T w e n t y S i d e d
Note: This is a Shamus-scheduled article that is being published post-mortem.
The helidrone drops off Troy Denton on the Miami coast. We’re at a hotel, looking for the would-be assassin Leo Gold. It’s sundown.
It’s finally time to play a proper Deus Ex level, with an open design, multiple routes, and affordances for combat, stealth, hacking, and social interactions.
Actually, let me back up and take care of something from the previous entry.
I had a bit where the player’s augs would slightly malfunction. I wanted to create a feeling of mild paranoia and make the player wonder if they could trust their augs. That worked, but a few players wouldn’t accept the in-game dismissal of the problem. They wanted to stop the story right there and interrogate the issue.
Some people suggested these large blocks of expository dialog to satisfy all of the player’s various concerns or to explain why we can’t do anything about the problem right now. That’s not strictly wrong, but if I was faced with this situation I’d much rather just cut the earlier scene rather than spend more money on it. I liked the uncertainty it created, but I’m not afraid to kill my darlings.
It’s hard to say. Maybe having Troy’s augs fail is just too much of a problem to dismiss in a couple of lines of dialog, or maybe these objections are a side-effect of reading this in script form. To me, this felt like an overreaction. It’s like reading the script for an 80’s slasher flick, and as soon as the lights start flickering you say, “The characters should drop what they’re doing and barricade all of the doors before constructing improvised weapons!” The reader knows what genre of story they’re reading, and so they want the protagonist to take appropriate measures. I thought Troy could dismiss this glitch as a one-off, even if we in the audience know that it isn’t.
Having said that: You can’t argue with the audience. It doesn’t matter what the author intended. What matters is how the material is received. You can’t tell people “You’re reading my story wrong”. If we were really making a game and a non-trivial number of playtesters gave me the sort of feedback I got last week, the glitch would be cut and I’d handle Gold’s escape some other way.
We’re in the first moments of the story right now, before we’ve earned much trust from the audience. If you alienate them here, it will be very hard to coax them back later.
Okay, NOW let’s play our first real Deus Ex level…
Mission 1: Housekeeping
To the east is a marina. To the west is the hotel. In between these two are various recreational facilities. There’s a pool, equipment rental, a tennis court, and an open-air tiki bar. It’s mostly deserted. A few people are milling around, but they’re bored, restless, and not using the facilities. The bar is actually closed.
The heli just dropped us off in the middle of a parking lot where several large law enforcement vehicles have been hastily parked. These vehicles look like your typical SWAT vans, but they don’t have any sort of agency markings.
Agent Sam Carter explains on the radio: Some SWAT guys have locked down the hotel. We don’t know what they’re doing or why they’ve taken control of the place. We can’t figure out what department these guys work for. CIA? FBI? Homeland Security? Local police? We don’t know. They’re giving us the runaround.
We obviously don’t want some messy inter-department misunderstanding leading to more bloodshed. At the same time… We really need you to find Leo Gold. Look, I’m not saying to shoot these guys, I’m just saying use your head, okay?
The SWAT guys are ignoring the recreational stuff and the marina. They’re just focused on the hotel. They look like normal SWAT, except on the back they have a pair of wings logo where you would normally expect to see “POLICE”. Maybe the logo has the Eye of Providence between the wings? Is that too much? It is? Great! That’s what I was going for.
(Actually, I’d let a real artist design these costumes and logos.)
A lone civilian is milling around near the parking lot where we landed. He’s wearing loud swim trunks and a baseball cap. He’s also horribly, hilariously, sunburned. If the player talks to him:
Horribly Sunburned Guy: Are you people done yet?
Denton: What are you talking about?
HSG: You’re with the cops, right? It’s been four hours. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’ve got sand in my shorts. You gotta let me back into my room. (Beat.) I think I got a little too much sun out here.
So then the player can pump this guy for information and get a sense of what’s been going on. The police showed up, locked the place down, and nobody has been allowed in or out. Nobody has any idea why the police are here or what they’re looking for. Although, there were some gunshots about half an hour ago and maybe that has something to do with it?
The guy will ask Denton to go up to his room and get him some proper clothes.Or maybe a bottle of aloe would make a better pickup / inventory item? Whatever. If the player accepts, then the guy will give you his room card. This will get you through any of the major entrances, and also get you into his room. You can even bring him his clothes if you’re feeling generous, although the reward should be trivial and / or humorous.
Whether you have the key or not, most of the entrances will be guarded by the “cops”. They tell you they’re here on “government business”, so move along citizen. There should also be an unguarded basement entrance and a way up onto the lobby roof if you’re not looking to shoot your way in. Inside, the cops will attack on sight.
