Vapourware A new Deus Ex was in development at Eidos Montreal

[†††]

Most people have no idea how bad Invisible War was from a technical point of view. All of the problems stemmed from Warren Specter's insistence on using 100% real-time lighting because he thought that was immersive and believed tech demo lies about how it would be viable in the new version of Unreal.

To design around this imposition, the levels became tiny. Also, the reason load times are so terrible is because the game literally quits and reloads the entire executable when you switch maps.

More proof that figureheads are talkative morons who don't know what makes a game good. Without a good team reigning them in, they only create trash.

 

[Ash]

Agreed with most of your message. Blaming consoles is retarded, because it was shit even by console standards of the time, and most of the problems were design related not hardware related. Some of the biggest levels in the FPS genre are in Turok, a N64 game.

Turok was on a different engine and had emptier maps, no broad environmental interactivity, no NPCs walking around. The PS2 port of Deus Ex had to redo the level design in some areas because the console just couldn't support it. Releasing a game that looks like it's from 2000 in 2004 also would have been out of the question.

You missed the point and lack perspective. As is Roguey standard.

1. I didn't say it should look like a 2000s game, nowhere did I say that. I said it didn't have to have the graphical emphasis that it did (thanks JIM for some further evidence in that regard RE: real time lighting). It was among the best-looking 3D games that year.
2. The piece of shit Xbox also had Morrowind and Arx Fatalis, with no reduction in level size in the case of both. Once again, blaming consoles is retarded. Please stop being retarded. I don't know how many times I have to say it, IW sucked because Ion Storm's garbage design direction and intent to make money bags the size they were seeing other studios enjoy where Deus Ex 1 had failed in that regard. And they clearly just didn't know that marketing is (almost) everything anyways. Just look at that abysmal Deus Ex 1 trailer.

Whether it released on console or not, IW would have been terrible. That was its fate. Consoles made a good scapegoat for the 'tards to focus on though. The developers were the problem.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Whether it released on console or not, IW would have been terrible. That was its fate. Consoles made a good scapegoat for the 'tards to focus on though. The developers were the problem.

and the thing to remember is that it was the same people that wrote the story, the same people that designed the first game. This was the natural path they were already on.
The early screenshots prior to the console version indicate that it was always going to end up this way. This was always the plan well before the changes occurred. It would have still been the same game.
This isn't that different from the game we got. It's just that the UI resembles the original games a bit more closely but if you take a second look you can see all the elements people hated about Deus Ex Invisible War are present there still. What I'm noticing though is that the models are much higher polygon than what we got so really the downgrades were from visuals and UI, that's about it everything else went exactly as always planned. The plan sucked and both Warren and Harvey are on record stating they should have listened to the fans more and ignored what the industry was telling them to do because their friends in the industry were a bunch of idiots (and that very much does include GabeN because he worked on the damn first game he should've known better! lol).

What surprises me the most is Resident Evil exists, you had an example of how to do the grid-based inventory right on a console. So why redesign this in such a god-awful way when there were examples of it being done perfectly already?

 

[Wunderbar]

Resident Evil 4 came after DE:IW tho.

 

[LarryTyphoid]

The whole premise of IW is shit. DX's 3 endings are mutually exclusive; each ending is a complete rejection of the other two endings. The Helios ending represents complete control, the Tracer Tong ending represents complete freedom, and the Illuminati ending represents the status quo. Either JC accepts his role as the synthetic Jesus Christ of the world that he was bred for and becomes a cyber-god, or he rejects his destiny and tears everything down. You cannot mix all 3 endings into one and end up with a coherent story. So of course IW ends up just funneling you into the Helios ending again since the other endings are so shitty in comparison.

 

[Ash]

"Why redesign...?"

Questions? I have answers: They said before the game was even released that they're streamlining to reach a wider audience (make more money). The hilarious thing is they didn't even streamline in a good way. Simpler games can still be great. Mario Bros 3. on the NES in '88 is still a masterpiece. IW's just a garbage game lacking soul. If the entire ethos behind it is to sellout one's passion and principles it's never going to be worth anything is it.

"Resident Evil 4 came after DE:IW tho."

He's talking about RE1, which features an interactive grid-based inventory.
Grid-based inventories with interactive positioning in general is just outright rare. Another game on consoles with it pre-IW is Martian Gothic.

