???

Everything else seems to work fine.

Sometimes the game does not start up properly.

Sometimes the middle of the screen is just black.

Sometimes it crashes on startup.

Sometimes it does nothing on startup.

Now my desktop screen and everything else is really faded looking light the darkness has been turned way down even though it hasn't been.

Now I'm probably going to metaphorically scream into my pillow, but could you open Winecfg and go to the about tab, to report the version?

It's whatever version that Play On Linux uses. I think I saw 1.6.2.


Yeah, 1.6.2

Ah.

Excuse me a moment.

Screams into pillow.

This explains a lot. Wine 1.6.2 was released in 2013. Please seek out a newer version and maybe don't use PlayOnLinux's dartboard system of installing random versions of Wine. The newest version of Wine is 3.0.1, with 3.11 being the newest staging release.

Deus EX works just fine in newer versions of Wine.

I thought POL always used the best option.

Hahah, obviously not, it seems.

Now it works. But still crashes a lot on start up, or doesn't start up, or gives me some sort of general protection error on start up. But when it starts up it works.

Hmm. Look into QT4wine and maybe try launching it into a window, see if that stabilizes it. Otherwise, just tweak a little here and there.

Um, I have no idea how to do that.

To the former, it's a matter of installing the package and then using the context menu that appears.

For the former, just gently touching options in winecfg.

If you need more information, I suggest looking up the wiki or checking the arch wiki.