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Deus Ex Deus Ex 20th Anniversary - at least we get a remix album

Gargaune

Magister
Joined
Mar 12, 2020
Messages
3,136
Isn't it still two days away? Either way, twenty years since the peak of videogame development, there's a thought.

For any inadequate Codexers who haven't played Deus Ex yet, it's part of the current GOG sale for €1.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
Here's an interesting retrospective interview with programmer Scott Martin, about technical challenges and the cut content (White House, space station, moon base) and how Deus Ex was going to be an unofficial prequel to System Shock: https://www.techradar.com/news/deus...ks-about-working-on-the-pc-gaming-masterpiece

Nerf the AI!:

Beyond the narrative consequences of the player's actions, there were much more immediate and visceral responses to player behavior. Martin says he was especially proud of the way NPC behavior reacted to visual and auditory cues from the environment and not just simple line-of-sight reactions – a level of AI sophistication that was only starting to emerge in 2000.

Martin points to a playtest he conducted during the game's development to explain the kinds of boundary-pushing he and the Ion Storm Austin team were doing: "I was standing on the Statue of Liberty and shot at a distant terrorist with a sniper rifle. The shell casing dropped several stories and landed next to another terrorist, who heard the sound."

"He was immediately alerted, turned towards the casing, and then started looking around for me. I still remember my surprise decades later. We actually had to limit the seeing and hearing radii of NPCs because the game became too hard otherwise!"

Limited though it may have been, that response from enemy AI forced a radical change in how you played the game. Shooting an enemy with a pistol could alert other enemies you didn't know were there to your location, who would then come charging in, guns blazing, and overwhelm you.

Auto-saving and checkpoints were still a few years away, so if you hadn't saved your game in a while, one wrong move could send you back to where you were hours beforehand. And that was after Martin nerfed the game's AI.

"[Deus Ex] had to give the player the ability to recover from mistakes," he said, "so NPCs had to eventually 'forget' that some dude in a trenchcoat was detonating explosive barrels in their headquarters."

A silenced pistol, on the other hand, changed the calculation entirely, so before long, the player would be managing an inventory of several weapons and tools like something out of Diablo just to ensure you always had options. It turned out to be the kind of feature that many non-RPG players never even realized they wanted until Deus Ex gave it to them.

An unofficial prequel to System Shock?:

The realities of a production schedule necessarily lead to hard choices about what to keep and what to cut away. With Deus Ex's lofty ambitions, this meant scaling back some of the game's most ambitious ideas, like JC Denton ending up on a mission in the White House and his liberating 2,000 civilian prisoners held under UN guard at a FEMA concentration camp during an invasion of Texas by the Mexican.

One of the more interesting cuts from the game involved the setting for Deus Ex's end game events, which originally took place on a space station. Martin found this cut particularly difficult to take.

"For me, the biggest one was the space station. I was looking forward to coding combat and movement for a low-gravity environment, so I was crushed when we decided to cut the space station and the moon base. But," he said, "it was ultimately for the best. In hindsight, if we'd kept them, I think we would have lost some of the real-world grounding that made the game special."

Martin wasn't the only one who took a special interest in the Deus Ex space station that never was. Spector produced the original System Shock at Looking Glass Technologies and Origin Systems in 1994. He was convinced that that industry shoggoth Electronic Arts (which acquired Origin Systems in 1992), would never greenlight a System Shock sequel, so he wanted to incorporate elements of that world into Deus Ex.

"In the final levels of Deus Ex," Martin recalled, "we were going to drop little hints that the space station was actually Citadel Station, and [Deus Ex's] rogue AI was a precursor to SHODAN, making Deus Ex an unofficial prequel to System Shock."

"To our surprise, early in development, we learned that Irrational Games had acquired the rights to System Shock and was making a sequel, so we scrapped the idea."

Deus Ex 20th Anniversary: Programmer Scott Martin talks about working on the PC gaming masterpiece
How Deus Ex chased its "impossibly ambitious" vision and changed gaming forever

On June 23, 2000, the team at Ion Storm Austin released Deus Ex into the world and held their breath for about a month.

Weeks earlier, Ion Storm's Dallas office made gaming history with Daikatana, widely considered one of PC gaming's biggest failures, and Deus Ex was thrown into the middle of a raging firestorm that it had nothing to do with.

PC games – few of them were kind, and none of them were good.

Daikatana promised to be the greatest first-person shooter ever made, with advanced, realistic AI, loads of guns, and the kind of story-driven narrative that was rarely seen outside of a JRPG. Its failure to deliver on the promises it made is a cautionary tale for the industry and one of Daikatana's major failings was that it tried to do so many things that it didn't do any of them well.

So following up Daikatana a month later with an overly ambitious game from an Ion Storm office down the road that claimed to be unlike anything gamers had ever experienced before was chum for the sharks in the gaming press and gaming audience at large. Deus Ex was making a bold claim at the worst possible time.

Not everyone was rattled by it, though. Scott Martin, one of the only three programmers tasked with coding the entire game using the very first Unreal Engine, sums up the confidence the Deus Ex team had in the game's release: "I think we all knew what we were creating."

Envisioning the paranoid, shadowy, and mostly impossible world of Deus Ex
"We had a really talented and driven team," Martin recalled. "I was lured away from a job I loved to work on [Deus Ex], and I did it mainly on the strength of the original design document, which was almost impossibly ambitious."

Impossibly ambitious is one way of putting it. While branching conversation trees or deciding between sneaking past enemies or getting into a firefight are basic game design features today, putting all of these elements into a single game in 2000 was madness.

Deus Ex was a near-future cyberpunk dystopia that blended the conspiratorial world of The X-Files with the globe-trotting adventure of a James Bond film with the visual stylings of The Matrix. Toss in a heavy dash of transhumanism, artificial intelligence, and millennialist anxiety (we'd all just gone through the lunacy of Y2K, after all) and it felt like someone had set a curiously-morbid toddler loose to create a game and they just started throwing in everything they happened to like without concerning themselves how any of it would fit together.