The hotel should appear to be about eight-ish stories tall. If we can’t fill all of that in, then we’ll add some contrived blockade to make some of the floors unreachable.
I don’t know how many floors our engine can support, or how long it takes to fill out that much game space in modern engines. Obviously we want several floors so that the player has an incentive to look for clues to find Leo Gold. If the place is a lame two-story building, then the average player might just do a brute-force search by running around and jiggling all the doorknobs, and that’s not what we want. At the same time, we don’t want seven perfectly identical floors above ground level, because some completionist players will be compelled to scour the entire building, and that would get boring if we have too many copy-pasted elements in our environments.
I’m going to trust that our level designers are professionals that know how to make a building feel bigger than it really is, and how to present the same floor plan a few different ways so it doesn’t feel too repetitive.
Areas of interest:
- Alternate Entry Points: Around the side of the building is the service entrance / loading zone. This entrance will be guarded, but unlike the big obvious main entrance, here the cops will be pacing around / distracted so you can stealth past them. There’s an unguarded basement entrance that has difficult locks and security equipment you’ll need to contend with. There’s also the possibility of getting up onto the lobby roof. From there you can jump in through the skylight and make a ton of stupid noise and land right in front of the Lobby Goons. Or you can enter through the HVAC system. That’s a good way in if you somehow already know where you’re going, but if this is your first time here then you’ll need to sneak back downstairs to look for clues.
- The Lobby: Here the player will find two guards having the “Agency Conversation”. (See below.) Players are often averse to wandering around in open, well-lit areas, but this place is useful if the player is willing to explore a bit. Also, the skylights might provide an alternate way in if you don’t mind making a ton of noise. The front desk has keycards for several of the “real” rooms.As opposed to all the rooms that don’t actually exist behind cosmetic doorways. There’s a grand staircase here that will take you to the second floor. The elevators are guarded on the ground floor, but not on any of the above floors. So the lobby gives you a way to access the elevator without needing to face the elevator guards head-on.
- The stairs: If they don’t want to take the elevator, the player can always get around using the back stairway. The super-stealth approach to Leo Gold’s room is to take the stairs to the floor above his room, and then drop down through the building infrastructureElevator shaft, HVAC, employee maintenance areas, etc. to reach the proper floor.
- The kitchen: Along the way Troy might bump into hotel staff who are suspicious and frightened of these “cops” that have taken over the building. They can provide clues, keycards, and additional information if Troy plays nice.
- The security station where the lead SWAT is running the operation. This location is really just for dum-dum playersOr lunatics and speedrunners, I guess. who want to shoot their way through the problem. If you’re able and willing to murder your way into the fortified security station, then you can get most of the critical intel and access cards.
- Leo Gold’s room. It turns out Leo Gold is dead, killed in his hotel room by the mystery SWAT guys. A message on his phone / body / laptop indicates that he was here to go to the basement to meet with his contact Harley Filben.
- The basement, where you’ll find Filben’s dead body. It’s not clear why the police detained him, but he apparently died during questioning in one of the storage rooms. There’s a key on his body to his houseboat on the marina.
- Meat Locker: In the basement, near the storage room where you’ll find Filben. A few “suspicious” members of the hotel staff have been hastily imprisoned here. Troy can free them and they’ll give their account of what happened to Filben. (Surprise: He was basically murdered.) They can also help you identify his houseboat, so you don’t need to search the entire marina.
- The roof – A couple of young, semi-drunk guests are hiding out up here. They had slipped away from the rest of their groupThey’re here on a business trip of some sort. and hid in a broom closet for some secret snogging when the “cops” cleared the building. While the player has probably figured it out already, these two lovebirds can confirm that there wasn’t any shootout with Leo Gold. The cops just kicked in the door and started blasting. These two eventually snuck up to the roof to hide out and maybe finish making out.
- Filben’s houseboat on the marina. This is the player’s ultimate goal, and has clues revealing that Filben was supposed to kill Leo Gold before reporting back to his bosses in the Swiss Alps.
The Agency Conversation
In the lobby, two SWAT guys are having this conversation:
Mook #1: I don’t get it. Why don’t we just say we’re with the CIA or whatever?
Mook #2: Because if you tell somebody you’re from the CIA, then they’ll call the CIA to complain. And the CIA will say they never heard of us. And then we’ve got a problem.
Mook #1: So what do we tell them?
Mook #2: Nothing. You don’t say a word.
Mook #1: What if they call? Like, the CIA or whatever. They’ll still disavow us.
