Richard's Online Journal
The Nameless Mod
“Is there anything in this city which does NOT have some secret complex in the basement?”
“I doubt it. Everyone here is a Deus Ex fan, remember.”
Before we go any further, let me say this: The Nameless Mod is one of the best mods I’ve ever played. No question. I can’t think of many that have impressed me more, and very few that I’d actually put on the same pedestal. I have some quibbles, but it’s a phenomenal achievement. Download it now if you own Deus Ex.
If you take only one thing from this rambling screed, take this: I enjoyed it about ten times more than Invisible War, and that’s not me damning it with faint praise. It took seven years for the team to make it, and believe me, it shows.
“My city. My forum. My god, this mod’s actually out?”
I wanted to get the ‘it’s great’ bit out before saying too much more, simply because TNM’s basic premise might initially sound off-putting. It’s a Deus Ex mod, set in a Deus Ex style world… based on a Deus Ex forum. Think Tron or Reboot, only in in trenchcoats, with everyone happily living in a broken down world of casual conspiracy, godlike moderators, literal flamewars, and wacky memes about llamas.
It sounds ridiculous. It sounds like some light, fluffy bit of mastubatory fan-fiction that span out of all control. Even the name sounds like a joke.
The Nameless Mod is no joke. It’s definitely strange, and often very meta, and with a metal-tipped tongue stabbed right through its cheek, but in a way that hangs together surprisingly well. Imagine the original Deus Ex, only with conspiracy-names like Illuminati and Majestic-12 swapped out for things like “PlanetDeusEx” and “WorldCorp” and you’ve about got the size of it. It’s firmly a setting, not a gimmick, even if that’s almost certainly how it started out some seven years ago. Silly it may be, but it’s coherent silliness, and handled well enough that the goofier elements (most of which fade out quite early into the story, at least on the critical path) really don’t matter. By all rights, it should be insufferably annoying and cliquey. Somehow, it manages to work.
The only real issue with the fiction is that it’s often hard to tell exactly what the rules are — whether you’re interacting with ‘real’ forum members, or computer avatars with their own lives. When one claims he’s going to lock his rivals in a cage until the end of time, my first question is: “And this matters to the guy in front of his computer… because?” How, precisely, do you torture an avatar? Pelt them with Tubgirl links until they crack? Why is dying a big deal when you can just create a new account? To put it into geeky context, there’s a metaphor clash between Tron fighting for his User, and the Jeff Bridges character suddenly finding himself in the firing line. If you want a non-geeky one… really? Did you read the synopsis of this thing?
The Internet. Serious Business has never been so Serious.
The most impressive thing isn’t that TNM is up to Deus Ex’s standards in almost every area, but that it actually surpasses it in many. For starters, there are two campaigns, each of which is going to take roughly 12–15 hours, which means you get to choose which faction you work for during the bulk of the game. It’s not just a case of swapping the enemies out either. I played the ‘we seem like the good guys’ one, but while it and the ‘definitely the bad guys’ one have things in common, each has a set of unique maps, their own sub-quests and side-stories, and different characters to meet. Every line in the game is voiced, and while there are some dodgy performances from some side-characters, the overwhelming majority is professional grade stuff. No dodgy Hong Kong accents. No lobotomised main characters. There’s even… acting!
Far more important though is the astounding attention to detail. The phrase ‘labour of love’ usually goes without saying in mods, regardless of how good the result turns out, but TNM absolutely drips it. Hack into someone’s computer in front of them and they probably have a quip about it. Head towards an objective early, and you’ll usually get an Infolink putting you back on the right track. Achieve something in the gameworld and there’ll probably be a news story about it on one of the news terminals. It even anticipates many of the ‘clever’ ways you might have to break the map/story, and while it may not actually let you, it usually has a fun response to your naughtiness.
That’s before getting onto more random stuff, like some of the setpieces, or new code that does things like let you into the TNM IRC channel from desktop PCs in the gameworld, or play Breakout in the middle of enemy territory for some reason.
“Not affiliated with the Freeport City Hall of Mirrors”
Mission design is mostly fantastic, sticking firmly to the Deus Ex template, but with arguably better consistency. Wonderful as the early levels were, DX turned into a phenomenally flabby game after leaving the first couple of cities. TNM keeps the cool new stuff coming, including digging into the ruins of an older forum, a chance to stretch your legs in the fresh air, and a bit of good old fashioned freelance thuggery as time permits. As with Deus Ex, there are multiple ways to do almost everything, alternate routes to success, and lots of extra content outside of the main critical path. One thing I particularly liked was the Fallout style ending that comes after the credits, wrappping up a few of the smaller stories and characters and how you affected them. Certainly an improvement on Fallout 3’s attempt…
As for minute-to-minute gameplay, it’s straight Deus Ex, with everything that comes with it. The AI still can’t outsmart a specially imported fruitbat, no matter how badass a character it’s trying to be, the weapons are mostly the same as before, and the enemies are just the standard DX crew in slightly updated uniforms. There are some cool new toys to play with though, including a very helpful EMP pistol, and the devastating ‘throwing sporks’ wielded by the city’s growing army of Llama cultists. As usual, I stuck primarily to good old pistol and knives and multitools.
Always did like Deus Ex’s pistol. Not sure why, but there you go.
In many ways, this familiarity helps draw the focus onto the new stuff. It’s new enough, and anyone playing a Deus Ex mod in this day and age is presumably fine with the original game’s many, many eccentricities, even if they might be less forgiving of new ones. Despite the shared mechanics and similar world design, TNM has a strong feel all of its own, from simple things like rebalanced stats (no more swimming!), minigames, and a greater focus on mechanical enemies in many stages. It works well, even if I still find spiderbots a pain in the face with or without EMP.
