I’m almost afraid to write this post. There’s so much to say, and I’m not sure how to organise my thoughts. Moreover it’s difficult to identify my own biases based on my history with the Deus Ex franchise and weed them out of my opinions to form something at least marginally useful. I’ll give it my best shot below, but remember this is not a formal review, this is just my thoughts on the game, written in whatever order they matter most to me.

You may expect intense spoilers. Lots and lots of spoilers. All sorts of spoilers, both for the narrative and the mechanics of the game. You should not read this unless you’ve finished the game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is brilliant

I love it to bits. I’m mostly going to write about the things that bothered me, or the design decisions that I disagreed with both in general and relative to what I know about the paradigms that gave birth to Deus Ex. Before I get to any of my criticisms or doubts, however, I must emphasise that I mainlined this game for 4 days straight and finished it in just under 40 hours. I forgot to eat. I neglected to sleep. I let myself be transported into a completely different world, at once reassuringly familiar and intriguingly fresh and different, and I loved every second of it. Yes, every second. Yes, even during the boss fights, which isn’t to say I like the boss fights at all – I’ll get back to that.

Deus Ex 3 is very much a return to form for the franchise – in abandoning the uncompromising ambitions for constant reinvention of the Origin / Looking Glass school, they’ve managed to recreate most of what made Deus Ex special while introducing all the no-brainer features that are expected of a modern AAA game. A lot of what Deus Ex does, Human Revolution does better – as just a few examples, the city maps are much bigger and function as proper hubs to an extent the original city levels didn’t, hacking a computer gives you unlimited time to read through all its emails, and the acting is infinitely better (people in China actually often speak Chinese! I have much respect for this). Most of the modern updates they added to the design are unmitigated improvements, such as the cover system which changes the nature of both the stealth and the combat in directions I wholeheartedly approve of, or the iron sights which are pretty much mandatory in a modern shooter and improve the feel of the combat significantly.

Their dialogue is well written and well implemented, and their narrative is thematically extremely strong. Though I caught myself hoping for a revisit to one of the original Deus Ex locations, I very much respect and appreciate that Eidos Montreal resisted the urge to shoehorn obvious references to the original into every aspect of their game – you’ll find plenty of tie-ins to the DX story if you look for them, but they’re mostly quite subtle and fit naturally into the plot and setting. (Still hoping to infiltrate Area 51 or Liberty Island or somesuch in some DLC though.)

There are other minor ways in which DX3 falls short of DX1, especially the end of the game (it got the job done, but it was fairly weak compared to the first game, both in terms of the endings themselves and the build-up to them). It also seemed to have fewer memorable characters than DX1, but it also had far fewer characters that seemed included just for the hell of it, so I guess that evens out. The health regeneration didn’t bother me nearly as much as I’d expected it would, but the energy system did foster some weird and problematic behaviour in me – I quickly realised the best tactic was to keep all but your last battery drained most of the time and instead drag around a bunch of items to charge up your energy for when you need it.

Instead of trying to list a myriad of small criticisms, however, I’ve picked the 5 main problems I had with Human Revolution, presented here in order of most to least annoying:

1. XP for takedowns

As I understand it, Deus Ex was fundamentally conceived out of Warren Spector’s frustration that Thief would not allow him to think on his feet and fight his way out of a bodged stealth attempt. The whole philosophical core of the game design is that players should be able to play the game in whatever way they choose, and not get punished for it. The original game didn’t entirely succeed at this – some play styles are vastly more useful than others, and some styles yield far more rewards in the form of items or background info. Nevertheless, you never feel overtly punished for indulging in some combat here and there, you rarely have to load your quicksave if you trigger an alarm, and for every NPC that scolds you for murdering enemies, there’s another NPC ready to pat you on the back for being a cold-blooded badass.

One of the most important design decisions that facilitated this balance was the lack of skillpoints for taking out enemies. Skillpoints were reserved for completing objectives, be they mandatory or optional, with a few bonuses thrown in here and there for exploration*. That way, neutralising enemies was only mildly more rewarding than avoiding them completely, and only in ways you were unlikely to need with such a play style anyway (after all, what use is ammunition if you’re not confronting enemies anyway?) Knocking an enemy out was completely the same in gameplay and balance terms as killing them, only the narrative would change.

Human Revolution gives you XP for taking out enemies. In fact they give you XP for damn near everything – missions yield XP to the tune of 1000 or so a pop, pretty similar to Deus Ex. Exploration rewards are routinely 100 or 200 XP, however, to Deus Ex’s 30-50 points. Even hacking yields XP, as opposed to Deus Ex. Not raising any alarms is 200 XP extra at the end of the mission, and not getting spotted triggers a whopping 500 XP bonus. Would you rather fight? Tough luck, you’ll have to write off 700 XP per mission. Perhaps even more heinously, taking an enemy out non-lethally gives you far more XP than killing them. Shoot somebody and you get 10 XP – 20 if you got a headshot. Shoot them with a nonlethal weapon and you get a 20 XP bonus. Eviscerate an enemy with a melee takedown and you get 30 XP, knock them out and you get 50. Get two enemies together and knock them out at the same time if you have the aug for that, and you get 125, 62.5 XP per head.

You might suggest that this is done to balance the fact that unconscious NPCs can be woken up again, but the fact that non-lethal weapons and takedowns are completely silent whilst the lethal approach generates ridiculous amounts of noise should easily take care of that, and besides – nothing except your own squeamishness/ethics is stopping you from executing unconscious enemies if you bring a silenced weapon. The funny thing is, I prefer going the stealthy route, I derive incredible enjoyment from sneaking around levels and knocking enemies out, remaining unseen and causing no alarms to be triggered. The XP system is rewarding my favourite play style, but it bothers me out of principle. I want to select this play style because it’s what I like, not because it yields better rewards, and more importantly I want the freedom to draw my weapon and blast my way out of a sticky situation if I get spotted, and the freedom to hack a robot and turn it loose on the unsuspecting enemies without losing a 200 XP bonus at the end of the mission plus 30-40 XP for every enemy the robot mows down. I want to be able to use the silenced and fully upgraded combat rifle I’ve been lugging around since the first mission without being annoyed that I’m missing out on 30 XP.

In the end I mostly stuck to non-lethal takedowns even though I didn’t really need the extra XP, and I finished the game with (according to his calculations) 7 upgrade points more than Mads, who went for a more aggressive play style. I also hacked every PC and keypad and explored every nook and cranny of every level religiously, but I’d have done that anyway, because that’s the only way I know how to play a Deus Ex game.

* As an aside, I don’t feel exploration can be accurately classified as a play style on par with eg. Stealth, Heavy Weapons, or hacking turrets or robots to turn them against their former masters – exploration is more of a meta-play style that facilitates the other play styles. After all, how would you be able to play puppetmaster if you didn’t know about the back route that takes you right past the outer patrols to the security computer that controls the robots?

2. Boss fights

Much has been written on the subject, but I’ll try to see if I can’t add anything to the discussion. By the time I started the game, I’d already been warned from every source that the boss fights are pretty much terrible. Some had referenced Alpha Protocol, which I notably never finished because I got stuck on motherfucking Brayko as my stealth/hacking character build was totally useless in that boss fight. With this in mind, I stocked up on grenades and made sure to bring a combat rifle with me at all times: in case of surprise boss fight, break out rifle and hope for the best. The first boss fight proved just as terrible as I’d expected, but perhaps not in the way I feared – the first three times, he survived me unloading a full magazine of my upgraded combat rifle in his face, and then destroyed me with grenade spam. The fourth time, I threw a frag grenade at him first, then unloaded my rifle in his face, and he went down in all of about 5 seconds. The boss fight went from damn near impossible and entirely unfair to completely anticlimactic in an instant, with apparently nothing in between – not a good sign.

The second boss fight was not as bad, a little gimmicky but I failed it twice and then succeeded – it didn’t feel as unfair, but I cheesed my way out of it with frag mines. The third boss fight was over in the second attempt when I found the right rhythm between spamming frag mines and shooting him with a stun gun. The final boss fight was much different and actually felt like it made pretty good use of the various augmentations and play styles at your disposal, but it was a little confusing and I’m not sure how it would play if you can’t hack. I also think I managed to break it on my first attempt, but it worked fine the second time around.

