I just tried out TNM for the first time a few days ago and it's been a real kick in the head.. Not just because it's awesome, fun, amazingly put together, etc. but also seeing a bunch of names from the distant past popping up. A lot of the PDX stuff was probably after my time, but I definitely recognized evil_invasion & TRM and such as old posting pals from deus-ex.org..

I'm just wondering what happened with that community. Looking through the web archive all I can find is a form page that was up for a spell saying that the webhost had deleted everything, back in `09, I believe... right now it's blank. Does anyone know what was going on with the community those days? When the forum shut down or where posters migrated to (if they went anywhere at all)?

This is just a bit of wild curiosity brought on by a real wave of nostalgia but I'd definitely appreciate anyone with any insight about such ancient history. Thanks!

Well the English-speaking Deus Ex community is a bit all over the place right now. There's some of us here, there's some of us at TTLG, and I think a few of us may still check PDX once in a while though I think that place is pretty much a ghost town. As far as I can tell from outside, the Polish and Russian communities are doing pretty well. There's also DXHR of course, but I get the impression few of the old guard can be bothered with that, it's a fairly unpleasant mixture of reactionaries and noobs.

Added to what Jonas said, there are also the DX Alpha forums, quite a few people are still there and it's very active still.

Oh, and I'd advise not going to the DXHR forums, after lurking on there, it left me with a bad terrible headache at trying to make sense of some of their stupidity

That forum was fucking hilarious. Before the game even came out, a bit of news would come out and everyone would suddenly react to it and say "It's not Deus Ex!" etc and then someone would cry and say they're cancelling their preorder. Good times.

It's not like we didn't have any of that here. It just seems to exist in higher concentrations on the DXHR board.

I know you're referring to me as well as others, but at least here on this board people are somewhat more reasonable. I was there from the very first moment, and even then there were many people saying "this game is gonna suck" and other saying "this is going to be the best thing EVAH". While literally no information whatsoever had been released. I only got disappointed after the first preview, where the exact things I didn't really care about in DX were stressed and other, more interesting things were not mentioned and a lot of stupid ideas came forward. After more and more information was leaked or released everyone got divided into two groups: those thinking it was going to be awesome, basically being extremely enthusiastic about any change HR made to the original concept, and the haters, who were opposed to any change and just generally disliked everything. Neither group argued consistently. That was the moment I left.

Which arguably is what almost always happens.

I was a staunch "this is going to be awesome" fanatic before the release of Invisible War, at the official forums.

Not making that mistake again...if at all possible, don't partake in pre-release discussions at discussion boards.

Why did they split it up so each gun used different ammo. Too hard!

Universal ammo sounded like a really good idea. You could use whatever weapon you wanted to kill with, and the level designers didn't have to spend a ton of time balancing a specific aspect of the game that, while balance was needed, didn't add any psass to the game.

A systematic analysis of it reveals how retarded it is, both from a gameplay and narrative point of view, but I bought into the argument that it had way more ups than downs.

Not my proudest moment.

Actually the kicker is that it works just fine in Mass Effect 2, with just a tiny tweak: picking up ammo gives you more ammo for every weapon, yes - but using ammo only uses ammunition for that weapon. Turns out that was ISA's mistake

Not sure I could've come up with that myself, either.

Then of course in DXHR they went in completely the opposite direction and made ammo take up inventory space to really make it hard to switch weapons out in your inventory. It's workable, and it doesn't ruin the game, but I think it would've been better without it if I'm being honest.

I pretty much prefer Deus Ex 1's method - though I think ME2's method is fine for less exploration-based games.

But you're right; IW would've worked wonderfully with ME2's system.

DXHR had the advantage of a one hit kill melee attack which made all weapons effectively a shortcut.

Yeah, I was drowning in ammo since just using "E" was much more efficient. More XP, less damage, no more enemies, faster down...

Don't you carry like, 1 weapon in ME2? I don't think I ever used the side-arm. Or the heavy weapon. And that at "Nightmare" (or whatever it was called again, Nightmare's DA:O right?)...

I only used the side-arm when I ran out of ammo for the first gun, which actually only happened once to me. In that one mission just before or after you meet Ashley, or that other guy whose name I've forgot. Where you are fighting waves of enemies until you fire that laser or something.

Well, there's both hardcore and insane difficulty modes.

As an adept biotic, in the beginning, I ran out of ammo for the carnifax hand cannon so often that I couldn't carry it as my heavy pistol sidearm, because I'd be stuck using my smg-slot weapon against armored enemies and that was all sorts of suck.

I also had to seriously conserve ammo, so I had to switch between weapons a lot. The starting heavy pistol and submachinegun are made of assjuice.

Once I got a sniper rifle, things changed...and if I'd had the DLC weapons, everything would've probably been completely different.