Deus Ex 2 Interview December 02, 2003

Harvey Speaks

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FiringSquad: Invisible War is the first game you were project director on, giving you full control of its development. What decisions did you make during development that you think Warren Spector might have done differently? How was control over design shared?

Harvey:: Actually, my first role as project director was on Technosaur, an RTS that got cancelled after a year of production.

Warren and I share a lot of beliefs, from a game design standpoint. I think he leans toward story while I lean toward abstract gameplay. But, overall, we're both in line with the Ion Storm game design vision shared by many people at the company. On each Ion Storm project, there is a core of people--a cabal--who understand and LOVE the gameplay philosophy. Everyone influences game design decisions, but these people are key to the process here.

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FiringSquad: Speaking of emergent gameplay, you mentioned at NVIDIA Editors' Day that players and testers had come up with some very unique ways of beating the challenges presented in Invisible War. Got a favorite surprise?

Harvey:: There are so many...generic examples like players building Rube Goldberg physics puzzles to blow open doors with chain reactions, or game characters accidentally breaking security windows in a firefight, setting off alarms and waking up nearby sleeping security systems (like turrets).

One of my favorites: Players figured out that they could throw down a spiderbomb grenade (which spawns an allied spiderbot AI), then use their bot domination biomod to take over their own spiderbot. These players then run around as the spiderbot (in an 'AI possession' mode that is part of the bot domination biomod) and do all kinds of interesting things: Attacking and leading away guards, parking the bot near locked doors so they can detonate the bot later and blow open the door, etc.

Also, at one point it's possible to have a major fight with one of the critical characters, who appears flanked by allied security bots. One of the testers saw this happening and instantly dropped a scrambler grenade, switching the factions of all the bots. The bots immediately tore up the major character. We never planned this, but it was a really creative, on-the-fly use of our tools. (Of course we left it in the game...)

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FiringSquad: The generic ammunition and lack of reloading is an interesting choice. Care to elaborate why you chose not to have gun-specific ammunition and reloads, which have become so popular in many other games? How is the ammunition supposed to work in the game world?

Harvey:: We thought it was a very cool "nanotech" idea...the notion that guns of the future would be able to reconfigure inert matter into the desired caliber/shape. Deus Ex is all about self expression. Partially this is done through playstyle and weapon/tool choice. In Deus Ex (and some other action games), the player often favors a particular weapon throughout the game. However, they're also picking up the ammo for other weapons as they travel through the world. So, at the end of the game, the player realizes that they have tons and tons of ammo for all the weapons they don't use. In Deus Ex, some players would choose, say, a sniper rifle, use it throughout the game (conserving ammo and running desperately low). Then, at a certain point, players would realize, "Hey, I've got 99 shotgun shells!" We wanted to solve this problem. Nanotechnology worked well as a contextual justification.

With regard to reloading, there was a big internal debate. Some people like it a lot because it's a known game design weapon behavior...a tactical aspect of combat of which good players must stay aware. It also makes the weapons feel a little more realistic. Other people on the team just thought it was frustrating--to forget to reload and die as a result during combat. Also, some people liked the science fiction aspect of nanotech no-reload weapons.

These were not necessarily the Right Design Decisions, but they are, as you say, 'interesting.' We're comfortable experimenting...we're not so nervous about game design that we are dogmatic. We like taking some risks here and there too.

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Conclusion

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FiringSquad: Are there any people in particular that inspired the science fiction and conspiracies in Deus Ex and Invisible War?

Harvey:: Sheldon Pacotti was the lead writer for Deus Ex and Deus Ex--Invisible War. He and Sarah Paetsch worked with the game design team on all the missions, and those two wrote the AI one-liner 'barks' and the conversations. Aside from drawing from seminal video games, 'paper' roleplaying games and their own fevered imaginations, people on our team have drawn inspiration from Philip K. Dick, Umberto Eco, (nonlinear stuff like) Karen Elizabeth Gordon's The Red Shoes and Milorad Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars (to see how other writers deal with building drama when you don't know what sequence readers/players are going to encounter passages in), Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), Bertrand Russell (Principles of Social Reconstruction), the tv show "24," Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, the movie Blade Runner (and other canonical cyberpunk like) Snow Crash and Neuromancer. (As writer Sarah Paetsch said at one point, "We're not all that cyber, but it's the same landscape, overrun and blighted by commercialization and sprawl and sometimes some sort of apocalypse.") We also tried to stay up on current nanotech development and recent science reports.

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Harvey speaks on FiringSquad about Deus Ex 2! So what do you think about the interview? Let us know in the news comments! Yes, anonymous posting is allowed!