More than just the world they wanted to build, there was the audacity of the gameplay. It was a first-person shooter that was also an RPG and an adventure game that came as close as you could really get to the feel of an "open-world" in 2000. Today, it's not hard to imagine making this kind of game, but when development began in the late 1990s, this was faster-than-light levels of ambition.

Spector wrote up a postmortem for Deus Ex's development several months after the game's release, and by today's standards, it's a jarring read. When Deus Ex pushed against the boundaries of the available technology, that meant requiring players to have 16MB of RAM installed – not L2 cache, RAM – and something called a graphics accelerator. In 2000, this actually threatened to put the game out of reach for a good number of people and they hadn't even written a single line of code.

The game's fully-voiced dialogue wasn't novel, by any means, but with more than 200 NPCs and a heavy focus on its narrative story and allowing players to progress through the game by making correct conversation choices rather than just shooting everything, the game chewed up hard drive space that was still a premium commodity in 2000.

The world that Warren Spector and his team at Ion Storm Austin wanted to build was inconceivable from a technological perspective. But that was the ambition of Deus Ex, even if no one really knew how they could actually do it. All they could really do was rely on their experience to guide their work going forward.

"A big chunk of the development team came from the Looking Glass and Origin Systems tradition," Martin said. "Ultima, in particular, was famous for dumping a million tiny details into the game world. Even those of us who didn't work for those companies before we joined Ion Storm loved that kitchen-sink approach and tried to take the same approach with Deus Ex."

For Martin, whose responsibilities included building a user interface library for the Unreal engine from scratch and designing the behavioral AI for the game's NPCs, this kitchen-sink approach translated into making the NPC denizens of their game world behave in a radically new way.

"At the time, [Unreal Engine] had a purely shooter-based AI," he explained, "which could handle movement towards targets but not more subtle NPC behavior. I added a lot of new AI states to the code, especially for non-hostile NPCs, and gave them the ability to wander, patrol, follow the player, sit in chairs, etc."

An NPC walking across the room to sit in a chair for no narrative reason chewed up processing and graphics resources, so if an NPC wasn't used in a scripted scene, developers would just have them there until you talked to them. By introducing these NPC behaviors, it was a much more living world than any game that had come before it, including 1998 Half-Life.

This extended even further than just people. Animals are NPCs too, so Martin also developed the AI behavior for the game's ambient critters, like New York City pigeons or the rats in the Paris catacombs. Spector's design document listed a Pentium 133 processor as the target hardware requirement, so spending scarce processing cycles on a developed AI for background critters was an unorthodox move to say the least.

How Deus Ex made player choice consequential

The game has its hero, JC Denton, traveling the world to exotic locales to uncover a conspiracy that touches on everything from secret government population control schemes to a runaway AI that may or may not end up controlling the world from behind the scenes by game's end.

Whether it does or not is entirely dependent on the choices that you, the player, ultimately make. Not only was player choice a guiding principle for Deus Ex, more importantly, those choices were consequential, not just decorative.

"One of the most important design decisions we made was that choices have consequences," Martin said, "that the user's actions should affect the game in both large and small ways."

"We wanted players to be able to make choices and then react to the consequences of those choices, following real-world consequences as closely as possible...within some pretty severe limitations."

"We didn't have a lot of CPU power or memory to work with back then," he conceded.

Beyond the narrative consequences of the player's actions, there were much more immediate and visceral responses to player behavior. Martin says he was especially proud of the way NPC behavior reacted to visual and auditory cues from the environment and not just simple line-of-sight reactions – a level of AI sophistication that was only starting to emerge in 2000.

Martin points to a playtest he conducted during the game's development to explain the kinds of boundary-pushing he and the Ion Storm Austin team were doing: "I was standing on the Statue of Liberty and shot at a distant terrorist with a sniper rifle. The shell casing dropped several stories and landed next to another terrorist, who heard the sound."

"He was immediately alerted, turned towards the casing, and then started looking around for me. I still remember my surprise decades later. We actually had to limit the seeing and hearing radii of NPCs because the game became too hard otherwise!"

Limited though it may have been, that response from enemy AI forced a radical change in how you played the game. Shooting an enemy with a pistol could alert other enemies you didn't know were there to your location, who would then come charging in, guns blazing, and overwhelm you.

Auto-saving and checkpoints were still a few years away, so if you hadn't saved your game in a while, one wrong move could send you back to where you were hours beforehand. And that was after Martin nerfed the game's AI.

"[Deus Ex] had to give the player the ability to recover from mistakes," he said, "so NPCs had to eventually 'forget' that some dude in a trenchcoat was detonating explosive barrels in their headquarters."

A silenced pistol, on the other hand, changed the calculation entirely, so before long, the player would be managing an inventory of several weapons and tools like something out of Diablo just to ensure you always had options. It turned out to be the kind of feature that many non-RPG players never even realized they wanted until Deus Ex gave it to them.

The Deus Ex that might have been

For any creator, there's going to be some "If only we had more..." kinds of reflections about their creation. Art is never finished, only abandoned, as the saying goes and video games are no different.

"I wish we'd had about three more months to polish the game," Martin said of one of PC gaming's most critically acclaimed titles. "For understandable reasons, we were under tremendous pressure from our publisher to ship Deus Ex. Ion Storm's first two titles (Dominion: Storm over Gift 3 and Daikatana) shipped before us and hadn't sold well. We were concerned that Eidos would shut down the studio if [Deus Ex] didn't earn back the investment they had put into the game."

The realities of a production schedule necessarily lead to hard choices about what to keep and what to cut away. With Deus Ex's lofty ambitions, this meant scaling back some of the game's most ambitious ideas, like JC Denton ending up on a mission in the White House and his liberating 2,000 civilian prisoners held under UN guard at a FEMA concentration camp during an invasion of Texas by the Mexican.