More innovative things, like building design, the way it handles faction warfare, alterations to the terminal interfaces, and a lot of one-time effects and bits that I’m not going to spoil, all sit comfortably on the original game without ever damaging anything that already worked. The more you dig, the more new stuff you’ll find, and outside of a couple of jumping puzzles — just say no, kids — it’s all very welcome.
Achievement Unlocked: Avoided ‘Flame War’ Pun
Aside from a few fixable issues here and there, notably involving non-critical scripting bugs and a couple of crashes, there are only a couple of perpetual annoyances. These don’t affect the whole game, not by a long shot. Most of it flows really well. It’s simply that when problems did show their heads, they were usually one of these.
First, many of the levels are just too damn big. This is especially irritating on the outdoor maps, where you find yourself retreading the same handful of streets again and again and again to report back to people, or sometimes just in search of an objective you’re only told is “in the south west” or similar. By the end of the game, I was flipping on the ‘ghost’ cheat code just to speed up the journeys from A to B. There’s a lot of content, but a lot of empty, uninhabited space and closed off buildings with it.
Second, one obvious problem of a seven-year development cycle is that the designers are often too close to many of the levels and puzzles to see the confusion points. As a basic example, the main city has three districts, all of which are frequently renamed by mission objectives — asking you to head to the ‘slums’ instead of ‘Central’ and so on. One area relies on you finding a door that’s tucked away in the middle of a huge map, not in the giant temple that dominates the landscape, but round the back of a market. Another just tells you to find ‘a wall’ in the south-west of a map. Another points you to an alleyway, even though what you’re looking for is in a freezer next to it.
Rather too often, crucial information is either skipped over because it’s been forgotten you need to know it in the first place, or deemed to have been imparted because it’s on a computer somewhere, or was dropped in one of many infolink messages. It may never even have played, if a trigger didn’t fire or you didn’t take the route that the designers expected from you. It’s not usually too hard to find what you need, and you always know your basic objective, but you can end up stumbling around a lot around completely deserted corridors in search of the bleeding obvious.
In other cases, something important is there, but inconspicious. For instance, if you need multitools, you go to the Weapons Shop. Fine, except that they — along with grenades and other important items — are sold out of vending machines that are completely out of your eyeline and look like drinks machines until you get right up close. They’re hidden behind all the furniture, nobody ever points you towards them (that I remember hearing) and you have no reason to go over there unless you know they’re there. You don’t even know that you’re meant to get them from that specific shop, or if there’s some guy in an alleyway instead, or if you’re expected to pick them up in the field, or if you’ve just missed a room in your faction’s base.
Obvious, but only when you know what you’re looking for.
This myopia has another knock-on effect when it comes to tools. Unless you specialise, and specialise hard, you’re going to run out of things like multitools fast, and often be left unsure if you’ve screwed yourself over as a result. There’s a new Custom Difficulty setting which lets you increase the numbers of enemies, drops and other goodies, but playing on Medium, TNM seems to waver uncontrollably between positively terrified of letting players have too many tools, and throwing open the door to whole armories full of ammo, weaponry and so on for no discernable pacing reason.
For the most part though, there’s very little margin for error, especially when it comes to multitools. Scarcity makes perfect sense for game-breakingly powerful items like rockets and LAM explosives, but it’s a disaster if you run short on, say, EMP gear with half a level full of armour-plated robots still to go, or have no idea which of the twenty computers/user accounts on the level might have a code in them, or what computer your support team meant by ‘this computer’ ten minutes earlier.
(The fact that there are usually other solutions means that this is usually annoying rather than excruciating, except on one particular level in the PDX campaign that should never have made it into the mod in the first place. It’s like some evil-universe version of the best bits — a room by room masterclass in What Not To Do inserted into the game like a wire pipe-cleaner up the penis tube. Puzzles that break game logic. Rooms you have to take damage to get through. A complete lack of tools if you don’t already have them. Brutal numbers of enemies with little opportunity to recharge. Luckily, it’s being patched for the next version, but if you find yourself in an underground server complex full of tricks and traps, just switch on God Mode, switch on Ghost, and try to forget you ever saw it. Trust me on this. Although do wake up for the ending bit, which is pretty cool and very, very creepy…)
“Our top story again. Pedantic reviewer makes level designer cry. What have you done recently, demands angry mob. But first, the weather. It’s dark and it’s raining. Duh.”
The great irony is that most of these problems are only so noticeable because the rest of The Nameless Mod is such a quality production. You forget that you’re dealing with what I suppose you could call ‘amateur’ work, because only a few of the voices and elements of the basic premise really draw your attention back to it. It’s a love song, not just to the community that gave their time and names to making it happen, but to the game that brought them together in the first place. It begs, borrows and steals from everywhere, but still ends up with something it can genuinely call its own.
The amount of work that must have gone into every element is truly jawdropping, especially over seven years of people moving on and moving around, ideas shuffling about, new games coming out and old glories forgotten. There’s genuine sadness when a bum glances around, bemoaning the fact that Invisible War didn’t bring the new visitors to his ‘city’ that everyone had hoped for, just as there’s unbridled geeky joy from characters in the Fan Fic store that literally live to share their love of the original game, and lingering bitterness over the times that things went wrong.
Even without all this stuff, The Nameless Mod would be a fantastic mission pack. With it, it’s one of the finest send-offs any PC game has received, and a game that more than justifies the seventeen hours of credits at the end.
And if you do find it all a bit too fan-wanky for its own good, at least you can track down everyone involved in-game and blow their heads off with a rifle.