Korgan
Arbiter
It's all in the numbers. Number one: that's terror. Number two: that's terror.
Jaesun said:Anyways... still curious what Skyway defines as an RPG. r00fles!
page 1 said:February 18, 2003 - When we went down to Austin to see the Ion Storm team we had a lot of questions about DX: The Invisible War. First on our list was "Can we play it?" followed almost immediately by "Why not?" But having finally been convinced that no amount of pleading, sneaking or shooting was going to change their minds, we decided to take a different tack with our questions.
Project director Harvey Smith and lead programmer Chris Carollo were happy to sit down with us and talk about their favorite features, the need to innovate and the ethics of emergent gameplay. We've already covered the game in a lengthy preview to which this interview should serve as a supplement. Be sure to check back soon for our interview with the head of the Ion studio, Warren Spector.
IGNPC: We talked with Warren over a year ago and he mentioned being glad that you were taking chances that terrified him. Can you just elaborate on the choices you've made that have paid off and those that haven't?
Harvey Smith: That's a good question and a hard one to answer. There's a way Warren would like to do things. He founded the studio but the studio's grown larger, we're doing two projects now and it's a lot of people who have totally different tastes than Warren has. I think he realized eventually that he was going to have to be a total dictator or he was going to have to loosen it up a little bit.
Our approach is kind of team-oriented. We have a team that is mostly aligned in a direction. Maybe it doesn't always match Warren's taste and that's probably where that comment comes from. He's more story, we're probably pulling back a little and adding more visceral interactions to the game. There's still a strong story but the action elements are as important to me as the story elements are.
I pride myself on burning traditions. We wanted to make a roleplaying game. Chris used to work at Looking Glass and I agree with something that my friends from Looking Glass used to say. "You should question everything a traditional game does and ask if you really need to do that again." What's a good example?
Chris Carollo: There's the initial screen of declaring your character.
Harvey Smith: Exactly! Is there a better way to do that? Morrowind came out with a really cool, in-game way to do that. Richard Garriott years ago did the same thing. Instead of having a bunch of numbers, why not have a gypsy fortune teller ask you eight questions and based on those they ferret out your character type. It wasn't as intentional; you kind of randomly ended up with this strange character.
Chris Carollo: Like the shepherd?
IGNPC: D'oh!
Harvey Smith: Yeah, what combination of answers was that? I thought I was going to be an assassin. But yeah, I ask if we really need things like inventory and Warren goes "Aaagh!! We're an RPG! We have to have an inventory!" Well, maybe we don't; let's think about it. In the end we did need an inventory because we want you to be able to hoard stuff and carry it around and use it strategically, so we need some concept of an inventory.
Chris Carollo: Yeah, but if someone asks "Why do you have an inventory?" the answer isn't "Because we're an RPG."
IGNPC: It's "Because Warren said so."
Chris Carollo: Well, we want you to carry things and have stuff in your inventory so you can plan when to use them later. There are a bunch of gameplay decisions wrapped in it.
Harvey Smith: Chris is exactly right. We only want to do things for a reason. We don't do it dogmatically. I guess that sounds like I just said Warren was dogmatic but that's not what I meant. Warren wanted to make sure that we were making a roleplaying game so he pointed to several features and said "These are sacrosanct." We're not in to that.
We looked at them and said we're cutting the skill system. We're gonna merge it with the bio-mods because the bio-mods work better in a videogame. And we're gonna give you the same powers; you're gonna be able to do the same things strategically in the game. In some ways it's better. We're just not going to be presenting you with a big screen of numbers and stats just because every other RPG in the history of man has done that. Of course, the fans flame the hell out of you for that. "You're not an RPG! You took away my stats!"
Whatever.
We don't give you a little sheet that says "strength, dexterity, charisma, wisdom." That's ridiculous.
page 2 said:IGNPC: Like missing the forest for the trees.
Harvey Smith: Exactly. What is the wisdom of the average Diablo character? That's just insane.
IGNPC: What's the wisdom of the average Diablo player?
Harvey Smith: That's awesome. Leave that bit in.
IGNPC: What's your favorite new feature of the game?
Chris Carollo: It's hard to say. Things have kind of come together enough that I can start making that call. Personally I like the drones and the fact that we're adding more of them and that you can be the drone guy that has a swarm of little buddies that hang around you.