One of the more interesting cuts from the game involved the setting for Deus Ex's end game events, which originally took place on a space station. Martin found this cut particularly difficult to take.

"For me, the biggest one was the space station. I was looking forward to coding combat and movement for a low-gravity environment, so I was crushed when we decided to cut the space station and the moon base. But," he said, "it was ultimately for the best. In hindsight, if we'd kept them, I think we would have lost some of the real-world grounding that made the game special."

Martin wasn't the only one who took a special interest in the Deus Ex space station that never was. Spector produced the original System Shock at Looking Glass Technologies and Origin Systems in 1994. He was convinced that that industry shoggoth Electronic Arts (which acquired Origin Systems in 1992), would never greenlight a System Shock sequel, so he wanted to incorporate elements of that world into Deus Ex.

"In the final levels of Deus Ex," Martin recalled, "we were going to drop little hints that the space station was actually Citadel Station, and [Deus Ex's] rogue AI was a precursor to SHODAN, making Deus Ex an unofficial prequel to System Shock."

"To our surprise, early in development, we learned that Irrational Games had acquired the rights to System Shock and was making a sequel, so we scrapped the idea."

Delivering on the promise of Deus Ex
Despite the inevitable challenges of a creative process, the grudging revisions and concessions to reality, often the hardest thing to do is to simply get a team of 20 or so people to collaborate toward a single shared vision.

"Warren had learned a lot from the development of immersive sims like Ultima Underworld and System Shock," Martin said. "Many of the specifics of the game changed massively between conception and completion, but Warren's [Deus Ex] design mantra (refined by Harvey Smith and others) survived the entire process, and everybody was committed to following it."

The Ion Storm team was heavily invested in the game's success and not just for financial reasons. As a small team of game developers, there was a lot of ownership over the final product, Martin said.

"There was a lot of camaraderie, and each individual developer could make a larger contribution - and everybody on the Deus Ex team made positive contributions. When you 'own' more of the final product, I think it inspires you to put more time and effort into making your piece of it as good as possible."

After devoting three years of their lives to a project as ambitious as Deus Ex, the Ion Storm Austin team could be forgiven if any of them felt any dread about releasing their game so soon after Daikatana's failure. If he did, Martin doesn't let on, his only ill word against the game being the understated observation that the game "hadn't sold well."

If anyone else felt anxious, it was short-lived. The critical reception of Deus Ex was swift and ecstatic. PC Gamer gave it a 94 out of 100, while Eurogamer and GamePro gave the game perfect scores. GamesRadar did as well, calling the game "near-perfect in every conceivable way."

As for Ion Storm, Eidos shut the studio's Dallas office in 2005 but kept the Austin office open for a time. The franchise spawned three more games in the series over the next two decades, some better than others, but none as groundbreaking as the original.

"It really was the game of my dreams," Martin said. "I worked on some fun games after Deus Ex, but none of them captured my heart the way DX did."

After Deus Ex's 2004 sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, the series was turned over to Eidos Montreal, who produced 2011's Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a game many fans of the series celebrated as a return to the series' original vision. Martin said that Eidos Montreal has definitely done right by the series.

"I spent a little time with the Eidos Montreal team when they first started developing Human Revolution, so I knew the series was in good hands. Overall, I think Eidos Montreal took it in a great direction. They kept the atmosphere of the original game, but made it their own."

Reflecting on the original Deus Ex's revered place in PC gaming history, Martin keeps it humble. "I feel honored and privileged to have worked on the game," he said, "and happy that so many people still remember it fondly after all this time!"

About his Ion Storm colleagues, Martin said, "I miss them all. We sometimes acted like a huge family of grumpy siblings, but it was a great team. Working for Warren Spector remains one of the high points of my entire career."
 

Venser

Erudite
Joined
Aug 8, 2015
Messages
1,765
Location
dm6
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/06/22/deus-ex-at-20-the-oral-history-of-a-pivotal-pc-game/


Deus Ex at 20: The oral history of a pivotal PC game

From studio conflict to creating a classic

By Jeremy Peel


Deus Ex is the king of the immersive sims – the blueprint from which an entire genre of ideas has been pilfered. If you’ve loved a Dishonored game, you’ve enjoyed Deus Ex by proxy; its design, and even some of its developers, can be found at the very centre of Arkane’s DNA.

For those who played it 20 years ago, Deus Ex set expectations for how malleable game worlds could be, and new standards for reactivity that the rest of the industry failed to match in the decade that followed. Deus Ex was ultimately so influential that, as one of our interviewees points out, its innovations now seem normal.

Here’s the story of how it was made, as told by the people who made it. The story begins in 1997, at a time when testosterone-fuelled first-person shooters still dominate PC gaming. Thief and System Shock developer Looking Glass has closed its Austin studio to save the ailing company, leaving Warren Spector and a team of crack simulation nerds without a project.


Origins
A group of unemployed Austin developers busied themselves with prototypes and experiments. But rescue was coming, in the form of Doom designer John Romero.

Steve Powers, level designer: When Looking Glass Austin closed, the team stuck around because the rent was paid on the office. We’d come in during the day and work for free, pitching ideas and building things. One of the concepts that came out of that was a spy game called Shooter. It was going to star a James Bond-type technical spy who could hack devices. Warren floated this idea of nanobots; an agent who could control nanotechnology. It was really crude – it never really went further than a few little mock-ups, some sketches and documents. Then one day John Romero showed up in a giant yellow humvee and said, ‘Hey, we wanna make a studio here. What have you got?’.