My main problem with the boss fights isn’t so much about gameplay as it is about narrative and… philosophy. Honestly, failing a boss fight 3 times before you succeed is totally acceptable, and seeing how I cut loose with the lethal weapons anyway, it didn’t affect me in directly that they all died in cutscenes in the end. However, knowing that there is no way to use stealth against these enemies, and knowing that even if you stick to stun gun, tranquilisers, and knock-out gas, they still die in cutscenes, offends me as a Deus Ex fan. What did affect me directly was how spurious and poorly supported they were. An antagonist is somebody who’s supposed to be connected to the protagonist, and merely being another mechanically augged person in a world surprisingly full of mech augged people does not count.

You see all three bosses in a cutscene after the tutorial level, and the third boss shows up in another couple of cutscenes throughout the game, but apart from the first one who shows up in a couple of emails, you never even know their names until you look at their corpses after each fight. When I killed Anna Navarre in Deus Ex, and when I faced Walton Simons, they didn’t have to be introduced in cheesy cutscenes and they didn’t need special scripting – they didn’t even have to put up much of a fight, because no matter what, it was going to feel special. They were characters I knew because I’d dealt with them many times and had interesting conversations with them throughout the entire game, they had reacted to my play style and other NPCs had discussed them with me behind their backs – I know these people and killing them was always going to be meaningful no matter how it went down. You could remove all three boss fights and every reference to the characters involved entirely from Human Revolution and it would change precisely nothing. Except the game would be three pointless, out-of-place boss fights lighter.

I wish they had.

3. Pheromones

Maybe this one should be higher, but… it’s less of a flaw than a massive missed opportunity. In case your memory needs refreshing, the game offers a social aug (“CASIE”) which does a variety of things. This is used exclusively in a sort of negotiation-style conversation minigame where you have to pick your way through precarious dialogue with major characters that you need something from. Without CASIE, these conversations are incredible – you’re forced to really listen to what people are saying and consider everything you know about them in relation to your dialogue options. In some cases you can even get useful clues as to how you’re doing out of their facial animation, though more often than not it’s too crude to read properly.

Many of the things CASIE does are fine. It displays a window with a short psychological profile of the person you’re talking to, which genuinely helps you decide what to say. It gives you a reading of their personality type (Alpha, Beta, or Omega – I don’t know if these are ever properly introduced, but I figured out what they mean pretty quickly). Most usefully, it gives you a “persuasion level” reading of how close you are to either losing or winning the argument. All of this works splendidly. Where it picks all of that up and tosses it directly out the window is with the addition of a “pheromone” button. This is basically a magic cheat button where no matter how good or bad a job you’re doing of winning your opponent over, all you have to do is keep an eye on their personality type readings and then pick the matching line to instantly win the argument. That entire brilliant structure I outlined above, all of the work and thought that went into that goes completely out the window, and worse – you miss out on a whole bunch of really well written and acted dialogue.

If you have yet to play Human Revolution and you unwisely decided to read all the way down to here despite that, I implore you: never use the pheromone button. You can still get the CASIE aug, its persuasion level reading and its psych profile are both extremely useful, but winning an argument the proper way is by far the most satisfying way to do it. I’ve tried both ways, and I can tell you I’ll never be using those damn pheromones again.

4. The economy is broken

We’re approaching niggle territory. Those three points above? Those were some serious points of critique, major annoyances that bothered me for the entire game. This… is more of a detail. And really, it’s not like Deus Ex did it much better, but still: the economy in this game works poorly, and I blame it mainly on being able to sell items to vendors. Each city hub level in the game has two vendors, and certain missions have vendors of their own. So far so Deus Ex. Human Revolution adds a shop GUI to make trading a more pleasurable experience, which also allows the vendors to stock more items than Deus Ex could, since that was all handled through dialogue.

Being able to sell stuff was one of the most requested features in The Nameless Mod. Do you know why we refused to implement it? For the same reason they never let you sell items in Deus Ex: it encourages you to wade like a pack mule back and forth between some alley where you killed a bunch of enemies and the nearest vendor, selling all their items and weapons one by one. Sure, it doesn’t force you to do so. Sure, you still get enough money in the long run that there’s no need at all to do it. But when you find that praxis kit for 5000 credits, you better believe you’re going to make your way back to that apartment where you left two shotguns and take them one at a time to the vendor two blocks down where they sell for 750 credits each.

I did this. And I hated myself for it. I felt like an idiot, I knew I was just being impatient and that I would make that money through normal means soon enough, but I just had to have that praxis kit. It was the worst parts of Diablo all over again, and this time you can’t even pick up two shotguns at a time because they’re simply merged in your inventory. So I wasted my time and turned Adam Jensen into a pack mule, and at the end of the game I had 26755 credits – more than I could ever possibly hope to spend.

Obviously this hilarious surplus of money wouldn’t have been entirely fixed by not letting you sell things. You’d have prevented players like me from carrying out some severely boring commuting, but I still would’ve had far too much money at the end. The game needs some sort of money sink, something you can buy if you have loads of money, but the lack of which doesn’t nerf you completely. For a while, the praxis kits looked like they might be it, but the 5000 credits that seemed so outrageous at the start was spare change half-way through the game. Deus Ex had this same problem, but Eidos fixed so many of Deus Ex’s other weaknesses, I would have liked for them to fix this one too.

5. Too many praxis points

By the end of the game, I had fully upgraded every augmentation that I gave half a damn about and then some. I bought and maxed-out dermal armor basically because I had nothing to spend my points on that I really wanted. I bought the wall-hack augmentation just to see how it looked – used it once, nodded approvingly at the nice visual effects, then turned it off and never used it again. Taken in isolation, this is good and bad, but in the context of the franchise I think it’s mostly bad.

Irrespective of Deus Ex’s design philosophies, it’s fine that you have points to spare. You still have to prioritise your upgrades since the first half or so of the game does change substantially depending on what augs you upgrade first, and knowing that you’ll eventually be maxed out gives you some leeway to build a more all-round character right from the start instead of having to pick a specific play style and stick to it. Essentially this fits right into that fundamental design ethos I outlined when I was criticising the XP system, in that you can easily “multiclass” between stealth, hacking, and combat without being underpowered later on, which gives you freedom to switch to combat whenever you get tired of stealth.

On the other hand, it really limits the replayability of the later levels. ION Storm Austin put a fair amount of thought and effort into making sure Deus Ex would remain interesting on further playthroughs. Every aspect of the game contributed to this, from the semi-reactive narrative and the multipathed levels to the limited inventory and the skill system being tied into your item use. One of the most obvious aspects of this was how augmentations were set up to be mutually exclusive. The game had twice as many augmentations as you could install, and they typically came in matching sets of two. The result was obvious: to try out all the augs, you had to play at least twice.

To be fair, I was incredibly thorough. I mostly stuck to non-lethal takedowns to get the most XP, I explored every level fully, I hacked everything, and I got a fair few ghost and smooth operator bonuses. Less OCD players may not experience quite the same abundance of praxis points by the end of the game as I. To be even more fair, I didn’t max out all the augs I wanted until about half-way through the game, so the first half of my second playthrough will be just as different as my second playthrough of Deus Ex. But my abilities in the second half of the game will never be much different from playthrough to playthrough. I’ll upgrade my inventory fully so I can carry all the weapons I want, and there are no secondary upgrade system such as Deus Ex’s skills to further differentiate character builds from each other. I’ve already seen nearly everything the game has to offer in terms of level and narrative, so the only motivation I have to play again is a scattered handful of narrative choices that may have interesting alternative outcomes if I choose differently next time.

It’s not a huge problem, but it does feel like a small step in the wrong direction. When so many aspects of the original game have been improved, it feels particularly disappointing when the game falls short of its predecessor on such a comparatively major point.

In summary

It’s important that you understand why I have so much to say about the things that annoyed me in Deus Ex 3. It’s because I love this game, it comes so close to perfection and so close to its predecessor, which is deeply embedded in my personal identity. Any flaw I perceive in such a game will inevitably draw far more attention than a similar flaw in a worse game. Furthermore, my history with the franchise and my fairly deep understanding of and respect for the design paradigms that gave rise to it and the handful of games like it adds a philosophical layer to my experience of the game – I’m bothered by things that don’t directly affect me, simply because they don’t fit with the intentions behind the original game. Finally, the very fact that I’ve dedicated over 3000 words to discuss the things I didn’t quite appreciate about the game should indicate how much I care, and though it won’t necessarily communicate that I really really love the game, rest assured this entire post was born from powerful, undiluted enthusiasm.