Mook #2: If you don’t say where we’re from, then they gotta call everyone. CIA, FBI, NSA, ATF, CBP, Homeland Security, state and local police… That’ll take hours. By the time they do that, we’ll be long gone.
Mook #1: It just seems strange to not say anything. What if they keep asking?
Mook #2: That’s why you have a gun.
Just to keep it weird and mysterious, maybe these guys should have two different non-American accents. Then again, mooks usually all share a common voice, and I’m not sure how reasonable it is to have two random mooks with unique voices.Remember that these mooks will still need to function in combat, which means they would need their own versions of the standard AI chatter for spooked, searching, idle, attacking, giving up a search, in pain, dying, etc. We don’t want to have to record ten minutes of boilerplate chatter just so these guys can have a twenty-second conversation with unique accents. Also, there’s the question of what accent we should give to all the other mooks. I don’t know. I’d talk to the director and see what’s possible. We don’t want to waste a ton of money and time on a pair of no-name mooks, but the accents thing would be cool if we can do it on the cheap.
The most likely route of progression for a typical stealth player will be something like: Get the building keycard from Sunburn Guy. Enter through the service / kitchen entrance on the side of the building. Talk to the kitchen staff to learn that Leo Gold is on floor N. Visit the lobby for the key to Gold’s room. Sneak up to floor N and find Gold’s room. Find Gold’s body, and learn about the scheduled meeting with Filben in the basement area. Go down to the basement, find Filben’s body, and get the key to his houseboat. Free the folks in the freezer for more information and some clues as to which boat you’re looking for. Exit the hotel and visit the marina where you’ll find Filben’s laptop, credentials, orders, and clues pointing you to the next mission.
There are a lot of alternate routes, but that’s the most obvious and straightforward.
So that’s the first mission done. I spent a lot of time outlining different routes through the space to give a feel for how I think these levels should work. Now that you’ve got the basic idea, I’m not going to outline all of the details for all of the following missions. This outline is going to be more high-level from this point. Just keep in mind that future missions should feature a comparable level of complexity and choice.
Once Troy has the clue pointing him to Switzerland, his helidrone picks him up for the next mission.
Mission 2: Castle in the Sky
Troy is dropped off at the edge of some sort of mansion / castle in the mountains.I’ve never been, but I’m sure in the real Switzerland the skiing stuff is on mountain tops and the castles are in the lowlands. Building a castle at the top of a mountain would probably be difficult and pointless. But this is Deus Ex, and the inherent absurdity of the world allows us to take a little artistic license. There’s a small nameless town in the river valley below.In case it isn’t clear, the little town is just part of the skybox. The player will be fenced in by rocks, ice, and medieval walls.
The place is designed in “layers”.
Layer 1: The outer courtyard
This garden / parking area is where the heli drops you off. Maybe there’s a fountain or some statues here. This place is either unguarded, or the guards leave you alone as long as you don’t pull a weapon. This is basically a public area. It should be constructed so the player begins some distance from the castle, and is able to get a good view of the place as they approach.
Layer 2: The Old Passages
These outer rooms are sort of museum-like. They’ve preserved the historical look of the rooms and passages. It’s all antique furniture and old paintings. This place seems to be a meeting center for the 0.01%. Ultra-rich bureaucrats and bankers are here, having meetings and relaxing. These civilians are harmless (to the player) but can summon the guards if spooked.
Here the guards are sort of casual private security types with neckties and blazers. They’re carrying simple handguns and will be very inattentive as long as you haven’t set off any alarms yet.
The obvious front gate is guarded, but if the player recovered Filben’s credentials in Miami, and if they did so without causing a bloodbath, then security here will be lax and they’ll be able to use Filben’s ID to bullshit their way through the front gate. This will allow them to wander in and explore this area openly.
Layer 3: The Security Zone
Here the castle has been modernized a bit. Electric lights. Carpet. Maybe even drywall in places. Here you’ll find modern creature comforts like flat screens and desks with laptops.
Civilians evidently don’t come this way. There are automated turrets around, and the passages are guarded by a euro-styled version of the SWAT types we ran into earlier. These guys are a little more alert and much better armed.
There are no credentials for the player in this area. If you’re here, you’re either fighting or sneaking.
Layer 4: The Labs
This will be our ultimate destination for this mission. The labs should either be up in the higher levels of the castle, or down in some secret basement catacombs. This place is high-tech.
Layer 5: Inner Sanctum
Spoiler: We might come back to this level later in the game. For this visit, the Inner Sanctum is unreachable. So let’s ignore this area for now. The only important thing is that the player encounters a door they can’t open.