John Romero, Ion Storm co-founder: It was, I believe, September of ‘97. One of my artists had just heard that a Warren Spector project had been cancelled. I came down to the Looking Glass studio in Austin and pitched him on the idea of joining Ion Storm. I was trying to line up several games in different genres. I also tried to get Tim Schafer in to do adventure, but he was too cozy at LucasArts. He didn’t wanna leave yet.

deus-ex-oral-history1-690x388.jpg


Ian Livingstone, executive chairman of publisher Eidos: We’d become quite reliant on Tomb Raider, and were looking to widen the portfolio. We had already established Ion Storm to enable John Romero’s Daikatana and Tom Hall’s Anachronox to come out. For one reason or another, they weren’t meeting expectations. I knew Warren from when he was working at Steve Jackson Games in the pen and paper RPG days. I knew what a great designer he was. We decided to back the idea.

Romero: Warren had done really great stuff at Origin, and seemed like a really balanced person. He doesn’t have an ego, and he didn’t make failures. I knew I could count on him. I said, ‘You can make any game you want, you can take as long as you want, and money’s not an issue’.

Livingstone: Warren wanted to expand on System Shock and what he could do in roleplaying, introducing stealth and first-person shooter elements and other ways of getting through. It ticked all the boxes for me. My only worry was that it wouldn’t have a wide enough audience.

Romero: I said, ‘Just run the studio, we’ll pay the bills and keep you isolated from anything that’s happening up here in Dallas’.

Sheldon Pacotti, lead writer: It was maybe 20 people. There was publisher oversight, but it wasn’t heavy-handed.

Livingstone: We gave them total autonomy. The Dallas team was busy enough developing its own games.

Romero: We let Warren keep his team and find a new office space that was bigger, because the team was going to need to get bigger. These people had worked on Thief: The Dark Project.

Austin Grossman, writer: Deus Ex came pretty directly out of a learning curve that had started at Looking Glass with Ultima Underworld, System Shock and Thief, before they had phrases like emergent gameplay and ludonarrative dissonance. We didn’t have any vocabulary for it, but we would have intensive discussions about what worked and what didn’t.
A political awakening
A series of key hires saw Deus Ex, and many of its young developers, find their voice.

Romero: The ideas started to really gel after Warren hired Harvey Smith.

Harvey Smith, lead level designer: I was exchanging emails with Warren, and as soon as he started talking about a first-person shooter RPG with spy fiction background stuff, I just wrote a mission description. It ended up not being used in the game – it was all about surveillance from one side of a hotel, across a courtyard to a room on the other side, planting information, blackmailing, and sniping. He convinced me to move back from California to Austin.

Grossman: The key note that I remember is ‘All conspiracy theories are true’.

“We were very influenced by three games: Thief, System Shock 2 and Half-Life.”
Robin Todd, writer: We were reading all these different conspiracy books, about the gold and silver standards, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail.

Smith: I remember seeing some pitch documents lying around, and there was one where the protagonist was the last descendant of Jesus Christ or something. JC.

Powers: Right before the new millennium, secret societies were all the rage.

Smith: We were very influenced by three games: Thief, System Shock 2 and Half-Life. There was a lot of discussion around whether it was more elegant to get through a level without being spotted and killing everybody. But there was also political discussion about whether there was inherent bias in a game that gives you a mission to kill a bunch of enemies without questioning it. And of course, there is.

Grossman: Most of the political thinking came out of conversations between Warren and Sheldon.

Sheldon Pacotti, lead writer: I was a programmer. I didn’t find out until 30 minutes into the interview that they were interviewing for a writer. I saw Warren grab a basketball in the UNATCO headquarters and throw it down the hallway. They were trying to build a real place, with real people. I was excited about building all that logic out, and making the game fully reactive to whatever you do.

Smith: Sheldon came in halfway through the project and rewrote it in this voice that I’m not sure anyone else would have been capable of.

Pacotti: I’ve always been a very political writer. I’m attracted to social change and revolutions. If you see allusions to Foucault in there, that probably came from me.

Smith: We would say things like, ‘In order for one person to be a billionaire, millions of people have to live in poverty’. And then Sheldon could come in and back it all up with deep historical examples.

deus-ex-oral-history2-1212x682.jpg


Todd: It wasn’t this thesis statement from the outset. Sheldon was really into the conspiracy and socialist angle, I enjoyed a lot of cyberpunk at the time, and Austin was very much into politics.

Smith: Warren would contribute ideas here and there that I will always remember, like ‘You can’t fight ideas with bullets’.

Pacotti: I was certainly pilfering from Warren’s library – a lot of books about the NSA and the US government, different conspiracy theories. It was something he’d been into for a long time.

Smith: My dad was a welder, my mom was 15 when I was born, I graduated high school without knowing the difference between the left and the right politically. I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone say ‘The people you call terrorists are freedom fighters to someone else’ before. That period of time from ‘97 on was a political awakening for me, partly because of all the arguments we had and the research we did.

Player liberty or death
Ion Storm Austin committed to making its levels open-ended playgrounds, and embraced the resultant complications.

Todd: Liberty Island was the vertical slice and the proof of concept. The designers would leave datacubes and newspapers around the levels, and the writers would come and fill that out.

Powers: I remember placing a security guard with a sack lunch on his desk and a note from his kid. ‘Hope you enjoy your PB & J, I made it myself. See you tonight’. Players would execute the guy, see this note and reload.

“I cringe at a lot of the faux-urban characters, the pimp stereotypes and Chinese gangsters.”
Smith: Doug Church helped with a bunch of AI stuff. We concluded that it doesn’t make it a better game that enemies run away from you, but it makes it more interesting. You have to make the decision to shoot them in the back just to feel complete, or let them get away.

Grossman: One of my favourite moments in gaming is the stand-off on the plane with Anna Navarre, where she’s telling you to kill the guy. And you realise you don’t have to. You’re holding this gun in your hand, and you can shoot anyone in the room, and the plot handles it. That opened up my understanding of what a game narrative could be. It’s a lovely moment professionally, when you realise people are doing something new, and suddenly the medium looks bigger than you thought.

Livingstone: Early on, there was a buzz coming from the studio. There was a lot of excitement and chatter and happy-looking people wandering around.

Romero: I thought it was a really great weaving of shooter and RPG with multiple paths through it. It was like 9,000 lines of dialogue.