To make it clear that I really did enjoy this game tremendously, I’ll end with a short list of my favourite details in the game:

• Laser grids shut down when your enemies walk near the lasers, to allow them passage. This also means you can disable the lasers by dragging the dead or unconscious bodies of your enemies with you through the lasers. EMERGENCE!
• As if it’s not enough of an emotional high point if you fail to save your pilot after you’re shot down, you can find her dissected corpse at the Harvesters’ later on, as they’ve been digging out her augmentations. It’s an incredibly cruel gut punch, and it totally works.
• One of the most powerful scenes in the game for me was showing up at Picus HQ in Montreal to find it completely empty. It’s quite startling how unsettling and cinematic that whole scene felt simply because there was nobody there, and just like in the pod hotel in Hengsha, getting a chance to explore the level thoroughly before the enemies turned up made the following escape all the more fun.
• The helipad storage room in Sarif is restocked between each of your visits.
• Eidos Montreal has played around with the emails just as we did in TNM – you can track reply chains across different PCs and piece together little background stories if you read everything. As far as I can tell, even the TO and FROM fields are consistent, using names where there should be names, addresses where there should be addresses, and mailing list names where there should be mailing lists.

I’ve been thinking about killing in video games recently, especially after something Quintin Smith said to me about Uncharted on Twitter: “A character who moves like a monkey, slaughters hundreds and smoothes it over with a merry quip!” A few days later I came across another mention of Uncharted that pointed out the severe disconnect between the countless murders committed by the protagonist of that game, Nathan Drake, and the game’s chirpy characterisation and bright, unconcerned aesthetics.

A lot of interesting things have been done with player death in video games, though I’ve read countless more ideas begging to be explored further, but when “kill” is among the verbs at the player’s disposal, it’s generally treated in two ways: kill many people or kill fewer people. Some games include non-lethal weapons (a mechanic that seems most popular in stealth games, cases in point: Thief, Deus Ex, Splinter Cell), and some games feature a mission or two where it’s mandatory not to kill anybody.

I think the question of whether to kill a person in a game has huge potential, and I’m not aware of a lot of games that really make interesting use of it. Deus Ex is the predictable game for me to use as an example, but in fact the best example I can think of is Hitman: Blood Money, where unnecessary kills not only count against your score and salary, but change the media coverage of your assassinations which nominally alters the difficulty of subsequent missions. It could’ve been implemented more confidently, but I thought it provided really logical motivation for me to think like Agent 47 and try to limit my collateral damage.

Rock Paper Shotgun brought the blog Design Reboot to my attention this week, and though I have a very ambivalent opinion of it (I feel that the reboot posts are generally of little value to me, vastly preferring the occasional level design post), his ideas for Deus Ex spinoffs about Gunther Hermann or Anna Navarre contain some very neat ideas about turning the player’s killing into both narrative themes and gameplay mechanics.

I love the idea of a game with multiple endings chosen from how well you’ve restrained your killing throughout the game. I feel that for it to work best, a cold-blooded play style should be markedly more effective than a less-lethal approach, so taking the high road will be the difficult option. It’s important that the players be made aware that they’re heading down a dark path if they take the easy, deadly way through a mission, but I think sticking to your principles in a game like this would be very rewarding indeed. It’s what Deus Ex seemed to be doing up until its plot twist revealed it to be a sort of extended tutorial, and I’ve always thought the first act of DX was much more interesting because of that.

The way Monahan at Design Reboot proposes to tie the kill count into Gunther’s character development reminds me a lot of the role-playing system Cyberpunk 2020 where every character has a Humanity statistic that decreases every time a cybernetic enhancement is installed in his or her body. It’s used to represent the traditional cyberpunk theme of the transformation from human to cyborg and what it might bring with it of psychological problems and identity crises. The specific implication in CP2020 is that the more of a machine you become, the more you lose your human empathy, eventually becoming so disenfranchised that you go on a killing spree. This is very much the principle Deus Ex’s Gunther character was based on.

Since Quinns’ comment, I haven’t been able to shake the feeling that Uncharted could have been a far more meaningful experience if it had fewer fire fights, but made them matter more. The game already has a lot of elements that could replace combat as the core gameplay dynamic – adventure style environmental exploration, 3rd-person platforming, puzzle solving, and trap dodging. It also features reasonably robust melee attacks and basic stealth AI.

I love the fact that the pistol in Uncharted remains powerful and useful throughout the game, thanks to its high accuracy and stopping power and the scarcity of ammunition. I’m sure that if the firefights had been very rare but extremely lethal, and if the game had relied more on fist fights and stealth, Nathan Drake would’ve been more like his obvious role model, Indiana Jones. I rarely find myself advocating authenticity (realism, if you will) in games, but in this case I think a bit more of that would’ve made Uncharted a much more fun and exhilarating game.

For a very long time, I’ve wanted to experiment with an action game with very limited gun-play, where weapons are as lethal as you’d expect in the real world, where non-lethal combat such as a plain old bar brawl make up most of the fights, where few enemies try to kill you unless you produce a weapon first, and where killing somebody has serious implications. Short of a highly detailed law enforcement dynamic, tracking the emotional stability of the player character could be a splendid way to create such an aesthetic, and on top of that a potentially unparalleled way of tying the character development directly into the gameplay.

Above all, I’d just like to do something new and cool with the concept of killing in games, something that’ll make you rethink the traditional role of combat in action games, and I’m grateful to both Quinns and Monahan for getting me to think about these things in the first place.

Here’s the third and final part of my post-mortem of The Nameless Mod. I’ve chosen to cut it up into three posts because it’s very long. Two days ago, I posted the introduction. Yesterday, I gave you the five things that went right. Today, I’m wrapping it up with five things that went wrong. You can also download the whole thing minus illustrations as a PDF

1. We spent no time on pre-production

In stark contrast to Deus Ex’s luxurious six months of pre-production, we literally had none. Actual game assets were being produced from day one; before we’d even decided what the game was going to be about or what sort of story we would write, artists were churning out character textures and level designers were building maps. A month or two of recklessly disorganised brainstorming segued into a confused, hurried documentation process where we struggled to keep up with our own ideas. Since the project was entirely anarchistic in the beginning, nobody had to wait for permission to start pumping out assets, and little to no coordination took place between different designers or artists.

In and of itself, “don’t eliminate pre-production” may seem like a pretty obvious piece of advice, but what we were actually trying to do, in hind-sight, was iterative design: We were experimenting with the engine and the tools at our disposal, testing the capabilities of our team, and throwing our every idea at the game with no sense of restraint in order to see what worked and what didn’t. The approach could’ve worked out a lot better than it did if we’d made a conscious effort to evaluate the decisions we made and deliberately pick out the elements we wanted. Our team size and structure was even quite suitable for an iterative design model; we had around ten highly dedicated people working on it back then, and there was no management or budget to worry about, so we were free to mess around and distil the useful ideas from the poor.

Unfortunately we made the major mistake of not eliminating anything at all. Everything people created and every idea anybody had went straight into the design documents. In that way, we managed to waste what was actually a pretty healthy pre-production process because we treated it as full production. A lot of the bad ideas and decisions that made it into the game back then, we managed to replace or fix later down the line, but some of it can still be found in the final product because it’s simply too time-consuming to fix. File that one under “how not to do Agile development”.

2. We didn’t understand all the code

They say those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it, but sometimes you know going into a project that you’re going to face some major problems, and there’s very little you can do about it. The sometimes makeshift nature of parts of Deus Ex’s code was one such problem we faced. Now, far be it from me to criticise the Deus Ex programmers – they did an amazing amount of work and unlike us, they were working under deadlines. But by their own admission, the artificial intelligence in Deus Ex wasn’t as well designed as it should have been and suffered even further for being constructed precariously on top of the Unreal Engine code.

To us, the problem wasn’t just that we didn’t want to mess too much with the AI code, and that we never had access to Unreal’s source code to fix some of the more persistent bugs we encountered, but that we didn’t fully understand how the code was meant to be used in the design. Our AI problems are the most illustrative example of that, but unfortunately not the only one. Deus Ex’s AI, it turns out, is pretty stable when it just has to be friendly or when it just has to be hostile. When you start mixing friendly and hostile (and perhaps even neutral, if you hate yourself) behaviours in the same area, the illusion begins to fall apart. What we did was to mix friendly, hostile, and neutral characters in the same levels, and then switch their alliances around depending on the player’s previous choices. It blew up in our faces, and it never stopped blowing up.

I suppose there were two ways we could have solved this problem: One was to sit down and rewrite all of Deus Ex’s AI code as early as possible. This wasn’t an option due to our extremely limited programming resources, so the remaining solution was to look very carefully at how Deus Ex’s characters had their AI set up and how the different settings were used, and then stick to that; but once we finally realised that, implementing such a solution was tantamount to scrapping everything and starting over from scratch.

