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this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2024
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There are some story-rich RPG shooters that are almost pre-2010 I could recommend, like maybe Dishonored or Fallout 3/New Vegas. But pre-2010 is tough, only ones I can think of are the System Shock or maybe Thief games.
Man, System Shock 2 was so good
I say yes both to SS2 and Thief 1&2. SS2 has several way for approaching most problems, a great story, lots of lore and a lot of character customization. It does lack story choice, but I feel thats ok for the setting.
Thief 1&2 are a bit more of a stretch, but if you like playing Deus Ex as a stealthy character, it will scratch that side of things. There isn't any character customization or story choices, but each level can be approached lots of different ways and they are all very atmospheric, with conspiracies and great story telling.
Thief is the only one that comes to mind from that era that holds a candle to Deus Ex's open-ended level design. Lots of different approaches to take on many of the stages. Well, as long as you didn't play on high difficulties, anyway.
There still aren't many games that go quite that hard on it. Open world games have a tendency to keep their set pieces much more simple. Maybe we'll see more of it now that Baldur's Gate 3 has made a big splash with the concept.
You should check out System Shock 2, Prey, Dishonored, Ctrl Alt Ego, EYE: Divine Cybermancy, and other Immersive Sims, or "Box Stackers."
I bounced off both Prey and Dishonored early on specifically because of how linear they were. I'm guessing they open up later?
Dishonored is about as linear as Thief, open-ended level design, generally. Prey is closer to System Shock 2 in that it isn't quite level based but not quite open world.
If you mean linear in terms of level design, they are both pretty open overall, similar to Deus Ex. If you're referring to the actual Systemic game design providing new unique emergent solutions, then they actually beat Deus Ex in many ways.
Okay. I wasn't as big on System Shock 2 as most seemed to be, but it's also been forever since I played it.
I'll have to give both of these another run at some point.
System Shock doesn't really share anything with Deus Ex except that it's also cyberpunk.
The original 2 System Shock games are Immersive Sims. They have systemic game design as the core focus of how the player interacts with the challenges presented.