Deus Ex Human Revolution Director's Cut: post scriptum.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut addendum.


Changes in short- many good, some bad, few ugly. Mostly good, overall- a totally fine edition of the game, all things considered.

     Director's Cut, introduced two years after the release of the original, acts as s superior, definitive upgrade over it, and in many ways it is. Nonetheless, regardless of the scale of success of this goal, its existence led to not only pulling the original version from the market but also even delisting it from the Steam store. Which is simply a bad, disheartening move, standing on flimsy practical and business justifications.
Removing the purchase option and announcing the existence of DC, and redirecting to it in a few places, should've been enough.

     DC on top of typical stuff like a rather seamless integration of DLCs including a story one (The Missing Link) that was itself designed to be an intermission, filling one blind spot in the story and timeline, adds ~8 hours of dev commentaries and a 45-minute “Making Of” documentary, and a highly requested  New Game + mode. All good, but some of the changes are more debatable and ambiguous.
While tweaks to boss battles are largely considered a much-needed improvement,  lowering the difficulty threshold by relaxing power regeneration mechanics (expanding default autoregen to two full cells, allowing for more dynamic, varied but also easier gameplay) might cause mixed feelings, partially because of lack of player control over it, same issue present for example in changes to the visuals and removal of slightly polarizing gold (yellow) filter.
While it might have been too much for some, it was a part of the original vision, enjoyed by many fans that didn't mind it. And just like in the original version there was no option to toggle or tweak that filter, now in DC there is no way to officially bring it back and people that might want to bring it back are forced to recreate it with the use of ReShade injector. Hardly an optimal solution and overall an example of inattention and neglect in the way this definitive version was treated.
Underneath it all, there are inexcusable issues like no GUI scaling (which is causing issues in modern, high resolution. Tied to it, there's a lack of rework of the scope zoom screen that is almost hilariously bad, light but definitely noticeable (data streaming?) stuttering issues, not tied to user PC configuration or operating system, especially glaring in a relatively light game like DX:HR.

   Nothing game-breaking or standing in the way of really enjoying Human Revolution, but still disappointing, considering the critical and consumer reception of the game. It would be great to see reenabling the store page of the original version (for the sake of preservation of history and all original reviews alone) and a new patch for the DC, modernizing the engine and smoothing out a few rougher engine edges here and there, along with a potential next-gen update either as an update, or a completely new product in case of more serious remastering efforts.
It would be a great sight to see, but I wouldn't bet on Square Enix-Embracer Group doing the right thing. Especially considering everything that took place in the years after the release of Deus Ex Human Revolution.

   Still, Director's Cut is a highly enjoyable package, working without any real issues on modern systems, and overall being an improvement over its predecessor. At the same time, it is a harbinger of bad luck that would follow this rebirth of the Deus Ex series, and cause development and business turbulences in its sequel, Mankind Divided, and despite dedicated fan following and good commercial performance of all these games- lack of any follow-up project and thus- an unsatisfactory ending to Adam Jensen's story and this fantastic, captivating world created by Eidos-Montréal.
Maybe one day.