It’s said that every time Deus Ex is mentioned, someone reinstalls it. If that’s true and you read RPS, it’s possible you’ve reinstalled Deus Ex around six hundred times by now.
That’s where the comprehensive Randomizer mod comes in, which remixes the immersive sim’s levels to make the experience fresh every time. It’s also just received a major update which, among several other additions, lets you pet the game’s dogs and cats.
I’m long over the ‘can you pet the dog’-ification of video games, but this is a good excuse to mention the Randomizer mod. Here’s the trailer for this new version:
It lets you randomise almost every interactive element in a Deus Ex level, from enemies to passwords, repair bots to starting locations, weapon stats to augmentations. All of these randomisations are tweakable by the player, and can take into account other settings like the selected difficulty.
You might wonder what petting animals has to do with randomisation. The Randomizer mod also contains several quality-of-life improvements to the base game, including auto-fill for passwords you’ve discovered, an aug selection wheel, and a speedrun mode. Several of these improvements, by reducing the need for a keyboard, make the game much nicer to play on Steam Deck.
You can head over to the Deus Ex Randomizer page on Github for a full set of patch notes. That’s also where you’ll find download links to the mod, including an installer that makes it straightforward to setup even if you’re new to using Deus Ex mods.