In the Labs, the player will be able to observe a meeting between our conspirators. If the player is good at remembering and recognizing voices (or if they’re reasonably genre-aware) then they might realize the people at this meeting are the same people from the opening cutscene.
We need the player to be able to overhear this conversation, but they also need to be unable to just shoot everyone. Maybe the player is trapped behind bulletproof glass. Maybe they observe via a security monitor. Maybe they observe via air vent in a cutscene, similar to how the protagonist got information from Mr. Tong in Human Revolution. Whatever.
Russian intelligence leader Leonid Sidorov reports on the failed plot to kill the troublesome president. The good news is that the leader (Leo Gold) and the intermediate (Harley Filben) have both been cleaned up. No more loose ends. None of this can be traced back to us.
South African industrialist Samkelo Mensah: We still need to somehow deal with President Ellis. And Morgan Everett is absolutely furious with us now. He says the frontal assault was clumsy and reckless, and that we should have let him handle it.
Chinese apparatchik Maggie Chow: (Annoyed at the mention of Morgan Everett.) Morgan is useless! We’ll put him down later.
(There’s some murmuring around the table. This is evidently a shocking decision.)
Chow: In the meantime, this botched raid means we’ve lost the element of surprise. The president will be under heavy guard now. (Beat.) The only way to get to him is to use the Morpheus Protocol.
American media mogul Ted Walters: (Alarmed.) Woah now. Do we really want to use Morpheus Protocol on such a high-profile target? (Takes off his cowboy hat and scratches his head.) Heck, shouldn’t we at least test it first?
Maggie Chow: (Dismissive.) We’ll test it by using it, Mr. Walters.
There’s more to the meeting to fill these characters out a bit, but the above info is the important bit. The conspirators are out of reach, behind security doors that can’t be opened right now.
Ted Walters is a famous American, so Alex and Troy manage to identify him right away. Picture a Texas-flavored take on Ted Turner. Alex manages to (correctly) guess one or two additional people. The group is obviously full of powerful and/or wealthy individuals. We can’t have Troy kick in the door and try to arrest these guys because he’s a secret service agent and doesn’t have jurisdiction outside of the US. But this is a start. Alex says that we’ll hand this investigation off to the State Department and they can handle the messy business of arresting oligarchs and tycoons across international borders.
There’s also a secret laptop hidden somewhere around here that will give Troy the full names and profiles of the entire conspiracy. And I don’t mean this is one of those videogame secrets where a spotlight is pointed at a vent full of loot items to draw the player in. I mean a real secret. Like, if first-time playtesters miss it 90% of the time, I’d say that’s about right.
There are other secrets hidden around the castle. A new cyber-upgrade for our hero. There’s some sort of mech armor parked here, a foreshadowing for a future boss fight. There are some new weapons tucked away for observant players. I’m not going to outline all the side objectives and bits of bonus lore right now. I imagine you get the general idea.
Once the player is done, they return to the clearing where the (whisper quiet) heli is waiting to bring Troy back to DC. Alex and Troy do a quick recap for the player:
- Someone Else is going to arrest these famous rich people for plotting the assassination.
- Troy needs to get back to DC to thwart this Morpheus Protocol, whatever that turns out to be.
The adventure continues next week…
Footnotes:
[1] Or maybe a bottle of aloe would make a better pickup / inventory item? Whatever.
[2] As opposed to all the rooms that don’t actually exist behind cosmetic doorways.
[3] Elevator shaft, HVAC, employee maintenance areas, etc.
[4] Or lunatics and speedrunners, I guess.
[5] They’re here on a business trip of some sort.
[6] Remember that these mooks will still need to function in combat, which means they would need their own versions of the standard AI chatter for spooked, searching, idle, attacking, giving up a search, in pain, dying, etc. We don’t want to have to record ten minutes of boilerplate chatter just so these guys can have a twenty-second conversation with unique accents.
[7] I’ve never been, but I’m sure in the real Switzerland the skiing stuff is on mountain tops and the castles are in the lowlands. Building a castle at the top of a mountain would probably be difficult and pointless. But this is Deus Ex, and the inherent absurdity of the world allows us to take a little artistic license.
[8] In case it isn’t clear, the little town is just part of the skybox. The player will be fenced in by rocks, ice, and medieval walls.
Dead or Alive 5 Last Round
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
There’s an air of melancholy now when I read these posts.