Some of our levels really pushed the capabilities of the creaky old Unreal Engine. We had to cut almost half of this one and replace all its background lights with ambient "zone lighting" to make it stop crashing; and to be honest, it's still too big.

3. We had to compromise on quality

By the time TNM was released, our standards were pretty high. We screened our actors thoroughly for audio quality, we rebuilt entire levels dangerously late in development if there were too many problems with them, and we’d long since stopped implementing any feature if we didn’t feel that we could take it all the way. But of course, beggars can’t be choosers, and we sometimes had to compromise because we couldn’t pay people. The two areas where I think this is most obvious in the final product are level design and voice-over. For the voice-over, it was a hard and bitter struggle to secure solid actors for the major characters, but I think we largely made it. In terms of minor characters, the picture looks a little different: Many of them were recorded by ourselves or our girlfriends or by random fans. Even our good actors occasionally had sub-standard recording quality, which becomes obvious far more often than it should.

In terms of level design, the problems were technical as well as aesthetic. Some of our level designers were quite good at producing pretty architecture, but didn’t seem to grasp the design principles that made Deus Ex’s missions so exciting. Others had brilliant ideas and a great understanding of design, but their levels looked boxy and uninteresting. Some levels that were otherwise nice and well designed had been constructed entirely off-grid, causing substantial technical issues later on, and it’s painfully apparent that we never had an art director or a concept artist, making our levels vary erratically in style and tone. Far too late did we understand the concept of dividing level design tasks amongst a designer and an environmental artist, and even then, we never had the resources to do it in the first place.

Though this problem was emphasised because we were forced to make do with the generosity of volunteers, I imagine that too short a supply of talented team members who meet your standards of quality is a problem even commercial projects face, and I suspect that if I had a fool-proof solution for it, I could use it as the basis for a whole new article. In the future, we aim to conquer the problem by counting on a small team of only the most skilled and dedicated rather than designing a project that demands the participation of 50 contributors of varying talent and enthusiasm. In short, we’ll embrace the indie ethos and stop pretending we’re an AAA studio.

4. We didn’t test enough

We tried though. We gradually brought over twenty testers in to play the game starting several years before we were finished, and set up an online bug tracking system for them to report back to us with. We set up a forum specifically for the testers, and we sent out guide documents to everybody detailing how to install the test build, what sort of bugs they could expect, how to report them, etc. We evaluated our bug database and set up priority fix lists towards the end of the project to make sure all the really problematic bugs were fixed before release. When TNM was released, it had no major bugs that we knew about.

And yet the first journalist we sent the release candidate out to, before the download link was publicised, found a bug in the kill counting code which would close off an entire map prematurely due to a recent fix between the two last release candidates. We then spent an entire week fixing bugs in some sort of infernal post-crunch, followed by another month of slower, steady fixes. By the second patch, we’ve fixed around 240 problems, and we’ve more or less brought TNM into the state we thought it was in when we released.

There are three things we could’ve done to improve our quality assurance. First and most importantly, we should have been more careful to test our own work during development. Far too often, features and assets went into the game without any testing. In a game as heavily dependent on emergent gameplay as Deus Ex, it’s critically important to apply very thorough testing to everything you implement: If we had tested each of our new additions in combination with as many different factors as we could think of, that would’ve significantly reduced the amount of combinations that slipped through the cracks. Secondly, we should have set up some auto-testing: One of our programmers coded up auto-testing scripts a couple of months before we were done, which was far too late – we only managed to apply it twice before release. Since our plot had so many branches and variations along the way, being able to fast-forward through certain common branches would’ve been a great help earlier in the project.

Finally, we should have managed our testers more strictly. Unfortunately I’m not sure most of our testers would’ve responded very well to tighter management, but I suspect five dedicated and well managed testers would’ve been far more useful than a score of testers left mostly to their own devices. We tried to get our testers to commit to particular kinds of playthroughs, hoping we’d get all the branches covered, but it never worked because most people who volunteered to test weren’t interested in committing to anything beyond playing the game and writing down the major bugs they found. In summary, our primary mistake was that we skipped the organised alpha testing and went straight to beta testing.

One of our design tenets was that every mission should have some sort of gimmick or setpiece to set them apart from each other. For example, our final mission takes place on a space station, leading to much new oxygen- or zero-gravity-related gameplay.

5. Our project is a PR nightmare

The final and perhaps the hardest problem we faced was making people understand that our game wasn’t shit. We’d spent a lot of time making sure that people wouldn’t be alienated by our game and that we had plenty of depth and internal consistency to keep everybody interested, but we’d completely underestimated what a huge turn-off the basic idea of the mod was to so many people. Every site where we published our trailer, and every forum thread where people began to discuss the mod, one sentiment would immediately surface like a knee-jerk reflex: What an idiotic concept. Why would anybody spend seven years working on this fan-boy circle-jerk of a game?

We were pretty crest-fallen: We’d gone to such lengths to make sure TNM was a game, not just a joke, and many people wouldn’t even give it a chance because they immediately assumed the worst. But to make matters worse, we came to realise that we’d frontloaded all the Internet references, the fan culture and the memes and the in-jokes right in the first mission of the game. Part of this was unavoidable: The first mission served by necessity to introduce the player to our setting, so all the opaque references and Internet semiotics were presented to you immediately. Once out of the first introductory hub area, the setting would quickly slip into the back seat to leave room for the plot itself, but too many people seemed to never reach it, having lost all interest long before then. Since The Nameless Mod is free to download, we have no demo, but in terms of convincing people to invest their time in playing through TNM, that introduction area is all we have, and it seems to be doing a rather poor job.

Perhaps our greatest mistake was to tell people that The Nameless Mod was inspired by a real community that existed on the Internet at one point in time. I suspect people in general would be a lot more susceptible to our quirky cyberspace setting if they thought we’d just invented it as a Snow Crash-esque sci-fi take on the Internet, because then they wouldn’t associate us with the reviled genre of “forum fan fiction” to begin with, and once playing the game, they wouldn’t be expecting in-jokes everywhere. Much of the feedback we’ve received has implied that people constantly see in-jokes and obscure references when by far most of the game’s fiction was either invented specifically to suit the plot or the setting or twisted so far out of its original shape that it no longer bears any resemblance to the events or the people it was inspired by.

A well-known games journalist graciously defending our concept wrote: “no wonder everyone makes games with space marines being gruff”. I’d like to think people are generally open to new concepts, but I’ll admit that our premise and our setting do us no favours. Not, however, because TNM is too weird – there have been many successful games far stranger than The Nameless Mod and our world is quite recognisable when it comes down to it. But at the same time it reminds people of a genre of fiction which is almost never executed well. If we’d managed to set ourselves further apart from that genre with all the PR material we sent out, and if we’d done more to change people’s expectations before firing up the game, I think we’d had a much easier sell.

In Closing

In some ways, The Nameless Mod is a triumph for Agile development and iterative design processes. Not only did we learn how to make the game we were trying to make, we learned almost everything we now know about game development and project management. We learned these things by trial and error, and our errors pushed us to seek out the information we needed and apply it to our own work.

It’s unfortunate that we wasted so much time messing up and making bad design decisions. Part of this was because we didn’t manage feature creep as well as we could have, and part of it was because we got carried away with perfectionism, constantly recreating old assets to match our new standards. If we’d known what we were doing right from the start, TNM could probably have been released in 2006.

It’s been an incredible project though, and it’s changed some of our lives substantially. I think we ultimately came out on top of most of our mistakes, and we’re very excited to move on to the next challenge. With all the feedback we’ve received on The Nameless Mod, hopefully we won’t repeat any of the mistakes we’ve made. And now we have this post-mortem to help us remember them.

This is the second part of my post-mortem of The Nameless Mod. I’ve chosen to cut it up into three posts because it’s very long. Yesterday, I posted the introduction. Today, you get the five things that went right. And Tomorrow I’m finishing with five things that went wrong. You can also download the whole thing minus illustrations as a PDF

1. Designing for the niche

It took us far longer than it should have, but we eventually figured out how Deus Ex worked, what made it great, and what we had to do to maintain its core gameplay. We made the decision early on to stay loyal to the original game; Deus Ex was very well designed and had a clear high-level vision, and understanding the design principles behind the original game allowed us to support and polish the existing gameplay and create a new setting and plot reflecting but not imitating Deus Ex’s.

