12.30.05
How to mess up a classic franchise with a pretty good game
Subtitle: My thoughts on the Deus Ex series.
Most of you who visit this blog will know what Deus Ex is. There is also a large chance that you are fans of the game, seeing as you know me. Therefore, I won’t bother with an introduction to either game in the franchise. I will, however, share my thoughts on why Deus Ex 2 disappointed so many people (included, to some extent, myself) even though it was quite a decent game in and of itself.
The main problem was that Deus Ex is, in its very core, a PC game. And in my use of the term “PC”, I do not distinguish between a Windows PC or a Macintosh PC as the game was released for both operating systems with the exact same interface. The PC origins of the game can be seen in almost every level of its design. It is no secret that the PC platform allows for a far more complicated control scheme than any console does (be it a Playstation, an X-box, or a Nintendo system), and that this in turn encourages a more complicated game design. The graphical user interface (GUI) of Deus Ex reflects this in every possible way, from its several layers of clearly Windows-inspired in-game menus to the fact that it has so many different functions crammed into it - change ammo / toggle laser sight / toggle scope view / lean left or right / crouch / jump / toggle walk or run / activate object in world / toggle up to 9 nanoaugmentations / open inventory or any of the other 7 menus / holster weapon / drop item / etc. - that it would be impossible to control without all the buttons of a keyboard and/or several mouse-operated menus.
With the paragraph above, I hope to have conveyed that the very nature of the game depends on a complicated control-scheme. The sequel to Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War or IW for short, made this painfully apparent when the developers chose to create the game for PC and the X-box console simultaneously. From a business point of view, this was a great idea: The X-box uses DirectX to run its games, just like a Windows PC (given that Microsoft is the creator of both platforms) which makes it easy to develop for both at once, and the console gamers outnumber the PC gamers by far in the United States.
But in order to fit the controls for the game on the rather limited amount of buttons present on an X-box controller, ION Storm Austin had to considerably trim down the number of functions in the game. This suited them fine, because they believed it would serve to “streamline” the game, making it more accessible to the mainstream gamers. Unfortunately, among the fans of the original game, this streamlining was mostly perceived as a severe “dumbing-down” of the game. Features from the first game which were not present in the sequel includes different types of ammunition for each weapon, a diablo-style inventory where larger items take up more space than small items, the entire skill system including the way your aim would become more accurate when you were stationary and took your time to aim as opposed to when you were running around or jumping up and down, a conversation log which let you read over dialogue you had already been through in case you missed something important, an in-built text editor to let you write down your own notes, and a few more things I don’t recall off the top of my head.
Additionally, many parts of the game had been considerably simplified; for example, the game would now remember keypad codes for you and activate any keypad to which you had obtained a code instead of letting you enter the code yourself like you did in the first game. This may seem like a small thing, but a lot of people including yours truly were very sad to see it go, as it was a nice little thing to make the game seem more real. The computers in the game had been stripped of some of their functionality, most notably the ability to read other people’s email. The augmentation system had received a huge overhaul, the specifics of which I won’t go into here. And the single most despised simplification among Deus Ex fans was the inclusion of a single type of universal ammunition for weapons. In IW, all weapons - from the flamethrower and the rocket launcher to the pistol and the stun prod - use the same type of ammunition. Hopefully you can imagine what this did to the immersiveness of a game which previously featured up to three different types of ammo for each weapon.
All these simplifications didn’t make IW a bad game of course. But it truly fundamentally removed the game from its predecessor. Even though the game was set in the same world that used the same timeline and featured the same characters, nobody could shake the feeling that this was an entirely different game. A far simpler game. This is of course not necessarily a bad thing, and indeed it would’ve suited me perfectly fine if they had just aimed to create a new game in the spirit of the old one. Unfortunately, when you choose to use the same world, timeline, and characters (not to mention name) as another game, your fans will expect a game which feels like a sequel rather than a new game capitalizing on old intellectual property. Either you make a proper sequel or a new game entirely. The Invisible War approach will only create disappointment.
Paradoxically, Deus Ex: Invisible War was a great game, and I enjoyed it a lot. But I would doubtlessly have enjoyed it far more if it hadn’t attempted to be a direct sequel to Deus Ex. As it is, I have to actively distract myself from thinking of Deus Ex when I play Invisible War. When I succeed in doing this, IW becomes a very solid and fun game with great (if not optimal) graphics, hilarious physics, and a rather solid artificial intelligence, but it would have been far easier for me to enjoy if I didn’t have to spend mental energy deceiving myself while I play it.
It was really nice to get that off my chest. And now I have somewhere to link people to every time somebody starts ranting in the PDX forums about what an awful game IW is.
