destruction wrought on the city in the first Avengers flick as an excuse for why the neighborhood is back to being as run-down and dangerous as it was in the 1970s. Deus Ex gets the same effect from the general breakdown of American society.

Here, I think I’ve finally given up on trying to save absolutely everyone’s life. I really kept that up longer than I should have; the main reason I kept at it in the Battery Park segment was that Anna Navarre, one of the player character’s pointedly evil cyborg colleagues, kept insisting on congratulating me on losing my inhibitions about killing, and I didn’t want to let her have that satisfaction. ¹Ultimately, it turns out there’s a known bug that sometimes makes her say that even when she shouldn’t. Ah well, I know I’m doing a pacifist run even if she doesn’t. But Hell’s Kitchen has a section where UNATCO is in a shooting war with the NSF, just like Battery Park did, only larger. Holding back every possible casualty there just seems too onerous. I’m still trying to keep anyone from dying because of me, though, even by accident.

It’s a section with good diversity of action, with branching and side-quests and sub-levels. Less than a block away from that shootout, there’s a bar where you can question the locals. Appropriately enough, many of the locals are worried about all the shooting going on nearby. Some of the interiors seems to me a bit more ambitious than the environment models can really support, though: much like in Tomb Raider, the world is built to a scale for action and adventure, not normal human inhabitation.

And below the streets is the secret hideout of the MJ12 troopers with their ridiculous G. I. Joe outfits. As much as the game’s dialogue and in-game reading material aims at being more serious and thought-provoking than your typical circa-2000 FPS, there’s always something to stop the player from taking it too seriously.

OK, we’ve had another lull where my attention is on things other than blogging. Before I get back into Deus Ex, there’s one thing I’d like to note. Back in the first mission, just outside the entrance to UNATCO HQ, there’s a small armory, with a keypad-locked door. Once you’ve completed the mission, you can go inside the HQ building and obtain the code for the keypad. I didn’t need to. I knew the code already. It’s 0451.

Using 451 or 0451 as a keycode is something of an in-joke that goes back to the original System Shock, where it was the code for the first locked door you encountered, leading to a small closet full of goodies to give the player a little boost in the early part of the game, much like the UNATCO armory. (The developers sometimes referred to this as “the batcave”. At one point during development, there was even a poster-sized Batman logo on its back wall.) In tribute to this, the devs went on to use the code in other games, and eventually fans picked up on it and, when they went on to become game developers themselves, continued the tradition. There’s grown to be a notion of “0451 games” as a genre — games in the System Shock lineage, which use the 0451 code as a wink to those in the know — although apparently there are a lot of people who think of it as a Deus Ex thing rather than a System Shock thing, simply because a lot more people have played Deus Ex than System Shock.

And yet, at this point, 0451 as an in-joke has spread to games as disparate in content and gameplay as Firewatch, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, and Might & Magic X! ¹There are extensive lists at giantbomb and the main LookingGlass fan forum. If 0451 is meaningful as a genre rather than just a meme, then surely not all the games containing 0451 are 0451 games. What does it mean, then? Could a game be easily recognized as an 0451 game without using the 0451 as a keycode, and if so, what would it have to be?

Genres of course have fuzzy boundaries, and are created not by strict definitions but by “family resemblance” ²That’s Wittgenstein’s term, and he wasn’t talking about game genres, but rather, words in general. But it’s worth noting that his paradigmatic example of the idea was the word “game”.. There’s a core cadre of 0451 games that I think everyone would agree on, consisting of the Shock (both System and Bio-) and Deus Ex franchises, which every true 0451 game imitates to some degree. These are all “immersive sims”, another loosely-defined genre, the main attributes of which are (as far as I can tell) first-person perspective, an emphasis on exploration, deep detail, and a large skill upgrade tree that enables multiple viable approaches to overcoming obstacles (typically including both stealth and violence). Is “0451” just a synonym for “immersive sim”? Perhaps. But I think of the 0451 genre as a bit looser, more able to shed aspects while retaining its identity. Take Gone Home, a game that references 0451. It’s a first-person game with an emphasis on exploration and deep detail, but it doesn’t have any kind of skill tree and doesn’t have many valid alternate approaches. Is it an 0451 game? The idea wouldn’t have occurred to me if I didn’t see it on those lists of games that reference the code, but I’m willing to call it a borderline case. I don’t think anyone would call it an immersive sim, though. Ultimately, it’s not easily definable. It’s about how the game feels more than anything you can point at — and that applies to “immersive sim” just as much as to “0451”.