Judging from how TNM has been received, this was definitely the right choice. When developing a mod (or, one would imagine, an expansion pack or a piece of downloadable content or similar), it’s a safe bet that the people who will be interested in your product are the hard core fans, and so it’s not a bad idea to design your game for them. With this in mind, TNM had more freedom than Deus Ex and significantly more replayability. It also had a greater emphasis on role-playing, more long-term choice and consequence, and was a lot more difficult. None of these features help when it comes to accessibility, but to people who already knew Deus Ex’s gameplay well, our design seems to have hit the sweet spot.

Furthermore, most of our design choices were aimed at tipping the balance of the gameplay elements further towards role-playing and adventure dynamics: Talking to NPCs who react to your play style, making long-lasting choices, exploring large and detailed environments, tackling problems with thorough use of your character’s skills and abilities, etc. In other words, exactly what many role-playing fans seem to feel is missing from more commercially viable RPGs. It was obvious that people wanted more Deus Ex, and I believe we succeeded in delivering that, while adding our own stamp of uniqueness to the experience.

To familiarise himself with Deus Ex's GUI code, one of our programmers, Nick, implemented Pong with it. Then he got a bit carried away and did Tetris too. Then we demanded he also create Breakout and Lights Out. These minigames can be played by accessing certain PCs in the game world, and the players love it.

2. Turning a joke into a setting

One of our main concerns was how the scope and the aim of the project had gradually changed over the first couple of years. The Nameless Mod had started out as a small-time project aimed at a very limited audience, but after a year of development, we realised that we’d spent so much time and energy on the game already, we had to appeal to a greater audience – even though no money was involved, we felt that the more work went into this game, the more people needed to play it in order for our hard work to be justified.

Unfortunately, the game we were working on had a distinctly limited appeal: It was self-insertion fan fiction full of in-jokes, with a plot held together almost entirely by obscure gags and references to personal interpretations of events of no interest to anybody outside our small community. It was a mess, and it had to change. The primary way we did this was to bring people on board who had little to no attachment to our community and get their feedback. The fundamental causalities and motivations of the plot were rewritten, the setting was continually fleshed out and supported by explanations and player training, the fiction was tied together to make it more self-contained, the dialogue was repeatedly rewritten and edited to have fewer references and more character, and I did my absolute best to imbue the game with as much cultural relevance as possible, hoping people outside the development team would find it meaningful.

We started alpha testing relatively early, before the game was playable even half way, bringing in testers who had no knowledge of the Deus Ex community to get their general opinions and impressions about the game, and we improved the game in many ways with their help. The feedback we picked up immediately eased our worries: The game generally felt consistent, internally logical, and engaging. Nevertheless, we kept polishing the game as testing progressed and more people joined our QA team, realising that the unpromising concept of The Nameless Mod would be a hard sell. Judging from what chatter we’ve been picking up post-release, the general consensus seems to be that everybody hates the concept of the game until they actually play it, and that may be the greatest compliment we could get, in that we seem to have pulled off what most people considered impossible.

3. Managing complexity

Deus Ex was a complicated game with many different genre elements and many interacting and overlapping gameplay systems creating joyously unpredictable results in the hands of its players. Lead Designer Harvey Smith famously used the phenomenon of grenade climbing (utilising the fact that wall-mounted grenades have collision cylinders to scale a wall by jumping from grenade to grenade) to illustrate the dangers of emergent gameplay. We’ve always considered the benefits of emergent gameplay to be well worth this “undesirable emergence”, and so one of our main goals was to add even more complexity to the game, both on the narrative level and the mechanical level.

In terms of gameplay however, we had an easy time compared to Ion Storm: Rather than having to invent an intricate web of game systems ourselves, we had the luxury of simply expanding on and tweaking a tried and tested set of mechanics. We chose to keep almost every object from Deus Ex (be it items, augmentations, or skills) and just add our own creations to this already sizeable collection. When we did change objects from the original game, it was to add further features to skills or augmentations that were widely considered to be less useful than their alternatives. We also had a lot of fun adding further layers of interaction to the game world, identifying such incidental interactivity (flushable toilets, readable emails, playable pool tables) as one of the great strengths of Deus Ex.

The real complexity came from our extremely ambitious plot design. I’ll be the first to admit our ambitions in this area passed far beyond the boundaries of reason. One of the major points of criticism of Deus Ex was that you were apparently offered a choice of whether to leave an organisation, only for that choice to be made for you. I wouldn’t call this a reasonable criticism, considering how much extra work such an option would’ve called for and how poorly it would’ve worked with the overall concept of the game, but we still decided to give the people what they wanted: two parallel, mutually exclusive storylines.

The key to basically creating two games in one turned out to be – perhaps unsurprisingly – reuse of assets. Early experience taught us that levels were the most expensive type of content, so we had to minimise the amount of unique maps per storyline. The cheapest resources turned out to be dialogue and gameplay scripting. Thus, we let most of our missions take place in maps that served other purposes as well, for example having one faction task you with breaking into the headquarters of the other faction and vice versa. By switching out all the plot-relevant dialogue depending on the storyline, but keeping the same maps, weapons, and characters (as either enemies or allies depending on the player’s choices), we were able to create drastically different plotlines without too much unnecessary work.

That said, designing levels to be your home base in one case or a hostile mission area in another case, and writing and scripting characters to be either allies or enemies complicated the game logic more than was perhaps necessary, putting incredibly high demands on quality assurance – but I’ll save that for the What Went Wrong section.

Weapon renders are a bit of a modding cliché, but heres one anyway! Our weapon designs were pretty much improvised by our 3D artist, but we managed to come up with unique functions for them that didnt just duplicate weapons from the original game.

4. We released!

We actually finished the game after 7 years of work. Though many were itching to count us among the many over-ambitious total conversions that would never release anything before the developers eventually gave up and called it quits, we never stopped working on the mod. We had periods of low activity, but at any given time, somebody was always making progress towards finishing The Nameless Mod.

The fact that we released was largely down to three factors, chief of which was sheer determination to see this through. Though TNM started out as a pure hobby project, a couple of us realised along the way that game development was something we wanted, nay needed to do for a living, and we’d be damned if TNM wasn’t going to be the greatest portfolio piece in the history of game design. There was also a pervasive sense that we’d come too far to give up on the game now – one does not simply sacrifice 4-6 years of free time on a project only to walk away from it when the end was in sight.

Even with this hell-bent determination to see things through to the end, we would never have finished anything if we hadn’t started to reign in our own creativity. Feature creep was the engine that kept us running up to a certain point, but then it started to become a real problem – we weren’t making nearly enough progress towards actually finishing the game, instead spending our time on whatever new features happened across our minds. Somewhere around 2006, we started making lists of what we had left to do and plans of how to finish it all. In other words, we became more responsible, more organised, and more professional. Eventually we entered feature lockdown, then complete content lockdown, and then we were done. Turns out the way to get things done is with good management.

5. Post-release support

After 7 years of development, most of us were really eager to put TNM behind us and start up a new, independent project – something we might actually be able to make money from eventually. Unfortunately that would have to wait. By the time we released, Deus Ex was a very old game, and in our infinite ambition, we’d been messing with the native code and adding a couple of our own features to it, such as an OGG music player – in short, it crashed a lot. Furthermore, it turned out that thousands of players are better at finding bugs than 20 volunteer testers (who would have thought?)

We started fixing bugs the day The Nameless Mod was released. When we built the release version, we were almost certain there were no significant bugs left, but hundreds of people signed up to our forums to tell us otherwise. The first patch was released after one very long, very hard week of the worst crunch I’ve ever experienced, and fixed around 140 bugs. The second patch was released a month later with over 200 fixes. Though this sounds like a lot, it’s actually fairly good considering the scope and complexity of the game, and the fact that we had very few really dedicated testers and no systematic testing procedures in place.

Most importantly though, we got them fixed very soon after release, with the help of our community, and we’re not done with the game quite yet. We’re also cooperating with a few other well known Deus Ex mods to help make sure their work is compatible with TNM. Finally, we’ve been providing thorough support to people with installation problems or other technical issues, going so far as to monitor TNM discussions on other forums to intervene with help when it’s needed. All of this, combined with some very open and honest communication throughout, has earned us a lot of good-will with the community that we might otherwise have lost to a reputation for releasing a bug-ridden mess of a game.

Promotional artwork of Trestkon.

