The Lay D Denton Project mod for Deus Ex

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE:

The Female JC experience should be as fully immersive as her male counterpart.

The Lay D Denton Project was started to fulfill 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.

We have used four different simultaneous approaches in our efforts to achieve this goal:

JC Denton Dialogue Overhaul

At the core of the experience, all of JC Denton’s 1,700 lines of dialogue have been re-recorded by voice actress Karen Rohan, under the vocal direction of Chris Rohan. Karen’s reserved performance style is a solid fit for the JC character, further enhanced by Chris Rohan’s extensive knowledge of the Deus Ex dialogue/story/lore/community.

The performance strives to faithfully preserve the character of JC. Every single line was performed directly after listening to the original Male JC’s read. While not blatantly copying every single line, the original performance was used as the primary anchor point for the line reads. Variations were only made after careful consideration.

In addition, we have strived to preserve the more beloved community one-liners as accurately as possible.

Pronoun Edits for All Dialogue and Text

Even if JC looks female and sounds female, it doesn’t hold water if the world doesn’t respect it.

All gender pronouns and references have been edited to reflect the female protagonist. He → She. Him → Her. Guy → Girl. Man → Woman. Brother → Sister. You get the idea. Because of the natural cadence of human speech and the ear’s natural sensitivity to abnormalities in speech, this was by far the most challenging effort in the project.

Each pronoun was a unique problem, and many different techniques were used depending on what we could get to work:

• Combing through character dialogue and transposing syllables. Taking someone’s “sh” and splicing it onto the front of “he” worked often. Using “er” to append to the h in “him”, was less frequently successful but worked in some cases. Changing Mister to Miss by cutting the “ter” was the most reliably successful and is heard frequently throughout the game.
• Transposing words. This was often less successful but did have its place in some areas. As a bonus, we found a few areas where we could naturally add a pronoun. While perhaps not necessary, every bit can help further the goal of immersion.
• Cut the reference. Despite all our best efforts, sometimes we just couldn’t win. These lines were dealt with by removing or editing the line “Sir, you are creating a disturbance!” → “You are creating a disturbance!”
• Get creative. In some cases, the references couldn’t be cut naturally and couldn’t be fixed. One example is the UNATCO agents offering JC tear gas. “Give ‘em the grenades.” Just wouldn’t edit well and was needed because otherwise it’s very unclear what is being talked about. In order to solve this, we added the JC line, “What, gas grenades?” to allow her to identify the topic of the conversation.

Another example is the last dialogue with Manderley and Simons. “I can’t control a man’s mind.” In order to remove that line, Manderley had dialogue brought over from another conversation. “Just shut up and listen for a second.” was edited to “Just listen for a second.” and transposed.

This effort is where you will most likely see some cracks in immersion. While we were thorough, there will inevitably be a pronoun or two missed, and some of the edits may be audible to a discerning ear. If you encounter anything, we would appreciate it being reported on our Discord server.

NPCs Added, Rerecorded, and Tweaked

Sometimes editing pronouns wasn’t enough to fix immersion issues within the world. Some NPC behavior doesn’t make sense in the context of a Female JC. (Shannon, Mercedes, Sandra’s Pimp selling Janey, etc) The Lucky Money club as a whole felt heavily slanted against a Female JC, with Mercedes trying to seduce you, men ignoring you, Mamasan trying to sell you a date, the Russians being rude to you despite wanting more girls to dance.

These situations and scenes required a heavier hand to fix, but we also saw an opportunity to try and give Female JC a few immersion enhancing points:

• New tertiary NPCs. Several small additional characters have been scattered throughout the game. They’re designed to be unobtrusive, their main function to subtly acknowledge JC’s gender using a pronoun. In the case of the clubs, a couple of more complex NPCs have been added.
• Recast NPCs. A very select few characters were problematic enough that a recast was required. All except for one were done mimicking the original voice as closely as possible.
• Altered NPCs. Some NPCs had their interactions minimized, or had options either cut or replaced. Female JC can no longer offer to buy Sandra from her pimp. Mamasan no longer offers JC a date. Mercedes no longer hits on the player.

Female JC Player Model

Last and certainly not least, the female JC model has been restored. In addition to the skin, all player sounds such as jumping, running, getting hit, dying, etc. have been re-recorded. The first-person model has been altered to match JC’s selected skin tone and tweaked in an effort to look more feminine.

The UI has been altered slightly as well, the limb damage screen, health screen, and augmentation screen tweaked for a female body.

Additionally, astute players may notice that Female JC is, in fact, shorter. Female JC stands about half a head’s height lower than the standard male, and this can be seen during conversations and in gameplay. It’s a small touch, but we feel it adds to the immersion a surprising amount.