Harvey Smith: There are certain tracks in the first game. You could be the stealth player and take all the augs and bio-mods dedicated to stealth. Or you could be the bomb guy. We came up with this idea of drone augmentation. It'd be cool to have a little floating orb that does cool things. We came up with a weapon that launched them. We cut the weapon and moved it to a bio-mod and realized if we added one or two more drone-oriented things, you could be the autonomous drone guy. Sort of like the summoner in certain games. That's a track that I think is going to be popular.
The black market bio-mod track is going to be extremely popular too -- the guy who has nothing but black market augs. Some of them are just so weird and creepy and we've tried to make everyone with a downside. There's one called the Prismatic Resonator. You know the laser triggers?
IGNPC: Yeah.
Harvey Smith: Well, this time we do red and green and gold. The red one sets off alarms, the green one spews gas and the gold one just fries you. The Prismatic Resonator phases your body, like a variant of the cloak, so you can just walk through them. It's very empowering. You're the player that walks in to the area, sees those laser triggers and just walks right through them with no effect. It feels great...conceptually speaking, you know because...
IGNPC: Because you haven't done it yet?
Harvey Smith: Right. The downside is that energy-based weapons do double damage to you. We'll have one or two weapons that'll really whack you if you do that. But being the black market guy will be really popular.
The new technology, physics and rendering, there's no doubt that those have changed things dramatically. We've already taken it for granted. That's why it's not first on our list. If you think back to Deus Ex how terrible the physics interaction was. Everyone in the world, regardless of what they looked like was a giant cylinder. They might as well have been a totem pole. You could just throw stuff on top of their heads and it would just sit there. You saw the rag doll falling down the bleachers, that's just incredible. It adds all this emotion to this game. If you throw a grenade and accidentally kill a kid, it'll look like a child dying [Ed's note: Fantastic, I always wanted to know what that looked like]. The arms move the right way and he's lighter in mass. All this math just works out.
IGNPC: Right on. Moving back to the idea of empowerment [Ed's note: Thank God], I'm always interested in games that are really flexible and seeing how the designers play them. Like what kind of God Peter Molyneux is in Black & White. How do you guys approach the game? What's your own philosophy as a player?
Chris Carollo: I'm typically more stealth-hacky. When I play games like System Shock 2, I always take the hacker. I typically don't do the guns blazing thing. I don't know exactly why.
Harvey Smith: Well, it's boring.
Chris Carollo: Yeah, it's a last resort. If things go wrong I do it and it's more fun because it's not really what I intended and I still have to fight my way out of it.
Harvey Smith: There are lots of different options in the game, and in games like those we're in to, that are indirect. Instead of going toe-to-toe, you can sneak around, or hack, or sneak down in the sewers. Indirection is more interesting than being direct, I think. I don't know why this is but I really enjoy exploration and there are times when I had to fight so hard against Warren and other people like that to preserve exploration.
page 3 said:Harvey Smith: My friends who were on Ultima would do the same thing. They're out in the middle of the woods and want to build an empty house that's been ruined by a fire. They already have all the textures, no extra work has to be done. All they have to do is build a quick house, take the roof off, gut it, put the scorched marks around, knock over the furniture, add a couple of burnt corpses and try to vaguely tell a story that the player can interpret. "Oh, there's a summoning mark in the basement. A demon came and burnt the house down." Maybe there are some other clues and rewards but it has nothing to do with the plot. There's not much you can get out of it but it's something you might find that makes you feel unique. I think Underworld is the king of games like this.
My favorite moments in Deus Ex were building things like that. In Paris, there are a couple of buildings that are empty. You've got to go here to get to the map transition. Why not put a second and third floor on that area? Put some windows and locked doors on it. Now you can shoot out the window and jump-aug in to the second floor. Now I'm in a dark office creeping around. For whatever reason, that totally turns me on. And I wouldn't even call it stealth; I wouldn't even care if I murdered the guy outside that was guarding the place. It's the notion of being in a place I'm not supposed to be and to be allowed to, at my own slow pace, poke around in their drawers and see what's behind doors.
IGNPC: How conscious are you guys of the correlation between the content of your game and the current global situation?