Pacotti: You weren’t paying $20,000 for every line of dialogue in those days.

Grossman: Harvey got in touch and said, ‘We have two writers, but we have more writing than we can handle, so do you wanna write?’”

Pacotti: I inherited a story bible that had pages for 100 different characters. Maybe about half of them made it into the game.

Grossman: I was looking through the script, and it’s a lot funnier than I remember. It was such an absurd world that if we played it straight the entire way, I don’t think that would have worked.

Pacotti: I worked really hard on capturing the different ways every character speaks, where there’s gang stuff going on, just trying to get all of that right.

Grossman: I cringe at a lot of the faux-urban characters, the pimp stereotypes and Chinese gangsters. That’s a thing you could never do now and should not have been done even then.

Pacotti: I would give a lot of thought to the mental life and rationale of all the characters and groups.

deus-ex-oral-history5-1212x682.jpg


Grossman: JC Denton had to be a bit of a blank because the player is making decisions on his behalf. Is he a tough guy? Is he funny? He has a kind of ironic tone. I never really understood what was going on in his head. The character I enjoyed the most was your brother, Paul. You were on this path of figuring things out, and he was just ahead of you.

Pacotti: Harvey took all the story home with him and came back with a draft. He had a big input on that final, tight storyline. Credit for the dialogue tool has to go to Al Yarusso. I remember the engineers saying they wished they had time to develop something more sophisticated, but in practice it was very versatile and powerful. Simultaneous coding and writing let us give players great freedom, rather than forcing mission outcomes or a linear series of gates.

“To this day, I hate boss battles. You go into a room and then all the doors shut, it just feels so artificial.”
Grossman: An individual level had a lot of space in it that you could stick around and explore, or you could go straight through. We called it the string of pearls structure. It was explicitly designed that way, with the expectation that plenty of players would miss whole chunks of it.

Romero: I love the way that you decide where you’re gonna go and how you’re gonna do it.

Pacotti: We had a fallback for all these cases where you could kill a character early – a datacube on the ground that would trigger your mission.

Grossman: A top level motto was that every single task had three ways to accomplish it.

Pacotti: To this day, I hate boss battles. You go into a room and then all the doors shut, it just feels so artificial.

Smith: It was like D&D with guns. It was very powerful to not be constrained in that way.

Grossman: They poured a whole bunch of different game systems into it, and then frantically tried to tune and correct and manage it. Which was exciting, but it led to a lot of uncertainty.

Pacotti: One time in VersaLife [] a test player spooked a guard dog, who upset a secretary, who may have defended herself with a knife, which then drew employees and guards from across the facility into a battle royale in one of the elevators.

Grossman: When you have a lot of interacting systems, you’re constantly finding exploits. You could attach laser tripwires to the wall in a stepwise sequence, and stand on each of them, working your way up a wall, which I don’t think anyone had ever seen or particularly wanted.

Faction warfare
During development, Ion Storm Austin was in conflict, both internally and with the Ion Storm team working on Daikatana in Dallas.

Smith: There were two distinct subcultures inside the level design movement, and they were at times hostile to each other.

Pacotti: There was a Design Team A and a Design Team 1, hired in different ways. It became trench warfare between those two. One was the fantasy group, and one was the realism group. One wanted to build the world to support game navigation, and the other wanted to build to the actual proportions of what a bar or street would be.

Smith: I wouldn’t say one was realism and one was fantasy. More that our team was Looking Glass fans, and the other was more RPG-oriented. We were working with some daft subject matter, but we took it seriously. The other team liked easter eggs and in-jokes.

deus-ex-oral-history4-1212x682.jpg


Grossman: Even in the late stages there were tons of debates about how it was supposed to work. It was a big clash of philosophies and backgrounds with the system-driven people and the Origin RPG people.

Romero: Warren would have the dev team work on different things that would be in conflict with each other. One of them was gonna win. He would let that go on, and choose the best solution with the team. He would be fair about it.

Pacotti: Eventually the fantasy group won out. I can’t remember if that was A or 1, but that’s how the direction of the game went. There were hard feelings on both sides, but honestly I think that’s what makes the game work. There’s this strong tension between the real and the imaginary. That’s what a conspiracy theory is.

Smith: We’ve lovingly ribbed Warren for not wanting to make a difficult decision around all of that.

Ricardo Bare, level designer: The double design team thing is ironic given that the game’s most memorable moments are about putting the player in crisis points where you have to make a decision.

“Those guys would fly in for an important quarterly check on how the money was being spent, and party so hard with the Ion Storm Dallas guys…”
Pacotti: A lot of the developers had come out of working on sprawling 2D tile-based adventure games at Origin. The mental model was, ‘I’m just gonna start building stuff and dreaming of things’. That’s how Steve Powers approached the Hong Kong map.

Grossman: Since the levels were being built independently, I had to go in and forge relationships with each different designer and understand their approach.

Pacotti: At the end of the UNATCO segment, you fight Majestic 12, get on a helicopter and fly off to freedom. And then in the next mission, you’re loading into the basement of a Majestic 12 facility. You’re right back where you just escaped from, essentially, and for a long time I struggled with how to open that. Then Austin wrote this first line where Jock the pilot says, ‘I blew it, JC.’

Grossman: It was so complicated and it still feels a little unbelievable that it all hung together.

Pacotti: A lot of locations and missions got cut as we tried to make the date. I wrote dialogue for rescuing people who had been taken out to a pirate island. There was a White House mission that seemed pretty pivotal at the time. The president was a puppet of the Illuminati – he’d been replaced with a clone, and you rescued his daughter.

Bare: Deus Ex was my very first job in the industry. I came on the project for the last year and a half, and Harvey pretty much dumped a bunch of levels into my lap. They were at varying stages of maturity. I had a huge amount of freedom.