 

[Drakortha]

Resident Evil 4 came after DE:IW tho.

You Resident Evil 4 fanboys are all the same. It's like you think the first 3 games didn't even exist and didn't have a grid inventory. You disgust me.

 

[Wunderbar]

I just got used to people using the term 'grid inventory' to describe deusex/diablo-like inventory tetris with items having different size.

 

[agentorange]

Wunderbar is right, though. Pre-RE4 Resident Evil inventories are effectively slot-based, not grid-based in the way that the Deus Ex inventory is. Since all items, barring exceptions like the shotgun and grenade launcher which take 2 slots, take up 1 slot each, you are simply choosing which 6 or 8 items to take with you, rather than arranging items of various shapes and sizes to most efficiently fill out a grid.

 

[Drakortha]

Wunderbar is right, though. Pre-RE4 Resident Evil inventories are effectively slot-based, not grid-based in the way that the Deus Ex inventory is. Since all items, barring exceptions like the shotgun and grenade launcher which take 2 slots, take up 1 slot each, you are simply choosing which 6 or 8 items to take with you, rather than arranging items of various shapes and sizes to most efficiently fill out a grid.

It's the exact same thing. The only thing RE4 did was make the inventory like 10x larger

Wow, RE4 REVOLUTIONIZED inventory management!
- Every RE4 Fanboy ever

 

[agentorange]

Yeah I'm a well known RE4 fanboy. That's why you see me in every thread saying that it is shit and ruined survival horror.

Anyway, the fact that it made the inventory larger and made all the items vary in shape and size is what makes it a Deus Ex like grid based inventory system. No one said anything about it being revolutionary.

 

[Drakortha]

That's why you see me in every thread saying that it is shit and ruined survival horror.

That's my job around here.

 

[J1M]

Whether it released on console or not, IW would have been terrible. That was its fate. Consoles made a good scapegoat for the 'tards to focus on though. The developers were the problem.

and the thing to remember is that it was the same people that wrote the story, the same people that designed the first game. This was the natural path they were already on.
The early screenshots prior to the console version indicate that it was always going to end up this way. This was always the plan well before the changes occurred. It would have still been the same game.
This isn't that different from the game we got. It's just that the UI resembles the original games a bit more closely but if you take a second look you can see all the elements people hated about Deus Ex Invisible War are present there still. What I'm noticing though is that the models are much higher polygon than what we got so really the downgrades were from visuals and UI, that's about it everything else went exactly as always planned. The plan sucked and both Warren and Harvey are on record stating they should have listened to the fans more and ignored what the industry was telling them to do because their friends in the industry were a bunch of idiots (and that very much does include GabeN because he worked on the damn first game he should've known better! lol).

What surprises me the most is Resident Evil exists, you had an example of how to do the grid-based inventory right on a console. So why redesign this in such a god-awful way when there were examples of it being done perfectly already?

I agree with the spirit of your post, but the level size restrictions are directly tied to console memory limitations.

UI changes are likely due to the push for more "immersion", same as the real-time lighting fetish. The circular UI is supposed to feel like something imprinted on your retina.

 

[J1M]

The whole premise of IW is shit. DX's 3 endings are mutually exclusive; each ending is a complete rejection of the other two endings. The Helios ending represents complete control, the Tracer Tong ending represents complete freedom, and the Illuminati ending represents the status quo. Either JC accepts his role as the synthetic Jesus Christ of the world that he was bred for and becomes a cyber-god, or he rejects his destiny and tears everything down. You cannot mix all 3 endings into one and end up with a coherent story. So of course IW ends up just funneling you into the Helios ending again since the other endings are so shitty in comparison.

I don't agree. There are multiple solutions, especially if you are able to have a different protagonist in the sequel. Some examples off the top of my head:

1) Put geographical space between the two games. The entirety of Deus Ex 2 could have been set in an Arcology that exists as a sheltered bubble from the outside world.
2) Ignore the ending of Deus Ex 1. Stick to the near future setting. Majority of the players for a sequel are not going to have played the first game and of those that did, the majority will not have finished it. Bonus points if you hide some deep lore in your game indicating that it's actually 1000 years later and there was a calendar conspiracy.
3) Create three prologues in the style of Dragon Age Origins which each push the narrative back to a consistent starting point. People loved that in Origins for some reason.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

same as the real-time lighting fetish.

