The Lay D Denton mod is a huge project that takes the original Deus Ex and lets you play through the whole thing not as a gruff cyberpunk dude, but as a gruff cyberpunk woman instead.
If you’re thinking that just means a quick character model swap, you could not be further from the truth. This is extensive, and has resulted in changes being made to the entire game:
The Lay D Denton Project was started to fulfil a major feature cut from the original game; the ability to select the protagonist’s gender. While a model swap and a vocal plugin could create a cheap facsimile, we felt this would be woefully insufficient. Immersion is a core feature of the Deus Ex experience, and a half-implemented female JC Denton would sabotage that. Either we do it right or we shouldn’t bother.
This is our attempt at doing it right.
The mod team has designed the project around four key tenets. Those are voice acting (every single one of Denton’s 1700 lines of dialogue has been redone by a new voice actor), redesigned NPCs (to better reflect their possible relationships with a woman protagonist), a new player model (which has had its sound effects re-recorded, and which stands half a head shorter than the original) and, perhaps most impressively, an undertaking to dig back into the game and make pronoun edits on the entire thing, changing every single “He” to “She”, and every “Guy” to “Girl”.
That’s all just such a huge amount of work to do for a mod, but like they said, there’s no point doing it unless it’s done right, and they have certainly done right here.
Here’s an example of the acting and rewrites in action with a trailer:
While for fans wondering about some of the more memorable lines of dialogue from the original, here’s this:
If you’re interested, you can download the mod here.
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