Smith: There were very few check-ins. Eidos was over in the UK. Those guys would fly in for an important quarterly check on how the money was being spent, and party so hard with the Ion Storm Dallas guys that they would inevitably email us and go, ‘We’re gonna make it down to Austin next time’. Therefore we were allowed to make our crazy, crazy game.

Romero: One of my co-founders, Todd Porter, wasn’t making a game anymore. So he was just doing whatever he wanted to do, which was getting involved in Deus Ex. He tried to shut down Deus Ex probably two to four times – just get it cancelled.

We had a real long meeting, and I remember telling him – I don’t care what you’re hearing down in Austin, whatever Warren makes is great. I don’t care how he does it, if they’re having a circus every day in the office. So we’re leaving them alone and we’re not cancelling the project ever.

Todd Porter, Ion Storm co-founder: I never tried to cancel any projects nor would I have had the power to do so. I really had very little interaction with Warren and left Ion long before Deus Ex shipped.

deus-ex-oral-history9-1212x682.jpg


Romero: It wasn’t really an expensive game to make. I think it was similar to Daikatana. It had about the same number of people, and Warren didn’t have to restart his whole game like I did.

Pacotti: In Dallas there was this churn – they were changing engines so many times. Stuff was behind and not crystallising creatively. There was a sense with the relationship with the publisher that we were the good branch of Ion Storm.

Smith: Ion Storm Dallas was a crazy place. It’s not like they were the parents in the room.

Romero: The Austin team were mad that we were giving Ion Storm a bad name. They were obviously not happy with anything they heard coming out of Dallas. They even went and created a new logo, and they wanted to rename the studio. Warren let them go through that whole exercise, but eventually didn’t change it. I totally understood.

Smith: In Austin, our culture was much more nerdy and reserved. This sounds evil, but it was more thoughtful. Meanwhile, up in Dallas, you had this wild party culture that was much more aggressive and spun out of the shooter scene. We were just cats and dogs.

Powers: The public face of the Dallas office blended well with their demographic. But we were aiming at a different audience, and that same vibe would have sent our players looking elsewhere.

Crunch time
As Deus Ex’s potential became clear, staff leaned into the project, sacrificing their own health in the process.

Smith: We were not particularly awesomely paid, and we worked our asses off.

Pacotti: I opted into a total crunch from the moment I joined Ion Storm, simply because I saw the creative potential of the project. Later, Warren and Harvey had to talk sense to me.

“The Austin team were mad that we were giving Ion Storm a bad name.”
Bare: That was in the days when people considered it a badge of honour to work themselves to death, which was super foolish.

Pacotti: I knew Deus Ex would be more momentous than any of the fiction I was working on, so I set everything aside and wrote for the game at work, at lunch, at home, and on the weekends. In a mature company, today, that kind of schedule would be seen as exploitative.

Grossman: Liberty Island was the last level to come together. The stakes of it were really high, because that’s where we educate you about what Deus Ex is. That was what we were anxious about.

Pacotti: Everybody was starting to realise it was going to be something pretty special, and the battles did get very intense at times. Warren was asking for a little more time with the publisher. He said, ‘I told them, if you just give us three more months, I’ll give you the game of the year’. They didn’t give us three more months. It could have been tighter, we could have made it even better.

Livingstone: Ion Storm had a bit of a problem delivering to an agreed schedule and budget.

Truth will out
Deus Ex was released in 2000 after years of toil, but its creators had little idea of how it would be received.

Romero: Warren thought of the marketing campaign with a UNATCO website. People thought it was a real government organisation. It was an ARG kind of situation.

Smith: The deeper you read into that website the more we started using questionable coded phrases that were adjacent to fascism.

Powers: It had a fake sign-up process if you wanted to be recruited as a UNATCO agent. And people applied. People wanted to be in it. We got applications from military veterans, and we would look at these resumes that came to the office.

Todd: Something that was commented on multiple times in the reviews was that if you were being stealthy, you could overhear the guards discussing communist philosophy. That was the first time I’d worked on a game where that kind of philosophical attitude was exposed to the player.

Livingstone: I remember the excitement in the media about this innovation in gameplay. It doesn’t happen very often, but here it was.

deus-ex-oral-history6-1212x682.jpg


Romero: We threw a big release party down in Austin, on the lake. We had the dev team out there and a bunch of people from Dallas. People took a picture of me in the water and that was up on Something Awful.

Livingstone: The sales goals were conservative because we didn’t know how hardcore the audience would have to be to play it. RPGs are not everybody’s cup of tea – by adding stealth and adventure and FPS elements, you could fall between two stools and end up appealing to nobody.

Smith: I remember standing in Warren’s office near the end and both of us were super worried about it – will people get it? And it had a lot of bugs. We were unwilling to compromise in some ways, and the framerate on some machines was really low.

Powers: I wasn’t convinced it was going to be a big hit. I was afraid that it would be too complex, and didn’t have enough faith in players to invest in it.

“We’d invested an awful lot of money without the return we were expecting, for Daikatana and Anachronox.”
Bare: Making the game accessible was not something we were good at. I let my brother-in-law play it. I handed him the controller, Liberty Island booted up, and within ten seconds he had thrown his pistol and multitool onto the ground, walked forward into the water and drowned.

Romero: I thought it was pretty funny when I started playing. The meme happening back then was seconds to crate, and you start right behind a crate.

Grossman: I was a little surprised at the success of it. We had seen all the backstage stuff and the last-minute decision-making. The Looking Glass games were never big sellers. It felt like our corner of game design philosophy was being vindicated.

Powers: It was very validating. It really reached the people who had been waiting for it.

Romero: Eidos was so happy about it. It became a game of the year. It made up for all the other stuff that was going on. They definitely got their money back, so I’m glad I brought Warren on.

Livingstone: It was a big relief, I can tell you. We’d invested an awful lot of money without the return we were expecting, for Daikatana and Anachronox. I can’t really say whether Deus Ex made up for it, but it was certainly a welcome contribution on behalf of the whole Ion Storm enterprise, to come out with a winner. It not just sold well but had critical acclaim.