As I understand the reason for this was to compete with both Half Life 2 and Doom 3 both of which had dynamic lighting. That seemed to be the main motivator behind it and having a physics engine. This is unfortunately what happens when you brag about things in the industry and then have to play catch up to be the "First" which is exactly what they did and why it ended up such a mess. Deus Ex shouldn't have been trying to compete with these games but for some reason they were.

I agree with the spirit of your post, but the level size restrictions are directly tied to console memory limitations.

Not necessarily, if you compare the level sizes to Unreal Tournament 2003 they are comparable, it wasn't until the 2004 version that the level sizes were vastly increased for the new onslaught mode clearly something was going on with the engine otherwise onslaught would've been out in 2003. Neither game came out on console.
The PS2 level design changes for Deus Ex 1 most definitely are attributed to memory limitations but go actually play it, you'll be surprised how much of the PC version translated, the only levels that got changed were New York, Liberty Island, Hong Kong, and Paris most of the game is intact in its original form it just couldn't handle those big hub areas. And yeah that sucks but its not entirely terrible they did a good job with what they had. I'm going to go with Unreal 2 was too new at the time and the team really struggled with it so you end up with unoptimized garbage.

Further evidence too is Warren's comments

“With Invisible War, the primary motivation was to make the game more accessible. We wanted to reach even more people,” Spector says. “The first game, it was pretty hardcore. We were making a game for ourselves… if the shooting is too hard for you don’t shoot, try something else. If the sneaking is too hard for you don’t sneak, try something else. And I always felt that was a really mainstream idea. In Invisible War, we really wanted the player to be more important than the story.”

The entire design philosophy was completely wrong. They went into this game with blatantly the wrong intentions. The gist is they were trying to compete with mainstream shooters, so they had to dumb down the design so it was less ImSim and more Shooter.
We can make excuses all we want the truth is this game was never going to be good. That was obvious. The team at that point had given up, Harvey's mental health collapsed and the team was ready to strangle each other.

Resident Evil 4 came after DE:IW tho.

I was referencing RE1 specifically. And yeah I get its slot based, but I mean so is PS1 Deus Ex so how is that not a perfect fit? That's the main thing I don't actually like about the PS1 version, changing from Grid Based to Slot based but to its credit it's very playable.

The circular UI is supposed to feel like something imprinted on your retina.

As I understand that was one of the reasons, the other was that I think they were copying the film Eraser. It looks so similar.


E: Furthering my point as well, Postal 2 same engine, same time, same problem never came out on console. Raven Shield came out same year, the levels in that game were fairly small as well. Clearly, something going on with Unreal 2 at the time.

 

[Ash]

"Not necessarily"

Indeed.

1. We all know consoles have hard restrictions. That's where optimization and non-sellout design direction comes in. That's how you are able to have Morrowind & Arx in all their glory on Xbox. There are many methods I've seen over the years to make a PC game run on a console with the least amount of sacrifice to the game: typical low settings like Smaller screen resolution, corpses disappear when killed to more unconventional stuff like break up the levels with more loading screens, heavy draw distance reduction, pause the game and stream, or hell release the game with a sub-par frame rate in a few sections, that was quite common to see. it doesn't have to be that big of a deal if it's kept to a minimum. We grew up with black & white games, ASCII graphics, 2D games that couldn't even side-scroll on PC, Racing games that faked 3D and you could barely tell what was ahead, ridiculously low resolutions, all sorts. Now all of a sudden you have a poly out of place or a skipped frame and all the cucks with absolute standards in graphics or performance but zero in gameplay bitch & moan. Yes I am aware gameplay and performance are closely tied, but if you don't understand my point then you probably can't be taught.
2. It just so happens that less graphics whoring, a rule these style of games should and did once traditionally follow, and have to follow to achieve true greatness, would also result in consoles being able to handle much more.

 

[Drakortha]

It's ultimately the fault of PC gamers that video games went in this direction. All they did day & night was copy, mod, rip, and pirate every game to death to the point that developers were forced to compromise with console limitations just so that they could protect their shit from those vultures. It's their fault IW was consolized. They made their bed now they can sleep in it.

