DesignEdit
The original 1997 design document for Deus Ex privileges character development over all other features, including experimental sequences and technology demos.[38][clarification needed] The game was designed to be “genre-busting”: in partssimulation, role-playing game, first-person shooter, and adventure.[35] The team wanted players to consider “who they wanted to be” in the game, and for that to alter how they behaved in the game.[32] In this way, the game world was “deeply simulated”, or realistic and believable enough that the player would solve problems in creative, emergent ways without noticing distinct puzzles.[32] The developers also wanted to include “choice” and “consequence”, which Spector called the team’s “two most frequently uttered words”.[32] However, the team’s simulation ultimately failed to maintain the desired level of openness, and they had to brute force“skill”, “action”, and “character interaction” paths through each level.[46] Playtesting also revealed that their idea of a role-playing game based in the real world was more interesting in theory than in reality.[47] The team chose two real-world bases for levels: “highly interconnected, multi-level” spaces, and places that most cannot visit (e.g., the White House).[32] In practice, the team found that certain aspects of the real world, such as hotels and office buildings, were not compelling in a game.[47] Ion Storm saw Deus Ex as being about “player expression” rather than making the developers appear “clever”.[35] They treated the player as a “collaborator”, who they sought to empower to “make choices and … deal with the consequences”.[35] Spector credited the 1995role-playing video game Suikoden as an inspiration, stating that the limited choices inSuikoden inspired him to expand on the idea with more meaningful choices in Deux Ex.[48]
The premise of Deus Ex was inspired by conspiracy theories such as those behind the JFK assassination
The game’s story changed greatly during production, but the idea of an augmented counterterrorist protagonist named JC Denton remained throughout.[38] Though Spector originally pictured Deus Ex as akin toThe X-Files, lead writer Sheldon Pacotti felt that it ended up more like James Bond.[38]Spector wrote that the team overextended itself by planning highly elaborate scenes, including a replica of downtown Austin,[41] a reconstruction of Area 51 from satellite data,[46] a sunken post-earthquake Los Angeles, a raid to free thousands of prisoners of war from a Federal Emergency Management Agency-controlled United Nations concentration camp, and over 25 missions throughout Siberia, western Europe, and the United States.[46] Designer Harvey Smith pushed for the removal of a subplot in which Mexico invaded Texas, in order to make development easier and the narrative more personal. He also removed a largely complete White House level due to its complexity and production needs.[a] Finisheddigital assets were repurposed or, in the cases of Texas and the Denver airport, abandoned by the team. Pete Davison of USgamer referred to the White House and presidential bunker as “the truly deleted scenes of Deus Ex‘s lost levels”.[38]
One of the things that Spector wanted to achieve in Deus Ex was to make JC Denton a cypher for the player, in order to create a better immersion and gameplay experience. He did not want the character to force any emotion so that whatever feelings the player may be experiencing comes from themselves rather than from JC Denton. To do this, Spector instructed voice actor Jay Anthony Franke to record his dialogue without any emotion but in a monotone voice, which is unusual for a voice acting role.[49][50]
Once coded, the team’s game systems did not work as intended. Prototypes of the systems and of certain missions were built near the beginning of development, which revealed some of the team’s planning mistakes.[40] For example, the early tests of the conversation system and user interface were flawed, but the team had time to revise them before the game’s release.[41] The team also found augmentations and skills to be less interesting than they had seemed in the design document.[40] Colleagues from other companies—such as Doug Church, Rob Fermier, Marc LeBlanc, and Gabe Newell—noticed and pointed out these deficiencies in game “tension” when they played the prototype.[47] In response, Harvey Smith substantially revised the augmentations and skills.[46] Production milestones served as wake-up calls for the game’s direction. A May 1998 milestone that called for a functional demo revealed that the size of the game’s maps caused frame rate issues, which was one of the first signs that maps needed to be cut.[47] A year later, the team reached a milestone for finished game systems that Spector nicknamed the “Wow, these missions suck” milestone, which led to better estimates for their future mission work and to the reduction of the 500-page design document to 270 pages.[47] Spector recalled Smith’s mantra on this point: “less is more”. [51]
One of the team’s biggest blind spots was the AI programming for NPCs. Spector wrote that they considered it in preproduction, but that they did not figure out how to handle it until “relatively late in development”.[41] This led to wasted time when the team had to discard their early AI code. The team built atop theirgame engine‘s shooter-based AI instead of writing new code that would allow characters to exhibit convincing emotions. As a result, NPC behavior was variable until the very end of development. Spector felt that the team’s “sin” was their inconsistent display of a trustable “human AI”.[41]
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