Now that GameCareerGuide has had their 30-day exclusive on my post-mortem of The Nameless Mod, I’ll be reposting it here for posterity and convenience, and in its original UK English. It’s fairly long though, so I’m spreading it across three posts. Today, you get the introduction. Tomorrow, the five things that went right. And Friday I’m ending it on a raised index finger with five things that went wrong. You can also download the whole thing minus illustrations as a PDF

If we’d known what we were getting ourselves into, we’d have run away screaming. The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex stands out for a couple of reasons. First of all, it’s a single-player total conversion, which isn’t the easiest or most popular category of modification on the Internet. Secondly, it’s enormous: The Nameless Mod features over 14 hours of voice-over, the average length of a playthrough is 15 hours, and that’s just playing one of two significantly different, mutually exclusive plotlines. Third, and arguably most notably, The Nameless Mod has been finished and released to very favourable reviews. The project was in development for 7 years, 2 months, and 11 days by an international team of hobbyists who never met each other. It placed enormous demands on communication, leadership, and quality assurance, and to top it all off, it started as that most reviled of genres: Forum fan fiction.

Back-Story

The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex, released 9 years after Ion Storm’s magnum opus, strives to reproduce the multilinear design and unique aesthetics that made Deus Ex such a widely beloved classic. While expanding on Deus Ex’s core gameplay, the Nameless Mod also introduces players to an outrageous new world which is at once an homage to, and a satire of Deus Ex, its community, and the Internet at large. Playing as Trestkon, a respected veteran returning to his old Internet forum, the player is charged with investigating an apparent abduction which takes him deep into the history and politics of the community.

Game Data

Release date: March 15, 2009.
Genre: first-person action/role-playing game; cyberpunk spy thriller; pop culture satire.
Core team size: 1 producer, 1 lead designer, 1 dialogue manager, 2 programmers, 5 level designers, 1 3D artist, 4 2D artists, 1 sound designer, and 3 composers.
Additional contributors: 4 programmers, 6 level designers, 6 2D artists, 4 writers, 6 sound designers, 5 composers, 23 testers, and 74 voice actors.
Length of development: 7 years, 2 months, and 11 days from conception to release.
Notable technologies: Unreal Engine 1 and the Deus Ex SDK including UnrealEd and Ion Storm’s ConEdit. One of our programmers added OGG music support.

The Concept

I would be lying if I said we had a game of TNM’s final scope in mind when we started out in January 2002. We were originally planning a single “fan-mission” – one or two maps connected by a simple, quickly grasped plot, with the twist that the characters in the mission would be based on the users of GameSpy’s PlanetDeusEx forums where the team was formed. It was a premise that betrayed our low expectations for the size of the audience we would be able to reach: we were just making this for our own community. However, the self-indulgent concept turned out to be a huge help in attracting qualified help. Everybody who joined got to be a character in the story, and who doesn’t want to see themselves in a game? As the team grew, the scope of the project slowly grew as well, and the concept was expanded. We decided to take it even further, making the plot actually take place on the forums, in a virtual world inspired by the stories and the imaginary spaces we’d created for each other.

The most central part of the concept was never actually discussed nor given thought for the first large part of development – it was a given, an unspoken rule that we all agreed upon: we would remain loyal to the original Deus Ex gameplay. Unfortunately our project initially suffered from a lack of conscious design: As we didn’t have a lead designer until a couple of years into the project (I was a dedicated writer to begin with), we had nobody responsible for analysing and recreating Deus Ex’s gameplay, which is why our initial designs missed the mark in several important ways. Our first concept was designed to be one very large hub level with complete freedom to move to the connected maps and handle the missions in any order. A prototype of the hub map revealed several problems with the single-hub structure, greatest of which was Deus Ex’s old Unreal Engine 1 and its hard limit on level size.

Through four revisions of the first design, we eventually settled on a design more closely matching Deus Ex’s own structure: A largely linear plot with branches and variations along the way, taking you through several hub levels. Unlike Deus Ex, however, we chose to branch the main plot into 2 parallel storylines early on. We also chose to connect our three hub maps and distribute the missions across them all so the player could move freely throughout the game world with a single “point of no return” about half-way, giving us an opportunity to reset the game world and move time forward to show the effects of some of the player’s actions. The result of these decisions was a game structured much like Deus Ex, but with far more freedom for the player to change the plot and far more optional content, but also a significantly shorter critical path.

The amount of information we supplied our level designers with varied a lot depending on how much faith we had in their design skills. One of our designers was a professional, so we just sent him this MS Paint schematic illustrating the structure of the mission and its primary objectives.

The Production

Initial development was incredibly chaotic. We had no well defined team structure and no communication infrastructure to coordinate our work. Level designers began to build maps before the plot had been written, characters were created based on the online personas of the forum users and were then written into the story afterwards, and weapons and items were constructed on the basis of a cool idea with no thought as to how they would fit into the game. The design documents were retroactively written around game assets that were already being created, taking input from everybody on the development team and anybody else who cared to contribute on the forums.

Over the course of several years, we gradually got a handle on the project. By trial and error, we worked out a sane workflow and a reasonable team hierarchy, established reliable communication channels, and developed a solid understanding of our own project and the game it was based on. Whether by natural evolution or a lack of imagination, our final team structure was very flat, with our producer Lawrence Laxdal and myself functioning as the intersections of all communication. We became more demanding of our contributors and learned to quickly let go of anybody who didn’t keep their promises. Moreover, we all became better at our respective crafts. Though this was a benefit for obvious reasons, in terms of scheduling, our perfectionism proved to be a problem. We estimate that 90% of everything we created in the first 2 years was later replaced, redone, or removed as our skills improved and we saw the flaws in our previous work.

When almost all our level assets were completed and we had a playable alpha, we took a good hard look at what we had done and what we still needed to do, and then we began to cut down on the feature creep. We’ve almost regarded feature creep as a form of currency with which we’ve paid our team – for every hour somebody has contributed towards finishing the game, we had to let them spend X amount of time working on their own pet features. As the project neared completion, we reduced X until the project entered feature lockdown around the summer of 2008. By this time, only the most dedicated team members were left.

The final stage of production was dialogue audio and quality assurance. The process of recording the over 195,000 words of dialogue in TNM began several years before release and is notable for making use of a large amount of professional or semi-professional voice-over artists who contributed entirely for free. For this enormous project, we created an online database system which kept track of every character in the game, every conversation node attached to that character, each character’s actor, the status of their lines, and which of our audio engineers was working on them or had worked on them. Early on, we recruited somebody specifically to oversee the voice-over process, and towards the last phase of the project, Lawrence and I ended up spending most of our time helping out as well. We always knew the large amount of volunteers would be a liability to the time frame of the project, but in the end we managed to wrap up the recording process about a month before we were finished with QA, much to our surprise. Three release candidates later, The Nameless Mod was finished.

Rock Paper Shotgun have been running a feature since last week called Gaming Made Me, with the following premise:

The games that made us the kind of people that we are today. Which was the game that made us stand on a table and say “O Captain, My Captain”? Which game bullied us after school and made us frightened of walking alone at night? Which game would a psychiatrist want to talk to after our first session on the couch? We’ve picked out a bunch of titles that stood out as defining in our lifetimes of button-mashing, whether good or ill. What will they be?

I’ve had a lot of fun reading first about the picks of four RPS authors, later the auto-analysis of various game developers and other journalists, but I didn’t see a reason to write one of my own since I doubt interest in my gaming past is really that great. However, today I came up with a good enough reason: it’d be kinda fun to write.

It’s pretty hard to pick just four games that were especially important in forming my gaming habits of course, not least because it’s difficult to think that far back and try to analyse the impressions that different games left on me. But I’ve picked the four games that seemed most obviously influential to me:

Command & Conquer: Red Alert

Oh how I wanted to pick Planescape: Torment. Torment showed me the sheer brilliance possible to achieve in interactive narratives, and it taught me that game stories can be so great that their gameplay almost doesn’t matter. But somehow, almost perversely, Red Alert seems more important. I think it was the first game that really captured me with its story. Those FMV cinematics were campy and clichéd in exactly the right way to suck in my naïve 10-year-old self, with the perfect mixture of espionage, war, and completely ridiculous fantasy technology.

It made me shoot Soviet conscripts, blow up Mammoth tanks, and dodge Tesla coils outside with my friends after school. It made me write fan fiction. It made me open up the level editor and attempt to construct worlds.