Usually by this point in blogging about a game, I’d like to do some more analysis of the story and how it affects and is affected by the gameplay. But I still haven’t reached any more story than I got to the last time through, and the main way the gameplay affects it is by slowing it down. Of course, the way I’ve chosen to play it doesn’t help there. I’m currently on my third restart of the Battery Park mission, this time because I realized that I could spend fewer lockpicks by going into Castle Clinton by the front entrance and holding off on picking any locks until I have enough XP from exploration bonuses to upgrade my lockpicking skill. (I’m still doing this stealthy-like, mind you. Instead of charging in guns blazing, I’ve found a way to laboriously climb up to the fort’s roof, there to creep around up above where anyone is looking and snipe them all with tranquilizer darts.) So far, lockpicks are pretty much the game’s most valuable resource, and their electronic counterparts the Multitools a distant second.

Those exploration bonuses I mentioned do a lot to confirm to me that the sort of exploration-maximalism I’ve been engaging in is in fact the right way to play this game. It’s certainly what the mechanics encourage, intentionally or not. It has some peculiar side effects, though. Like, a lot of places have a choice of two ways in, one that’s more sneaky and one that’s more fighty. But both routes can have their own secret areas, with their own exploration bonuses and loot. Obviously the maximalist approach is to claim both! Which is somewhat at odds with the clear intention that it’s a choice. I suppose this is why later games in the same lineage like Bioshock don’t put their major decision points into the environment like this. There’s something to be said for games that force you to make decisions as they come and live with the consequences, no backsies. But there’s also something to be said for games that let you get away with this kind of nonsense.

The second mission sends us to Battery Park, on Manhattan’s southern tip, where the NSF are holed up in Castle Clinton (a 19th century fortification of Doom-brown stone) and in the subway tunnels below, and desperate, starving people, the ones UNATCO is in theory supposed to be defending, are dodging the crossfire.

The whole level starts with a very explicit choice between storming the castle and finding a sneaky way in. I chose the latter, obviously. I’m still trying to continue keeping anyone from dying, even as my allies do their best to make this difficult. Not far from the starting point, there’s a place where UNATCO forces are already in a pitched battle with the NSF over a small shantytown. Just getting close enough to do anything about it before anyone dies is a challenge — maybe throwing a tear gas grenade in would help? (Tear gas in this game is a nonlethal substance that temporarily disables those caught in its cloud. In real life, its use in warfare is banned by the Geneva Conventions, but for some reason it’s considered okay for police to use, so it’s kind of up in the air whether its use here is a war crime or not.)

Regardless, it seems like the fighting doesn’t get started until you’re close enough to see it. So if I want to keep everyone alive, the simplest solution is to just not go over there. But that’s the exact opposite of the thoroughness I was talking about in my last post! There’s some decent loot in those plywood shacks, too — goodness knows how the ragged inhabitants of this future dystopia got their hands on it, but I want it.

That’s my ethic in this game: I must go to extraordinary lengths, not just to never kill of my own volition, but to make sure no one dies on my watch — but robbing them blind? Even those in the most desperate circumstances? That’s fine. The game kind of tricks you into this back in the Statue of Liberty mission: it presents you with an ATM that you can hack for some extra cash, and then shortly afterward you can find a note written by the person whose account you hacked, letting you know just how much it’ll crush his dreams when he sees he’s been wiped out. And you can decide you’ve crossed a line there, I suppose, and go back to an earlier save, but here’s the thing: if you do that, you’ll have less money. (Refraining from killing people doesn’t have this problem; you can loot an unconscious person as easily as a corpse.) My feeling about this is basically that this isn’t Undertale. My code against killing isn’t really motivated by caring about the characters. It’s more motivated by, well, the same thing it was motivated by in the beginning parts of Undertale, before I made any friends: challenge, and novelty, and a desire to see as much of the game’s content as I can. I really think that last point is too often overlooked as a motivator.

It took me a while, but I’ve finally gotten through the first mission without anyone dying. This is probably harder in the first mission than in any of the subsequent ones. For one thing, as I mentioned earlier, there are the various defenders on your own side, both human and mechanical, who will gladly gun down anyone who runs towards them. Then there’s Gunther. A cyborg like the player character (albeit from an earlier generation of tech), he’s been captured by the enemy, and one of the mission objectives is to spring him. Unlike me, he has no qualms about killing, and indeed relishes it. If he sees anyone he can kill on the way back to base, he will fight them and he will win.

But most of all, there’s the ending. When you complete your mission, your backup will sweep the area and take down anyone still standing. Please understand that these are not simply abstract, story-level deaths. Completing your mission objectives doesn’t simply end things and load the next map: you can freely wander the site afterward and observe the fallen. That means that if you want to get through the scene without bloodshed, you have to knock every single enemy soldier unconscious before finishing the mission off.

