We’ve done a lot of eye-widening on this website about the lofty requests of certain games’ system requirements, but it’s the recommended specs of Deus Ex Remastered that might just send my brow surging through the ceiling and into the fuselage of a passing Airbus, killing everyone on board. You’ve seen it. You’ve seen how it only adds, at most, five years’ worth of graphical nous to the 2000 classic. So, per Steam: a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, and an Nvidia GeForce RT-goddamn-X 2080? No. I’m sorry. No way.
As noted on Xitter by Mab, developer of fellow imsim ETOS, that’s more than what Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was asking for its own recommended hardware. And while that was nine years ago, it’s still quite clearly a more proficient user of visual whiz-bang tech than Deus Ex Remastered is. At no point, for instance, does Adam Jensen ever resemble a haunted bottle of children’s shampoo:
Also, they spelt ‘Nvidia’ as ‘Nvida’.
You must think us fools, Aspyr. Fools! To believe that a graphics card which cost 699 Ameridollars at launch could possibly be necessary to render the remaster’s meagre, sometimes actively vibes-quelling graphics changes. The original can run on a netbook, assuming any working ones still exist. There’s just no way. You’re lying. You must be. Oh god. Oh god what if they’re not lying.
What if you actually need, in 2025, high-end components to comfortably run a game built around something released a quarter-century ago? What if we’ve been played, and the past three years of stuttering, fan-torturing Unreal Engine 5 performance disasters were just a distraction from the true threat of questionable Blair-era remakes? What if ray tracing did nothing wrong and Randy Pitchford was only trying to warn us? That’s a reality I’m not sure I can face.
Y’know what, maybe some things are better left unbenchmarked. Sadly, there doesn’t seem to be much else for starving Deus Ex fans (hello) to look forward to instead, with a Mankind Divided sequel cancelled last year and Jensen VA Elias Toufexis vocally doubting the series’ future. With that cancellation came 100 staff layoffs at developers Eidos Montreal, a studio that cut jobs further earlier this year.