Might and Magic VI: The Mandate of Heaven

This was an important one – it was the first game where I basically came to live inside its world. I played it for a good half year with my best friend, twice a week, as we took turns to control the game, and its pausable real-time combat had enough tactics that the input of the one not at the controls actually mattered. The story was surprisingly original, a defiantly strange mixture of fantasy and science fiction, and somehow they managed to show most of it instead of telling it, even with those simple 1998 graphics. The multiple revelations of the world’s history were imparted subtly and gradually, but felt no less shocking and momentous.

M&M6 had a huge, expansive open world that ran like clockwork – it was completely obvious in retrospect that it had been designed in a spreadsheet, as everything fit so perfectly together (12 regions = 12 shrines = 12 months in the year), but I’ll never forget the joy of figuring out a system as enormous and complex as that game, picking it apart and mastering it completely. Years later I got the same thrill from analysing Oblivion for a university paper, cataloguing its cities, its storylines, its missions, its races, and picking apart its gameplay down to the constituent mechanics. For M&M6, we had a three-ring binder full of notes on travel routes, shrines, obelisks, skill trainers, traders, colour codes, alchemical recipes, artifacts, and secrets. We once spent a whole day experimenting with herbs to make a complete list of all possible potion recipes in the game. A week later, we found that very same list somewhere on the Internet, but it didn’t matter because our list was our list.

It was also the first game that showed me how stories can be created dynamically if the game system is sufficiently large and complex. We were so proud of our wizard when he became our first character to reach his third and final rank as grand master when we killed a powerful lich far earlier than our character levels should have allowed, and finding Excalibur in a rock long before we had the ability to pull it out made us completely obsessed about getting that damn sword. With such a love of M&M6′s expansive world and open gameplay, I still don’t understand why I never got on with Morrowind, but maybe I should’ve played it together with somebody else.

Half-Life

With the possible surprises out of the way, here are the nobrainers. Half-Life not only defined my current understanding of immersion in video games, it was my first leap into real 3D level design as well as my proper introduction to multiplayer gaming. I never became very good at it, mind, but I actually spent some time on it, unlike my quick brush with multiplayer in eg. Quake.

Half-Life seemed like a completely new way to tell a story in a game – so much more involved than the weak narrative tagged onto the beginning of a level yet far more natural and elegant than the expansive reams of text RPGs would happily throw at you, it was of course a storytelling technique already employed in games like System Shock or Ultima Underworld before Half-Life, but I’d completely missed those games, and combined with modern animation technology and modern FPS gameplay, Half-Life just took it to a whole new level. An entire year of my life was pretty much dedicated to Half-Life, and then I got Deus Ex.

Deus Ex

I’m not sure I need to say much about how much this game changed my life. The major achievement of the game was the fact that it caused me to involve myself so completely in my fandom for it. It was exactly the mixture of FPS, RPG, and adventure that I craved, and thankfully its unique, complicated gameplay clicked very quickly with me. It still took me about 5 years to completely figure out its design, but in that process, I also learned about other approaches to game design and even game development in general.

Seven years of my life were spent working with Deus Ex, and for that reason, it’ll always have a special place in my heart. Though in that period, I’ve discovered and suffered under pretty much every weakness in the game’s design and construction, I still see it as the most ground breaking and visionary piece of game design in my life.

Deus Ex is the reason I admire non-linearity, it’s the primary cause of my love of exploration, it’s why I crave non-lethal action gameplay, and it’s why I don’t fear complicated hybrid gameplay. Deus Ex has been my mentor.

High Definition Texture Package
In which the aim is to replace all Deus Ex’s models and their textures with higher-poly, higher-resolution versions. Have released a demo, and are currently hard at work on their first proper release.

New Vision
One man’s quest to recreate every world texture in Deus Ex with textures 8 times as large. Currently in open beta, and about 65% done.

The ENBSeries
Which adds modern graphical technologies such as bloom, specular, and bump-mapping to so-called “last-gen” or even older games with brute force. Currently in some sort of alpha mode for Deus Ex, so there are quite a few kinks to work out, but it’s already fairly impressive.

DirectX 9 renderer
Which brings many fixes and improvements to the aging game. This one is necessary in order to run New Vision and the ENBSeries at all, so kudos to Chris Dohnal for coding it up.

I’ve taken a bunch of screenshots:

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

Unfortunately the ENB Series runs quite terribly on my machine, and I’ve heard similar accounts from others. It’s probably the real-time bump mapping and bloom that destroys the framerate, but it does look a lot better in this latest version than it did in the last beta.

It strikes me as a huge missed opportunity that the ENB Series for DX didn’t come along in time to coordinate with its creator. The new specular effects would’ve been particularly useful in portraying Forum City wet with rain as it should be before you enter DXI.

It’s far from perfect yet, but considering this is a very early alpha build, I’m highly excited to see where all this is going. When all three of these projects are finally complete, DX will look quite acceptable indeed!

Also, in case you missed it, here’s our annual TNM April fools joke for 2009, written by Gelo and I

Hindsight is always 20/20

The thoughts herein spun off of a discussion I had with my friend Mads a few days ago, which resulted from this blog post of his: Why Writing and Programming are Fundamentally Different. I’ve added his blog to my links out there in the right side.

It made me think about what I’ve learned about branching dialogue during my work on TNM. As I’ve spent 7 years rewiring my brain to a more nonlinear form of creativity than other media call for, my sense of how to pull off good branching conversations has improved significantly, and it seems that the most important thing is to think less like a writer and more like a programmer – in that respect I agree with Mads’s thoughts.

But there’s something else – a trick to preserving the tightness of the dialogue. The more linear a conversation is, the easier it is to make the dialogue snap and spark the way a good screenwriter can. Writing, as anybody who’s taken a writing course will know, is not about producing realistic conversation, but about producing interesting conversation.

Real conversation is often idle, aimless, disconnected, and full of pauses and misunderstandings. In a screenplay, unless you’re deliberately aiming for realism over traditional mainstream writing, everything needs to be in there for a reason. If you include a pause, it must be pregnant with meaning. Misunderstandings must lead to something, they must affect the direction of the dialogue rather than just being a brief diversion before the conversation gets back on track.

Perhaps surprisingly, it’s easier to write realistic branching dialogue than interesting branching dialogue. Dialogue put together by a computer or by a player’s half-informed, tentative clicking more easily comes to resemble the aimless, slightly off-center, disconnected flow of an everyday conversation than the tightly paced and deliberate dialogue of a drama. To stay in control of the conversation and make sure it will eventually lead somewhere, a game writer has to drastically limit the nonlinearity of his dialogue.

Two good examples of different ways to limit dialogue branching without making it completely linear are Deus Ex and Neverwinter Nights. The former has largely linear conversations that only branch at important junctions, whereas the latter never gives the player less than 2 choices per line, but different choices often lead to the same response. The problem with DX’s approach is that the player feels far less in control of the conversation and the character of the avatar. The problem with NWN’s approach is that players often feel cheated upon replaying the game and realizing that by far most of their choices make no difference. Deus Ex’s choices feel far more important because when your choice wouldn’t matter, you’re not given one.

Whichever method you choose, however, the challenge you face as a writer is to make sure every branch of dialogue is equally interesting. Ideally this should go for all aspects of your game – if you give the player a choice, every option should have interesting consequences. This is why people complain about Bioshock’s wrench being overpowered – these are people who feel compelled to pick the optimal route through the game, and if that means they have to stick to the really boring wrench combat, they do so, and they have a miserable time as a result.

Often, as a writer, I feel that I have several ideas for how a conversation could proceed at particular junctions. As a screenwriter or a book author or similar, part of your job is to choose the option that you think is most interesting or will take the dialogue in the direction you want it to go, not to mention the direction that best fits your characters. When writing branching dialogue, you have the option of leaving that choice to the player – you just have to make sure every choice leads to something interesting.

As an example, here’s one of my favourite examples of branching dialogue from TNM. This is not a big spoiler, and depending on how you play and the choices you make in the game, you may not even encounter this conversation on your first couple of times through the story, but if you want to stay completely spoiler free with regards to TNM, best skip this blockquote box. Our player character Trestkon’s lines are bold.

• That was a bad move Trestkon.
• Oh I’m sorry, how inconsiderate of me. I should’ve left you some painkillers for that new headache of yours.
• Heh, nice. So what did you hope to achieve by sparing my life?

• Option 1: I needed a challenge. Killing you would’ve been too easy.
• I’ll give you a challenge. When you least expect it.
• I think you’ll find it quite difficult to catch me off my guard, assassin.
• Good thing I’m up for a challenge too.