And sure, I’m making things unnecessarily difficult for myself. But I could be doing worse. This is a stealth game, and stealth games have a tradition of “ghost” runs: never be seen, leave no evidence of your passage. I remember playing Thief: The Dark Project and feeling like ghost mode was clearly the correct way to play it, the approach intended by the authors. Not that I did it that way myself, mind you. I played Thief more or less the same way I did this mission: rendering anyone I came across unconscious. It just made things so much easier! Places fraught with peril are rendered completely safe for leisurely and thorough exploration. There’s a heightened sense of freedom in that.

Especially here, where my pointless commitment to not letting anyone die has forced me to explore rather thoroughly. But unlike in Thief, this kind of feels like the right way to go. Not picking options that constrain you, but expanding the possibilities as much as possible. Open every door, unlock every chest. You’re not just a cyborg killing machine, and you’re not just a thief. You’re an investigator of secrets.

It took three sessions, but I finally feel like I’ve hit my stride. It’s a slow stride. Last time I tried this game, I had a self-imposed deadline, and I’ve come to believe that was a mistake. The stealth in this game is the sort that requires patience, and I intend to approach the rest of the game in the same spirit.

One thing I’ve been mulling over as I start this game again: how historical and political context has changed the the experience. That’s been the case from almost the beginning, mind you: this is a game released in the year 2000, and the first mission involves a terrorist attack on New York City. A previous attack knocked the head off the Statue of Liberty in a fit of heavy-handed symbolism. This is how we imagined a terrorist attack that destroys a major New York landmark happening a year before it happened. No coincidences, really: the fiction and the reality were both planned out by people from more or less the same culture, and the differences between the scenarios mostly reflect differences in practical constraints.

But that was two decades ago. Today, we have another major world event kind of reflecting a plot point in the game: the plague. In the world of Deus Ex, there’s a deadly contagion that I think was secretly engineered by the secret bad guys — I don’t think I’ve seen definite confirmation of that, but even if they didn’t make the thing, they’re definitely taking advantage of it to extend their control. The intro cutscene shows them talking about using their stranglehold over vaccines to blackmail government officials. Now, that’s pretty definitely not what’s going on with COVID-19. But the disquieting thing is that there are people who seem to genuinely believe conspiracy theories of the sort presented here. Do we really need stories that encourage this line of thought?

And that’s the crux of it, really. Part of the premise of Deus Ex is that all the old conspiracy theories are real. That hits differently in a post-Qanon world. There are people who believe this nonsense and, amazingly, they currently pose a non-ignorable threat to democracy in America. If a game with a similar premise were released today, I’d assume it’s right-wing. What are the actual politics of Deus Ex? Can I tell? I’ll probably be returning to this.

There’s not much to report about my first day back in Deus Ex. When I left off back in 2010, I had just finished the game’s first act and shifted the scene from New York to Hong Kong. I’m starting over from the beginning — even if I still had my old saves (and knew where they were), I’d want to start over to refresh my memory about the story, relearn how to play, and possibly improve on my plot choices. Maybe I can keep Paul alive this time. But on reviewing my old posts, I find that I had something of a case of decision-paralysis back then too.

I had some notion that I’d try to keep everyone alive this time through. I was eschewing murder in my last sally as well, but I remember there were still a number of accidental fatalities: I’d startle a guard and he’d go haring off and fall into a pool of water and drown, say. And I wanted to see if I could prevent that sort of thing this time. It turns out I can’t; even the very beginning of the first mission makes it almost impossibly difficult, with enemies that can spot you before you’re even really gotten out of your fortified base and, on seeing you, run straight into the automated defenses. I suppose I’m meant to regard this as a good thing, crack a half-smile and make an action-movie quip about it. All so the story can puncture that attitude later. Or, given how obvious it is that you’re on the side of the bad guys, so it can make you aware of the possibility of that attitude so you can reject it. I still haven’t decided how much of this game’s surface I think is intended to be ironic; it’s definitely set up to give the manshoot fans the manshooting they crave.

Anyway, all I’ve done so far is play through the tutorial and partway into the first mission, and read my old posts. One thing that’s bothering me a lot this time through is how dark everything is, even with the brightness cranked up to max. I commented on how dimly-lit the game is before, but I really think my current hardware in its current state is making it darker than it’s supposed to be. I’ll try to find a solution to this.

OK, it’s been a solid two months since my last post. That happens. I’ve been blogging since 2007, but not steadily; there have been entire years when I’ve made barely any posts at all. Sometimes I’m just not in the mood, and one of the nice things about this blog, from my perspective, is that I’m not under any real obligation to do it. But the decline of Twitter has led some to try to create a new golden age of blogging, and I feel like this means I should at least try to get back into it.