Legacy
Over two decades, Deus Ex reshaped games in its own image. The importance of the project has become clear to its makers mainly in retrospect.

Romero: It was definitely something a lot of designers looked at as an inspiration.

Pacotti: I would hope it drove home that there’s great value in making the player believe that the things they’re doing are real and have consequence.

Bare: It was extremely formative in the way that I think about games and approach design at Arkane.

Smith: It’s filtered into every other part of the ecosystem. The emergent interactions and environmental storytelling have been assimilated into lots of different genres. Going to work on Dishonored 2 or Prey, it keeps us on our toes. The same old tricks work, but you also need new tricks.

Grossman: Deus Ex did things that now seem normal.

deus-ex-oral-history7-1212x682.jpg


Todd: I didn’t feel like we were making this grand statement. We were all just having a good time.

Romero: If I didn’t do Ion Storm at all, something else better probably would have happened. But if it meant that there wouldn’t be a Deus Ex, then I definitely would have gone through it all over again.

Bare: There’s a meme – every time someone mentions Deus Ex, someone reinstalls.

Smith: Every time the US shifts a little towards fascism or centralised control, somebody will send me a link to something from Deus Ex. It’s not that we were prescient – the sad part is that it’s on repeat through history.

Powers: We gave birth to UNATCO, a multinational secret police force that worked clandestinely and did these black ops around the world. There was this seed that hinted at our real world future that I didn’t take too seriously at the time.

Smith: You can really feel the change in 20 years as the internet has had its way with cultures around the world. You can look back and vaguely remember when conspiracy theories were just amusing, and not terrifying examples of people engaging in delusional magic reality thinking and doing hurtful things, or families losing people.

Grossman: I take it a lot more seriously now than I did then. Edward Snowden is a Deus Ex character. I have to say, I was a little more naive.

Smith: Deus Ex and Dishonored both involve a plague, and they both involve powerful, corrupt elites turning the disenfranchised against each other. When some states discouraged the wearing of masks or sheltering in place, somebody inevitably linked me the opening cinematic. ‘Why contain it? Let the bodies pile up in the streets’.
 

Infinitron

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Interesting:

Smith: There were two distinct subcultures inside the level design movement, and they were at times hostile to each other.

Pacotti: There was a Design Team A and a Design Team 1, hired in different ways. It became trench warfare between those two. One was the fantasy group, and one was the realism group. One wanted to build the world to support game navigation, and the other wanted to build to the actual proportions of what a bar or street would be.

Smith: I wouldn’t say one was realism and one was fantasy. More that our team was Looking Glass fans, and the other was more RPG-oriented. We were working with some daft subject matter, but we took it seriously. The other team liked easter eggs and in-jokes.

Grossman: Even in the late stages there were tons of debates about how it was supposed to work. It was a big clash of philosophies and backgrounds with the system-driven people and the Origin RPG people.

Romero: Warren would have the dev team work on different things that would be in conflict with each other. One of them was gonna win. He would let that go on, and choose the best solution with the team. He would be fair about it.

Pacotti: Eventually the fantasy group won out. I can’t remember if that was A or 1, but that’s how the direction of the game went. There were hard feelings on both sides, but honestly I think that’s what makes the game work. There’s this strong tension between the real and the imaginary. That’s what a conspiracy theory is.

Smith: We’ve lovingly ribbed Warren for not wanting to make a difficult decision around all of that.

Ricardo Bare, level designer: The double design team thing is ironic given that the game’s most memorable moments are about putting the player in crisis points where you have to make a decision.

Pacotti: A lot of the developers had come out of working on sprawling 2D tile-based adventure games at Origin. The mental model was, ‘I’m just gonna start building stuff and dreaming of things’. That’s how Steve Powers approached the Hong Kong map.

Grossman: Since the levels were being built independently, I had to go in and forge relationships with each different designer and understand their approach.

Pacotti: At the end of the UNATCO segment, you fight Majestic 12, get on a helicopter and fly off to freedom. And then in the next mission, you’re loading into the basement of a Majestic 12 facility. You’re right back where you just escaped from, essentially, and for a long time I struggled with how to open that. Then Austin wrote this first line where Jock the pilot says, ‘I blew it, JC.’

Grossman: It was so complicated and it still feels a little unbelievable that it all hung together.
 

grimace

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
1,959
Deus Ex at 20: The oral history of a pivotal PC game
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/06/22/deus-ex-at-20-the-oral-history-of-a-pivotal-pc-game/

I, Grimace, have finally understood what DeuSex was all about.


Grossman: An individual level had a lot of space in it that you could stick around and explore, or you could go straight through. We called it the string of pearls structure. It was explicitly designed that way, with the expectation that plenty of players would miss whole chunks of it.


The hidden conspiracy we all missed.

1. The Oral History
2. The Gross-man Comment
3. string of pearls structure
4. expectation that plenty of players would miss whole chunks of it
5. "or you could go straight"



Don't click this. I'm warning you.

There is something anal about this.


220px-Analbeads.JPG



Deus Ex is the metaphor of the exploration of a man's sexuality.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
13,582
Codex 2014

The album is out now. You can listen all tracks on Bandcamp.

Also an interview: https://www.pcgamer.com/deus-exs-composers-discuss-remixing-its-score-for-the-20th-anniversary/

Funny that PC Gamer recommends GMDX for re-experiencing DX1 while Brandon mentions ReVision only.

Deus Ex's composers discuss remixing its score for the 20th anniversary
That's some heavy augmentation.


Plenty of things about Deus Ex can be brought up-to-date with the aid of mods (I recommend Give Me Deus Ex), but something that's rarely tinkered with is its music. It's good the way it is. Recently, I've been walking the dog while I listen to the ambient electronic wash that accompanied JC Denton as he tried to find Smuggler's hideout in an empty Manhattan, thinking that the most dated thing about Deus Ex is the idea that during a pandemic people stay off the streets.