• Option 2: A clean conscience. And I thought you’d prefer being alive.
• Morals? That should prove a decent enough weakness to exploit the next time we meet.
• I have weaknesses enough, but I won’t let anyone exploit them.
• You just keep watching your back, “Agent”.

• Option 3: I proved a point. Gave you and Kylie something to think about for a while.
• I’ll mostly be thinking about our next fight. You upstaged me today, but the only result of your arrogance is that I get a rematch.
• I’m looking forward to it.
• Only because you don’t know what I’m planning.

Each of these three short branches is a perfectly fine piece of dialogue that I’d have been happy to write into a linear script. I think they work just fine on their own, with a good amount of friction between the characters – they’re all nice, snappy exchanges between two quick-witted people. If I were writing a linear script, I would have to choose one option based on Trestkon’s character – is he an arrogant, self-confident person? Is he a empathic saint who never takes a life if there’s any way to avoid it? Or is he a psychologically savvy person who manipulates his enemies?

In a film or a book, I would have to make that choice, but in a game, it’s best left to the player. As long as I have good ideas for how to take the dialogue in interesting directions either way, putting the choice in the player’s hands will make the player feel a stronger ownership of the avatar.

I feel that the trick to making this work is to make sure every option maintains the conflict. The above is a conversation between two enemies who quite recently had a fight which one of them lost. If one of the options completely defuses that conflict, leading instead to reconciliation and mutual understanding, the drama is drained out of the situation – not to mention the rest of the game is changed significantly (not that we’d hesitate to carry through with that, but in this particular case the game would be poorer for it).

The player’s choice above doesn’t really change the outcome of the conversation – in all 3 cases, the relationship between the two characters will be even worse than it was before the conversation. But the player has had a chance to pick his own character’s motivations, and I think that’s worth writing and recording the 8 extra lines.

A final thought: The conversation I chose as an example ends after each of the three branches, but the way I see it, there’s nothing wrong with “merging” the branches again after they’ve played out. If more information needed to be imparted during that conversation, each of the branches could easily jump to the same line and the conversation could then carry on from there – as long as the conversation changes noticeably for a few lines, I believe the player will feel that the choice was worthwhile and that it was properly recognized by the game.

Leonardo Da Vinci will be central to the story of DX3. That sounds good to me, Da Vinci has plenty of conspiracy theories attached to his legacy, and I’m sure they’ll tie very well into the Illuminati and the Knights Templar as they appeared in the original game (since DX3 has been confirmed as a prequel, it’ll be taking place before the Knights Templar were taken out by Manderley, so they’re bound to make an appearance). Additionally, there’s a very real possibility that Eidos Montreal’s French Canadian development team will bring a noticeably French aesthetic to the DX universe, which could end up being really inconsistent with the two previous games in the franchise, but if the story is centered on the European parts of DX’s web of conspiracies, I think it could work out really well.

The new game will cast you as an average security guard who ends up with biological modifications (I’d assume they mean mechanical augs a’la Anna and Gunther, but they could be going for a more biopunk angle). It’s revealed that the game will feature around 20 augmentations, which sounds quite promising – DX had 18 plus the 3 basic augs you start with, Invisible War had 15 plus the default Light aug.

They don’t reveal how many slots you have, however – in Deus Ex you had half as many slots as there were augs, so you could install half in any given game. In Invisible War, they gave you only 5 slots, so you had to choose between 3 augs per slot. Either way is fine by me, but note that IW let you replace augmentations you’d installed, whereas aug choices in DX were permanent – if they give you more than 2 options for each slot, they should probably let you replace them on the fly like in IW so you don’t have to play the game 3 times to try them all.

While we’re on the topic of augs, the two examples they give is an aug that sends tentacles out your back to work as a bungee jump, and an aug that lets you punch through walls. The tentacle aug sounds pretty goofy, but then both DX and IW had some very goofy augs (Spy Drone or Health Leech, anyone?). A greater concern is whether all maps will now have to start you out on top of a skyscraper so players who get the bungee-tentacle aug have a chance to use it. As for the wall-punching, it sounds great on paper, especially combined with the traditional night vision aug that lets you spot enemies through walls, but I fear that it’ll be very arbitrary – they clearly can’t let you punch through the outer walls of a map, lest you walk out into the void, so how will they explain this limitation?

It could end up like the wall-climbing gloves in Thief 3, where the only way to know what walls you could climb was trial and error. These gloves were implemented as a replacement for the excellent rope arrows, which were limited to shooting into wood beams – that’s a limitation that makes immediate sense inside the fiction, since you can’t really shoot an arrow into a brick wall and expect it to stick. By contrast, the wall-climbing gloves almost forced you to meta-play the game, and unless they line every map with reinforced steel walls, I fear the wall-punching aug will suffer from the same problem.

Moving on from the augs, Eidos Montreal says they’ve learned from the criticism of Invisible War and reintroduced different ammunition for different weapons. That’s a pretty much inevitable design decision seeing how much flack IW caught for its unified ammo, but a moment later they reveal that DX3 will use auto-healing in the vein of Call of Duty or Halo, which is the exact same type of design decision as unified ammo in that it removes an element of resource management.

Resource management was a huge gameplay dynamic in Deus Ex. Almost all the game’s strategy and tactics were based on a foundation of resource management. Here’s a quick list of all the different resource types Deus Ex gave you:

• Health – Decreased by eg. getting shot, walking into a room filled with gas, or falling from a great height. Increased by using medkits or activating the Regeneration aug, or restored completely by using medical bots.
• Bioelectric energy – Decreased by using augmentations or getting hit by EMP. Increased by using bioelectrical energy cells or restored completely by using repair bots.
• Augmentations – While augs can’t be “spent”, but instead spend bioelectic energy, choosing between two augs to install is very much a choice between two permanent resources. Augs can also be improved with upgrade canisters which are pretty much the most valuable resource in the game due to their great usefulness and their rarity.
• Skillpoints – Decreased by upgrading skills. Increased by exploring the world or completing missions.
• Expendable items – Medkits and bioelectric cells, lockpicks and multitools, thermoptic camo and night-vision goggles, one-shot weapons and grenades. Each item has a single use, and new items can be acquired by exploring the world, taking them from defeated enemies, or buying them from certain characters.
• Ammunition – Decreased by using weapons. Increased by exploring the world, taking it from defeated enemies (though this is always a poor source of ammunition), or buying it from certain characters.
• Money – Decreased by buying items or ammunition from certain characters. Increased by completing certain objectives, exploring the world, or hacking ATMs. Sometimes even by selling certain items to certain characters.

Invisible War did away with skillpoints entirely, drastically limited the amount of items you could carry with you, and only used a single ammunition type. In other words, the resource management aspect of the game was reduced substantially. While implementing automatic health recovery in DX3 only removes one of the listed resources, it’s still the exact same type of design decision that led to one of the most harshly criticized aspects of Invisible War. In other words, it sounds like the lesson Eidos Montreal took away from IW was the very specific one that players don’t like when all weapons use the same ammunition, but they failed to learn that resource management is a core part of Deus Ex and that reducing its role leads to a very different type of game.

Finally, light/shadow-based stealth is gone.

Maybe this is a good decision. From a business point of view, it almost certainly is – the Thief games never really sold well, and while the Splinter Cell games have been a success, this may be more because of Sam Fisher’s crazy moves than his shadow-based sneakiness. In fact it’s quite possible that the success of the Splinter Cell series is in spite of, rather than because of, its shadow-based stealth.

But on the other hand, it really is giving the finger to Deus Ex’s debts to the Thief series. Deus Ex originally came about as a reaction against the forced stealth in the Thief games – Spector was frustrated that he was forced to run away and hide or just load a savegame every time he was spotted in Thief – he wanted to be able to improvise and fight his way out of the pinch he’d got himself into, but Thief’s protagonist was so vulnerable as to render combat nearly impossible. Thus Deus Ex was developed as “Thief + Combat” (and eventually much more than that). At heart, that’s what both DX and Invisible War was: Stealth games where all-out combat was actually an option. Removing shadow-based stealth from the series is a very, very drastic change to the core gameplay. It’s a bit like removing the platforming from Tomb Raider – sure, that still leaves combat and puzzles as central dynamics, but it’ll be a completely different game.

I think the correct way to build a sequel is to secure the core gameplay of its predecessors and then build on it. Removing basic tenets of the design from previous games will almost certainly alienate your existing fanbase. That’s what happened with Invisible War. Let’s hope Eidos Montreal’s proposed cover-based stealth system will be good enough to make up for it.