Harvey Smith: We have a running joke that's actually kind of creepy at times. Even on the first game, when we'd put something in the game, someone would point out that it had happened in the real world. Wow, that's creepy. It's not like we're forecasting or geniuses or anything. It's just when you take these elements -- conspiracy, control of power, left versus right, scientific advancement and the impact on culture -- and stir them together with an agenda, you're going to hit patterns that repeat.
We were even going to mix in religion with the first game. A lot of people don't know this but J.C. Denton was supposed to be a descendant of Jesus Christ. We were going to pick up the old theory that Jesus had kids and that J.C. Denton had DNA from Jesus. When you mix those elements around you come up with these recurring patterns.
I don't know if everyone knows this but if you fire up the original Deus Ex and you run around in Liberty Island when we made the skyline in the background we had pieces with the Twin Towers and pieces for the other parts of the city and for New Jersey. The texture memory was so high that I couldn't use it all. I took one of the pieces and put it on one side, flipped it and put it on the other. So I made New York out of one half of the city so the Twin Towers were out.
When people complained, we just explained that it had been destroyed by terrorist attacks. We start the game with the Liberty Island statue having been destroyed by terrorists a few years before. We just said that the towers had been destroyed too. And this was way before 9-11. Years. That's kind of freaky. There are correlations. We're using the WTO in this game and there are WTO riots in Seattle every few years.
We ask questions like, "What is a terrorist?" Are our troops terrorists when they bomb a foreign city and rape the people? They're freedom fighters at times. Cleary, they do good work. I was in the Air Force and I'm not anti-military but it depends on your perspective as to whether you see them as freedom fighters or terrorists. When it's convenient our government has called people in South America freedom fighters; that same administration has later called those people terrorists. There are a lot of weird parallels going on in the world and we're not afraid to touch upon that.
page 4 said:IGNPC: So do you feel that your game is socially relevant? Are you above commenting on that throughout the game?
Harvey Smith: It'd be kind of arrogant to even answer that. I mean, we are relevant. We ask questions like "Should you kill people?" If you kill everybody on Liberty Island in the first game, even though they were called terrorists, you find out later that they were the freedom fighters. We subverted that. When you kill them, your brother Paul runs up to you and says, "You jackass! Those were people. They had lives." That's just a line out of a videogame, right? But we got so much mail and commentary from players saying a videogame had never called them a jackass or taken a stand because I murdered a bunch of people. So yeah, I think on some level games have the potential to do that.
IGNPC: What about shooting versus killing? You said you could go through the whole game without killing anyone. Does that mean not shooting anyone or not killing anyone? There are a lot of opportunities for cool ways to kill people that are too tempting not to try.
Harvey Smith: We certainly dangle that carrot out in front of you.
Chris Carollo: It's not like we're discouraging. We just want to leave all your options open. I bet you could do it without shooting anything, with pure stealth and misdirection, without any combat is probably the best way to say it.
Harvey Smith: That's our goal at least. But you sometimes end up with somebody who does something boneheaded -- like me putting a guy in front of a door you have to get through. You hope your AI is good enough for you to throw a wine bottle over there and have him go check it out so you can sneak in. If he's just going to stand there, I mean...? In Deus Ex sometimes you couldn't distract them. Unless the AI can do something like that, he's just going to stand there and you're gonna have to shoot him.
I agree with Chris though. Unless we completely drop the ball, you will be able to get through the game without touching a weapon at all. You will be able to get through the game without killing anybody. You can use the electro-stunner (the stun-prod as we call it) or the neuro-tox dart to get through the game sneaking. That's our goal.
IGNPC: You didn't mention this but we put two and two together. What do you call the object that you can throw that makes a noise like people talking?
Harvey Smith: At one point we called it a babble-lizer. I can't recall what we call it right now. Sound decoy? Voice decoy?
IGNPC: Isn't there a setup where you can pop a couple of gas barrels, throw one of the sound decoys in there and watch the guys die when they go in there. I killed them but I didn't shoot them, right?
Harvey Smith: You've just taken the general elements that we've talked about and put them together in an emergent gameplay way. I've never even thought about that but you could do that. It would probably even work. It's specifically made to draw them out to explore it. You could even wait to shoot the gas barrels until they walk in to the area.
It's always a tough call as to how smart you want your AI to be? Do you want it to be so smart that it sees the gas and decides not to go in there? Or do you want him to be just a little bit dumb and more fun to play with? "Oh, I better check out this voice. Oh, wait! I'm choking to death!"
