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It's been nearly a decade years since the original Deus Ex was released, and the game has been long-established as a classic of player-driven gaming that has, in the minds of many, yet to be equaled. At this year's Game Developers Choice Awards at GDC, a new teaser trailer for its second sequel, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, was revealed -- and was warmly introduced by Warren Spector, one of the instrumental creators of the original game.
Real-world technology has changed considerably in the years following Deus Ex, and that has implications both on the design of its sequel (what's possible on current PCs and consoles) and its world (delivering a believable visual look for a game set in the 2030s.)
Here, Gamasutra discusses the challenges and choices of these decisions with Jonathan Jacques Belletete, the game's art director, who also gave a GDC 2010 lecture on the game's art direction.
How did they arrive at the Cyber-Renaissance aesthetic? What meaning does the team mean to impart? And how does this jibe with the original game in the series? Though nobody working on Human Revolution was involved in the original game's production at Ion Storm, it looms large in their decisions.
Was it interesting for you guys to see Warren Spector get up there and introduce your first teaser [at the GDC Choice Awards]? As a person who drove the original Deus Ex, he seemed very gracious and very optimistic.
Jonathan Jacques Belletete: I've been on Deus Ex: Human Revolution for three years. We really started from day zero -- the four of us: the game director, the producer, and one of the lead game designers. Honestly, to see Warren, the way that he was, and the stuff that he said -- in those three years, it's one of the main milestones definitely for me and for a lot of us.
He gave us so much credibility in the way the he looked so genuinely excited and almost emotional about the whole thing. With us having worked so hard in the past six months on that teaser and stuff, it was amazing.
How much do you have to think about a teaser like that? It sounds like it was a major production to get just that going, aside from actually making the game itself.
I imagine at a certain point, you've got to lock in what this teaser is. And then the game's being developed too, but things might be changing.
JJB: Yeah, absolutely. When we started the main story, the main plot was really pretty much locked down. It's an RPG, so there are a lot of side quests and other side stuff to do, but the core of the story and the conspiracies and all the overarching high-level stuff was all down, and then Cody and [creative agency] Goldtooth did an amazing job. They're the ones who took all of our material, and there was a lot of stuff. It's a humongous game.
They went back to their studios and they locked themselves up for a couple weeks trying to dissect everything and seeing what the core elements were, and they came up with this amazing idea for the teaser that we loved. All of our themes are in there. All of our motifs are in there. A lot of important stuff from the story is there -- very quickly and sometimes just suggested, but there's a lot of stuff to be digested in the teaser.
We were really stoked about that. The CGI was done by Visual Works, which is the CGI studio of Square Enix, which we're so grateful for, because it's really the top visuals you can get for those kinds of things.
It's very deeply related [to the game itself]. You can almost have that scene in the game. There's something very, very close to that in real-time in the game. Cody and his gang, and all the folks at Square Enix, really made it happen, and they really got it. They really understood what we were trying to do.
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have some stuff referencing the other games.
Note: Title comparisons are used only as budgetary and definitional guidelines. Basically a how much in budget and time spent to what was delivered in the final product.
Over all Deus Ex has both history and yet the potential for a fresh outlook. It will be interesting to see what the final product plays and looks like, whether they will buck last years trend and follow the trajectory of recent Ubisoft titles.
Eidos Montreal might just put themselves firmly on the map with this one. Interesting too to hear how SquareEnix are involved already, if only by sharing a CGI studio.
I also like that you transcibed your laughter, Mr.Remo, it gives the interview more Joie de Vivre!
1. DX3 will run on the 360 and PS3. To what extent will that produce the cramped levels of DX: Invisible War and other console games, rather than the expansive levels of the original PC game that enabled multiple pathways for solving game challenges?
2. Why so much emphasis on the visuals? Those were never the most important aspect of the original game.
Deus Ex was far more about its multi-modal problem-solving gameplay design and its cusp-of-transcendence story than its looks. The sequel paid more attention to being shiny; look what that got it.
3. Deus Ex, a game whose core story had a highly political edge, was made by people in Austin, a liberal outpost in conservative Texas in 1990s America. DX3 is being made by Canadians in Montréal. No offense intended to our northern neighbors, but what are the chances that they perceive and care to follow Ion Storm's extraordinarily fair-minded handling of the DX story?
I was concerned about this even before M. Belletete's comment (at the end of page three of Gamasutra's interview) that a legislator asking whether people should be taxed to fund experiments in changing what it means to be human is basically the same as an Inquisitor threatening to imprison or kill a person for expressing thoughts that fail to conform to a religious doctrine. Is someone who is capable of such an analogy up to the challenge of developing story-driven gameplay that allows the player to think and decide for himself what's right, as the original Deus Ex did?
...
I'm neither predicting nor wishing for failure of any kind for DX3. I'd love to see it do as well critically and far better commercially than the original game its developers say inspired them.
