Here's a patch to give Deus Ex: Human Revolution—Director's Cut back its gold filter

(Image credit: Silent)

When Deus Ex: Human Revolution first released it had a distinctive gold filter that made everything shine like it was covered in Ferrero Rocher wrappers. It was a divisive feature, with some saying the black-and-gold palette was a valid artistic choice and a distinctive look. Others said it made everything look like it was made of bumblebees.

When the director's cut came out, initially as a WiiU exclusive (a fact I'd forgotten until today), the gold filter had been cut and it remained absent on the PC version. Until now, when a modder known as Silent put in the work to restore it.

You may know Silent for his patches to games like Scarface and the early 3D GTA games, focusing on the graphical glitches and timing bugs that occur when these games are played on modern machines. He also contributed to the Silent Hill 2 Enhanced project.

As you can see on his blog about the subject, getting a version of the gold filter working in Deus Ex: Human Revolution—Director's Cut wasn't as simple as flipping a switch marked "make it all shiny". A bunch of changes happened to the lighting between the two versions, and Silent's patch also works at fixing some of those that obviously seem like mistakes.

You can download the patch from Github. If you want to see some side-by-side comparisons, here you go.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.