IGNPC: So how far do you go with AI? How do you know when enough is enough? Otherwise you could make a game where it's just me against one guy and we try to outsmart each other for 20 hours.
Chris Carollo: The goal with AI is not making the smartest AI -- it's making the most fun AI. Often they are very different things. What you really want to do is allow the player to have an interesting area of the AI to play with. Maybe that's combat -- I take some damage but I tend to damage them more because I'm better than they are and I can take out three of them because three is more interesting than one because you can start using group tactics.
There's also the stealth element of that. You're playing this fun little game where he knows I'm around but he doesn't know exactly where I'm at. I'm not in combat yet. The AI's all about making that area as easy to get in to as possible and as fun and intentional as possible. So you can feel like you're kind of out of control but steering it a certain way. Then you're safe again because he's lost you or you're in combat. You're not really controlling combat either but you're in the middle of playing and trying to win the combat. That's really the goal of AI, not whether they can beat you or not.
Harvey Smith: That's a big mistake a lot of people make, trying to make the smartest AI. Outsmarting the player isn't nearly as fun. A bunch of AIs just about as dumb as dogs are way more interesting.
Actually those weak elements are that plus of DX too. Mostly because there was never a better combination. If the gaming wasn't a piece of shit for moronic kids who will play anything these days and all good developers didn't go out of business I'm pretty sure DX would've been topped many times. But alas - there is nothing better.Longshanks said:Deus Ex is an FPS with some RPG elements. As an FPS it's mediocre, as the gunplay is weak. The RPG elements are also weak (do things in a couple of different ways (sneak, hack, fight), limited skill system mostly dominated by player skill, cosmetic c&c). The aspect it does most well is level design, and in the first at least, the attention to detail. It has some nice large areas for the player to explore.
Don't forget that Deus Ex was based on the designs of the never-released LGS game (screenshots can be found floating on the net though) which were made by other people and Ion Storm used them. And after that they were left with their own creativity and Xbawks. Thief 3 is another good example of this. Not mentioning gangsta-Thief-4 which could've been a rape worse than DX:IW.spekkio said:We are making a sequel to a game that almost everybody loved.
So: let's change all the things that people liked, cuz... We're mothefuckin' brilliant game designers, we know how our gaem should be done, players gonna love all the new shit we came up with (universall ammo, consolized interface, etc.). Boy, we're great.
The main weakness of the sequal was the reduction in level size. Overall it doesn't do much worse than the original. Just disguises its faults less well and has less grimdark atmosphere/art style.
Kaanyrvhok said:Actually DXIW did succeed in its fun AI. It’s the only game I know where you could hide, shoot and kill someone then the ally of the person you killed would, instead of looking for you blame the nearest person with a gun. Not only that they added dialog with it. The dialog even noted sex of the victim. “You son of a bitch, you killed her”.
J1M said:No. This is a stupid comment. You are stupid for saying it and we are all stupider for reading it.POOPERSCOOPER said:I wish I had played Dues Ex 2 after I finished Duex Ex 1 last year when I was in the mode but all you faggots kept saying not to. Now I feel like playing it but I would have to play through 1 again to get to the butt juice of it.
Korgan said:It's all in the numbers. Number one: that's terror. Number two: that's terror.
Grifthin said:Are they considered RPG's ? I got Dues Ex 2 last night and I'm rather looking forward to playing it now. Aparantly there's some decent C&C (I hear) and some fun Loot. What's codex verdict on the game ? Shit ? Not shit ? Rpg ? no rpg ?
Elzair said:Insomnia.ac thinks Deus Ex is the closest thing to a real Role-Playing Game that the industry has ever produced.
You may have liked it, that doesn't make it good FPS combat. Having stats actually hurt the game in this aspect. Gunplay just felt clunky all the way through. That would be okay if stats were an important part of the game. Unfortunately, the poor AI and many cheese tactics open to the player meant they were mostly irrelevant. I never played Deus Ex thinking about what kind of character I'd play, it was always about how I'd decide to play it. Again, this is why I definitely don't consider it an RPG and believe it could have been improved on by removing stats, or at least their affect in combat.DraQ said:You spewed some bull, kind sir.