What I'm saying is that given what we've been told and shown so far, I believe that while this might wind up being a good game in its own right, what's been shown and said so far doesn't persuade me that fans of Deus Ex will consider this new sequel as enjoyable.
Of course some fans will never be satisfied. Others, however (including me, I like to believe), while having doubts are still open to the possibility that this game may capture the magic of the first one... but it's up to Eidos Montréal to answer the skeptics through the design and gameplay and story and art and sound of their new game.
I think the odds are against them, but I wish them luck and hope they succeed.
Funny what you say about Eidos Montreal being finally put on the map with this one. Seem to me that this studio was created for the sole purpose of creating this game and absolutely nothing pointed to it staying active after the completion of this project, until Thi4f (who the hell came with this title?).
@Bart point 3.
It's made in Canada which is a Liberal country next to the biggest conservative country of the world...
As to your first question, I would have said you have a point last console generation, but I see little to no difference in the production values of the modern PC game versus the modern console game, particularly with regard to the expansiveness of the levels.
The primary reason for the reduced level sizes in Deus Ex: The Conspiracy was the memory limitations of the PS2, which had 32MB of RDRAM. By comparison, the PS3 has 256MB of XDR DRAM. Xbox 360 has 512MB of main memory. You could argue that PCs these days have significantly more than that, but remember that your console is essentially (though not actually) running one process as opposed to however many your PC is running at any given time.
Furthermore, it's mostly a matter of programming, right? I mean, both the Xbox 260 and PS3 are more than capable of running both Oblivion and Fallout 3, two games with massive open worlds, so I see no reason this should be a concern for you. Or if it is, it should be concerns towards the developers, not the supported hardware.
Also, I wouldn't credit Austin with the original game's fair-minded political tone, but the people who made it. There's no guarantee that the game will be politically fair, or even that they'll be going that direction with it.
I too have my concerns, but I'll withhold my ranting until the game is actually released.
That said, I think there’s been some improvement in level sizes in consoles. That’s a good thing. But the PC, as you point out, offer more memory and thus fewer architectural limits. That means games made for the PC (as opposed to console games ported to the PC) can be designed to offer gameplay -- in particular, exploration-oriented gameplay -- that console games with less level space can’t.
Regarding Oblivion and Fallout 3, those two games use Bethesda’s internal engine that allows multiple outdoor zones to be rendered simultaneously (with a lot of level-of-detail optimization). They absolutely serve as evidence that consoles can support games that are tweaked to appear “open.” (Although even their games then revert to the usual small and therefore restrictive spaces in indoor/underground areas.)
As for political tone, I remain impressed with the balance from the team at Ion Storm. If the folks making DX3 can similarly refrain from imposing their personal beliefs on players, I will be surprised but pleased.
We can debate the meaning of production values until the cows come home, but it doesn't make a bit of difference towards my actual point.
In the world of video games, there's absolutely no difference between "appearing open" and "being open", so long as the behavior is what you would expect. You're not going to keep every object loaded at all times, performing physics calculations, multiplying matrices, etc. You're going to have a routine loading and rendering select bits at a time, so I really don't know what you're driving at there.
I guess I just don't know what kinds of games you're referring to, but if you're simply looking back at the original Deus Ex, you can't tell me that you believe today's consoles would be incapable of providing you with a level size like that. Again, if the game ends up being that way, it will be due to developer shortcomings, not hardware shortcomings.
If that’s more because of self-imposed limits inside the heads of game designers than from technical limits on consoles, that’s rather sad, isn’t it?
But either way supports my core concern: the fact that such games generally haven’t been made is reason to doubt that Eidos will buck that trend with its console-based Deus Ex 3.
I hope they can and do, but we’ll see.
Just a quick note on the reason for modern games typically lacking large and complex environments. I said "developers" not "game designers", which I feel is an important distinction here. I'm not saying that the industry lacks the creative faculties to make interesting environments. I'm saying that, and you should know as well as anyone here, that just about every game starts off as the next AAA title. However, problems arise from every point in the development pipeline, very typically technical. And I'm saying that these shortcomings are not because the hardware in incapable of doing what these developers want it to do (most of the time, anyway), but because of a failure somewhere in that process. This could be design, programming, or (frequently) project management related.
I'm feeling they are not putting that mature, adult, contemporary political reflexions which made DX1's philosophical grandeur.
I hope I'm wrong.
EM seems to be a talented and devoted bunch from all I've seen and read; I hope they make a good game worthy of the name...and not just another same old game that we've seen 100 times but set in the Deus Ex IP.
Hoping for:
-a story much like Ghost in the Shell
-the expansive world of Farcry 2 (haven't played oblivion or fallout).
What i may get:
-claustrophobic
-unlockble DLC (is it still DLC if you have to unlock it?)
Please,please make it good.