We left off Wizardry V just as I was beginning to explore the fifth dungeon level — something I had done just enough to be intimidated by its size and complexity. A two-month hiatus is a pretty clear indication that my desire to make maps, which was the primary motivation I had for pulling out the Wizardry series in the first place, has been sated for the moment. I do intend to get back to it sooner than later, before the state information completely leaves my brain, but first, I have an outstanding request (from several months ago) to finally finish Deus Ex.

(I had some notion that I was going to write about the games I bought in the 2022 holiday sales, but at this point it’s pretty clear that’s not happening. Maybe I’ll drop a post about Loop Hero when I’ve solidified my thoughts about it.)

The Wizardry magic system has a skewed symmetry to it. Spellcasting enemies and monsters pull their powers from the same spell list as the player. That may not be so notable today, but it was not something you took for granted in CRPGs of the time. Mainly what it means is that anything you come to rely on to give you an edge in fights will eventually become something the enemy can do as well. Until you can defeat the final boss, there’s no perfect, unassailable supremacy. There’s just an arms race.

I call it “skewed” because, despite perfect symmetry in what spells are available, there’s asymmetry in how spells are used, and it’s produced by the basic asymmetry of a singe party going up against an entire dungeon full of monsters. The player has to worry about wasting spell slots that they might need later. For the monsters, there is no later. They literally only exist for the duration of an encounter. As a result, it makes sense for them to use spells that I’ve declared “not worth it”, especially when they outnumber you and can cast them in quantity. I particularly noticed this back with the single-target instant-death spells used by the Priests of Fung back in Wizardry III, but I’m seeing it more and more with Wizardry V‘s expanded spell list. There’s a spell HAKANIDO that “drains magic”, expending some of its (single) target’s spell slots. This can be devastating when cast on your own casters, who have to continue to deal with the loss after the fight is over, but doesn’t seem worth using on monsters in a normal encounter. It’s a spell that’s in the spell list mainly just so enemies can use it against you, putting it in the same category as things like Animate Dead in D&D. Nonetheless, it’s there for you to use if you want to, and maybe it’ll become more useful at some later point, when I’m facing enemies with high-level spells and preventing their casting is of paramount importance.

Plus of course there’s some trivial asymmetry in what spells are even useful to monsters. There are a number of utility spells that are only used outside of combat, which means combat encounters never use them. There are also combat spells that are only useful against specific types of target, like ZILWAN (does massive damage to undead) and MAGATO (banishes demons). But that’s a relatively trivial matter.

I had a bit of a surprise recently. Remember how I said that there was an NPC (named the Ruby Warlock) blocking a passage, and he wouldn’t move unless I gave him something to drink, and after a few iterations of this I got tired of fetching drinks for him and decided to try fighting my way past him? Well, once you’ve killed him, he doesn’t show up at his post any more, the encounter replaced with a pack of “demon imps”. Before this, it had been a rule throughout the Wizardry series that enemy deaths aren’t permanent — that anything you kill in a fixed encounter comes back when you leave the dungeon level. Even Wizardry IV, the one game in the series to have any persistent effects on game logic that weren’t embodied in inventory, kept all deaths temporary.

That isn’t the surprise I mean, though. That came later, when I had occasion to go to the Temple of Cant in town for the first time in a while — my Priest had gotten paralyzed, and my Bishop hadn’t learned how to cure that yet. The UI for the Temple is a menu of all the dead or otherwise disabled characters who you can pay the priests to help. And there in the list was the Ruby Warlock.

I’ve confirmed since then that other NPCs show up at the temple when killed, and can be resurrected. (In a way, it seems a little unfair. When my guys die, I have to drag them out of the dungeon before the temple lists them.) So it’s basically an elegant general way to accommodate the player’s desire to solve problems through violence, and still provide an undo button in case you kill someone with important dialogue. Wiz5 is the first game in the series to need such a system, because it’s the first one to have killable NPCs who have functions other than being killed.

A few other random observations on this:

• If you’re the kind of person who does genocide runs in Undertale, you can use the temple as a sort of trophy case, preserving the bodies of those you’ve offed.
• The whole Wizardry system supports passwords on individual player characters, presumably to support multiple players playing from the same disks. It’s easy to imagine two players getting into fights over whether a given NPC should be dead or not, one player repeatedly killing them and the other repeatedly resurrecting them.
• I’ve talked with enough NPCs to get the impression that the final boss is a demonic being known as the Sorn. I wonder if the Sorn is resurrectable?