Yet two of the original soundtrack's composers, Alexander Brandon and Michiel van den Bos, have gone back to remix their music for an album called Conspiravision, reimagining Deus Ex's 20-year-old tunes. And now I'm starting to think maybe the original music isn't fine the way it is. Compared to these more rounded-out renditions some of the old music seems positively tinny.

"Some songs have aged a little better than others mainly due to their composition," says Alexander. "UNATCO is a timeless classic and always will be. The remix, while updated to a degree, isn’t much different than the original."

Michiel agrees. "The thought of a makeover for UNATCO has been on my mind for many years as I thought it was way too short. That problem has now been fixed and then some."

He's not kidding. The remixed theme, now called Home Base (UNATCO), is a full eight minutes longer. While still recognizable, the original's ambient synth noodling has been filled out and sounds like something that would have played over the end credits of the Deus Ex movie (starring Christian Bale) that fans always wanted.

"In most cases I tried to remain as close to the originals as I could," says Michiel, "but some songs warranted a change of pace or even a completely different genre. The UNATCO combat song, which I've been told was fairly well hidden in the game, was slightly timid and has gotten a huge boost."

Alexander explains they approached the tracks as they would if asked to write them today. "In a few cases we did some serious theme and variation work on the originals," he says. "In the case of Synapse (Hong Kong Streets) I made it more of a dance theme. And that was quite a lot of fun."

One of the topics explored in Deus Ex is the rapid advance of technology, as depicted in the conflict between a nanotech-augmented agent and his coworkers whose formerly cutting edge cybernetics suddenly look clunky and old-fashioned. Likewise, the process of composing electronic music has come a long way from what once seemed futuristic.

"While I wouldn't want to go back to composing in that way again, there was a charm to making do with what you had," says Michiel. "In the old days, you had a folder with maybe 250 samples that you'd use and manipulate to create different tracks. Now, there are tens of thousands of samples at your disposal with endless variations."

Brandon sums up the difference between now and then like this: "The sky’s the limit. We had 1.5 mb per song."

The Conspiravision album is intended as a standalone project, a reimagining for those who've already played Deus Ex and can recognize the difference between the Airfield combat music and the Oceanlab combat music. But Alexander has ideas for what he'd do with the music if it was to accompany a remastered version of the game. "I think Michiel and I would take it even further with more interactive blending and layering," he says. "The later Deus Ex games do this as well. Our style is just a bit different. It’d be fun to bring that back and update it to make it really shine with today’s game dev tech and music tools."

He has an ambitious idea for the main theme as well. "I'd like to do a full orchestral version of the main theme someday. We did that on the PlayStation 2 version but I'd like to have more players and do some more things with texture. One thing's for sure, the nostalgia is there each time I listen to the music."

Balancing that nostalgia with a desire to tinker with imperfections must be a challenge. "We tried to stay fresh while remaining true to the originals," Michiel says. "I hope the fans think we've succeeded in doing just that."

Nostalgia's had another effect on the composers, one that readers will be familiar with. "You know the old saying, every time someone mentions Deus Ex, someone reinstalls it," says Alexander. "I've played more of the fan remake: ReVision. It's awesome."

Conspiravision: Deus Ex Remixed is available in physical and digital editions from Materia Collective.
 

Zer0wing

Cipher
Joined
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Messages
2,607
I hate the remixes, the lost the bleak tone of othe original soundtrack. If only he'd remaster the original tracks with high-quality samples..
 

d1r

Busin 0 Wizardry Alternative Neo fanatic
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We don't really need a remake since we're already living in the world that Deux Ex predcited 20 years ago.

Happy Anniversary!
 

Stormcrowfleet

Aeon & Star Interactive
Developer
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Messages
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I'm listening to the whole thing. Some are just too much and I don't see why he added so much. Others are cool/enjoyable. Can't say any of them right now are "better" than their original.
 

Väderhatt

Novice
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Feb 17, 2019
Messages
47
Sounds good. I haven't heard anything new from Michiel van den Bos for a long time, thought he quit music.

Well, he was regulalry involved in composing soundtracks for Triumph Studios (Overlord 1 & 2, most of AoW, including Planetfall)

Wasn't expecting him for this remix, a good surprise nonetheless.
 

retinoid

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Messages
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They won't rerelease or make any new edition for Deus Ex ever again due to the fact it's too redpilled for the masses to handle in 2020. I'm sure publishers don't want to deal with the armchair political activists on Twitter screaming over some of the anti-globalist conversations in the game. Still, it would have been nice to have a special boxed edition with an elaborate dev booklet and other behind the scenes shit, even if the game was just a CD key to Steam.
 
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Ismaul

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I'm listening to the remixes now, and while they are good and better produced, they're not the originals. They changed too much, that sometimes what made the originals great isn't even there anymore.

The best example is the Main Title. The original is simply a masterpiece, while the new version is like a watered-down version, the original melody being almost absent from it.

Maybe the remixes will stand on their own, but they sure as hell won't replace the OST. I might warm up to them, but for now I'm quite underwhelmed
 
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Hobo Elf

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Listened to the main theme and that was enough. It didn't seem to retain the spirit of the original version. Not sure what happened here, but it wasn't a great listen.
 

NPC451

Literate
Joined
Jun 20, 2020
Messages
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I hate the remixes, the lost the bleak tone of othe original soundtrack. If only he'd remaster the original tracks with high-quality samples..

I'm listening to the remixes now, and while they are good and better produced, they're not the originals. They changed too much, that sometimes what made the originals great isn't even there anymore.

The best example is the Main Title. The original is simply a masterpiece, while the new version is like a watered-down version, the original melody being almost absent from it.

Maybe the remixes will stand on their own, but they sure as hell won't replace the OST. I might warm up to them, but for now I'm quite underwhelmed

I absolutely agree. The thematic elements are drowned out by the new instrumentation.
 

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