First, I really liked shooting in Deus Ex, in particular I liked how deadly guns can be - on "realistic", and DX shouldn't be played on anything but, single bullet to the head will kill you, so firefights or fleeing some guys shooting at you created some very tense moments. Second, explosives and White Phosphorous GEP rounds were fucking hardcore.
The plot was purposely over the top conspiracy theorist fare. What, you thought it was some deep kind of awesome? As I say, it was fun but over long.DraQ said:As for "ridiculously convoluted" plot are you sure you're literate, kind sir?
This was one of its better aspects. Well learnt from Thief - which again, I feel is the superior game overall.DraQ said:As for attention to detail, this game does sport a lot of it - from mechanics, including things like AI reacting to any sources of sound, fleeing when wounded and generally creating emergent situations, to well researched background fluff (fucking calcium sorting rotors, man). It also included cool things like human enemies being portrayed as people, not disposable mob.
BlackSun said:Elzair said:Insomnia.ac thinks Deus Ex is the closest thing to a real Role-Playing Game that the industry has ever produced.
That site is for douche bags.
In what way? If you wanted to be a sharpshooter you could pour points into weapon skills, and finally be able to run and gun. If you didn't pour those points in there, you could still shoot, and be fairly effective with weapons, but it required good position and time - you could not just pick off several consecutive targets one after another while running around like a retard.Longshanks said:You may have liked it, that doesn't make it good FPS combat. Having stats actually hurt the game in this aspect.
You must be talking about System Shock 2 and it's "you can't use shotgun because you have insufficient standard weapon skill, durr hurr" shenanigans, good sir.Again, this is why I definitely don't consider it an RPG and believe it could have been improved on by removing stats, or at least their affect in combat.
First, it wasn't particularly convoluted with it's whole one major plot twist, second, it was pretty interesting exercise in baking something consistent out of a jumble of conspiracy theories in a grimdark cyberpunk sauce, especially with attention to detail resulting in things like lunar mine backstory arc, or sarcoplasmic reticulum implanted nanoscale calcium sorting rotors aiding rapid muscle contraction.The plot was purposely over the top conspiracy theorist fare. What, you thought it was some deep kind of awesome? As I say, it was fun but over long.DraQ said:As for "ridiculously convoluted" plot are you sure you're literate, kind sir?
I would consider System Shock 2 a ripe candidate for removal or thorough overhaul of RPG elements, at least when it came to weapon skills. Not being able to hold shotgun in your hands, point it at the enemy and squeeze the trigger - something a disturbed kid or a hillybilly in 'kwa can do with ease - without investing three increasingly costly levels of standard weapon skill was mind-numbingly retarded. They could have maintained Marine-Navy-OSA trichotomy by just dividing skills between weapon maintenance and repair, tech and PSI rather than weapons, tech and PSI. Hell, making weapon skills affect your aiming, reload and recoil, while at the same time limiting ability to repair, maintain and upgrade given type of weapon would have worked too. Making you unable to pick up a handgun and shoot in the general direction of the enemy without skill investment was fucking andhairous, in stark contrast between rather reasonable influence of skills on your weapon performance in DX.This was one of its better aspects. Well learnt from Thief - which again, I feel is the superior game overall.
Don't get me wrong, Deus Ex is a quality game. One of my favourites. My previous post was more about why I do not consider it an RPG or a good pure FPS. Its various elements do come together nicely and make for an enjoyable experience. It is my opinion that it could have been improved on with a tighter focus and a bit more polish in certain areas, and is surpassed by similar games like Thief, NOLF and System Shock 2.
Longshanks said:^^That "on roleplaying" article is some of the most overly verbose self defeating bullshit I've ever read.
Insomniac dude on Deus Ex said:Not for the extensive dialogue choices and the elasticity and non-linearity of the plot
BlackSun said:His whole article is based on the assumption he has that pnp rpgs are more about story and "role-playing" than combat and this is simply not true, specially when they started out. When D&D was first released it was about dungeon crawls and combat. His opinion, like many other peoples, is based on a false assumption.
DraQ said:In what way? If you wanted to be a sharpshooter you could pour points into weapon skills, and finally be able to run and gun. If you didn't pour those points in there, you could still shoot, and be fairly effective with weapons, but it required good position and time - you could not just pick off several consecutive targets one after another while running around like a retard.Longshanks said:You may have liked it, that doesn't make it good FPS combat. Having stats actually hurt the game in this aspect.