 

[Roguey]

The piece of shit Xbox also had Morrowind and Arx Fatalis, with no reduction in level size in the case of both.

Morrowind was a small world that was made to seem larger by giving the player character a sluggish speed. NPCs were also rooted in place for the most part. I'm unfamiliar with Arx and don't care about it.

IW sucked because Ion Storm's garbage design direction

I was never arguing against this.

 

[NecroLord]

It's ultimately the fault of PC gamers that video games went in this direction. All they did day & night was copy, mod, rip, and pirate every game to death to the point that developers were forced to compromise with console limitations just so that they could protect their shit from those vultures. It's their fault IW was consolized. They made their bed now they can sleep in it.

Roguey That's straight up bullshit, bro. There is no sluggish speed. There are many factors which affect speed like current fatigue, how high the speed attribute itself is, your athletics skill and your encumbrance.

 

[Average Manatee]

Most people have no idea how bad Invisible War was from a technical point of view. All of the problems stemmed from Warren Specter's insistence on using 100% real-time lighting because he thought that was immersive and believed tech demo lies about how it would be viable in the new version of Unreal.

To be a little fair to him, it's impossible to know exactly how much a new graphical feature that few games have done before will affect performance at the planning stage. Lots of games have shit performance in development but in the last few months your programmers find a way to optimize the most critical functions to take 1/10th as much time.

 

[J1M]

Most people have no idea how bad Invisible War was from a technical point of view. All of the problems stemmed from Warren Specter's insistence on using 100% real-time lighting because he thought that was immersive and believed tech demo lies about how it would be viable in the new version of Unreal.

To be a little fair to him, it's impossible to know exactly how much a new graphical feature that few games have done before will affect performance at the planning stage. Lots of games have shit performance in development but in the last few months your programmers find a way to optimize the most critical functions to take 1/10th as much time.

There is a world of difference between dropping in dynamic lights in several places for a fancy box feature that can be turned off on lower end machines and deciding to be the first game to rely 100% on dynamic lighting while also tying dynamic lighting to the central stealth system so you have no way of backtracking on the decision late in development.

It was obviously an irrational decision and easy to see that not just when it was made, but during every step in development. It even fails their own (misguided) design principle of being more accessible and reaching a wider audience because it significantly raises the hardware requirements.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

@Roguey That's straight up bullshit, bro. There is no sluggish speed. There are many factors which affect speed like current fatigue, how high the speed attribute itself is, your athletics skill and your encumbrance.

plus you can make a spell/alchemy that makes you sonic caus the game is hilariously broken. They should have really put limits on effect stacking. You can make speed potions early in the game from alchemy vendors if you know where to look.

 

[Roguey]

@Roguey That's straight up bullshit, bro. There is no sluggish speed. There are many factors which affect speed like current fatigue, how high the speed attribute itself is, your athletics skill and your encumbrance.

Play Morrowind and then try Oblivion and/or Skyrim and notice how even Morrowind's running speed is a slow crawl.

Massively slow compared to the likes of Doom or Quake (where your character is admittedly inhumanly fast).

 

[NecroLord]

Because it actively encourages exploration. No quest markers or anything. You have to ask people for directions and consult your journal. Of course, boosting the speed attribute is a must. There are also silt striders and teleportation.

 

[Ash]

@Roguey That's straight up bullshit, bro. There is no sluggish speed. There are many factors which affect speed like current fatigue, how high the speed attribute itself is, your athletics skill and your encumbrance.

Play Morrowind and then try Oblivion and/or Skyrim and notice how even Morrowind's running speed is a slow crawl.

Massively slow compared to the likes of Doom or Quake (where your character is admittedly inhumanly fast).

Bro do you know anything about games?

Morrowind you start pretty damn slow, but with focus in the speed stat you can become the fastest character in probably any game. In fact, you can do this in less than an hour (boots of blinding speed + 100% anti-blind). That's breaking the game, so I choose not to, but I definitely focus on the speed stat + athletics as I am a speed whore (e.g always start w/ steed starsign).

Secondly, Morrowind's open world is probably 1000x the size of a Deus Ex: IW level, even if it's not that big (good. Games shouldn't get much larger than that as devs fail to fill these worlds with quality content around this point. Hell even morrowind itself suffers). You still miss the point.