There is. I always like to chip in on these posts with constructive criticism–now the instinct is still there to do it, and every time it hits me I’m like “Damn”
Same. :/ I know that Shamus used to read each and every one of the comments on his site. Part of me is torn between melancholy at writing anything knowing he’ll never get to see them now, and the other part thinks we should go on, that he would have loved to see the discussion his words and imagination fostered.
Same. :/
Same here too. :'(
Too bad Shamus won’t get to learn this, but for the rest of you: old German and Swiss castles are actually often built on mountaintops. They’re built for defence, and a mountaintop is much easier to defend than a valley. Of course this made it much more difficult to build and maintain the castle, but apparently our ancestors found the trade-off worth it.
The most famous mountaintop castle (which is in fact the example in the photograph) is Neuschwanstein in Barvaria. This castle was built in the 1860s on the orders of King Ludwig II of Barvaria, a famously “mad” king (he was also the first monarch to be diagnosed by actual psychiatrists, although given the state of psychiatry in the 1860s he was not diagnosed well, and the diagnosis mostly hinged on the Barvarian government wanting to depose Ludwig in favour of a more financially sensible and less homosexual relative). The 1860s are several hundred years after the point where castles were necessary to defend the royal household — Ludwig was a romantic and envisioned the castle as an exaggerated throwback to mediaeval castlery, which is probably why the Disney castle is in turn based on Neuschwanstein. Having said that, Neuschwanstein was built on top of the ruins of two older castles, so presumably some mediaeval Barvarian nobles must have thought that the site was defensible. While Neuschwanstein was thought of as a stupid idea at the time, Ludwig paid for it with his own personal wealth rather than Barvarian public money (he still put himself into huge debt to pay for it though), and it has been phenomenally attractive as a tourist hotspot since Ludwig’s death.
Now, if you wanted to, you could use an edited version of this history to justify your Deus Ex castle. Perhaps the Swiss mountain castle was built by a “mad” ancestor of one of the conspirators, so you can imply that the castle was actually built to serve the goals of the conspiracy all along. If it’s a tourist hotspot then you can have tour guides outside to fill a bit of backstory.
True, but they aren’t often (ever?) on remote snow-capped mountains like he describes. All the old castles needed to be within easy walking distance of the fields and pesants (otherwise… what would they eat?). Burgruine Falkenstein Allgäu is the closest example I could think of for an ancient castle built on a mountaintop in the swiss alps, and it’s nowhere near the snowline (though you could certainly see the snowline from there. What a view!).
The most plausible case for the creation of the castle in the second mission is that it’s not a legitimate ancient castle at all, but an artificial ruin built in the modern era. Perhaps the game could hint at that by having exposed re-bar in some out-of-the-way places that the player can find as they sneak around.
Castle Oex is at about 1000m high up in the mountains. A nice tourist location with plenty of snow in winter.
Problem is, it’s not a very attractive castle.
I think a fictive location would be fine so building a combination of both should provide an interesting place to explore. Castles are amazing.
Also, have any of you heard of the Guedelon Castle in France ? A bunch of crazy people started building it from scratch a couple of decades ago.
I just searched for it, and while I found Gruyères Castle and Château-d’Œx I wasn’t able to find Oex Castle perse. In any case, yes, he makes it clear that the castle is intended to be fictional. In my mind I’m now imagining something as picturesque as Neuschwanstein, extensive as Windsor, and located like Gruyères.
He was reading and responding to our comments right to the end. What a guy. Haven’t had time to read this yet, but will soon.
There’s at least one more in this series queued up for next Friday, and I think there will be more after that.
Do you know if there are enough articles/notes etc. to cover the full story? It would be nice if he got to finish his last project, and of course I, and several others I assume, are interested in where he’s going with it.
As for the article, I think the augment glitch can easily be smoothed over by giving interested players a few minutes worth of dialogue on the left side of the dialogue wheel with the tech and/or commander characters. The player can argue that it’s really important, and the others give in but say it will still have to wait until after this is dealt with because a presidential assassination attempt is more than just really important. Maybe have a follow-up conversation about it if the player argues about it. Depends on where Shamus was going to go with the idea (if the tech or commander guys were in on it it would make sense that they try to brush it under the carpet while pretending they’re investigating it, for example.)
Did he make it clear if Troy Denton was actually a Denton (potential prototype/sibling/clone base/whatever) or if that was a reused name to make things easier to follow, like the other?
I didn’t get a chance before (took some time to think of it), but I had hoped to propose that the character have an integrated IFF (Identify Friend or Foe) system and that’s what malfunctioned. This makes the issue more specific, gives a specific, plausible explanation for why the protagonist couldn’t shoot (the IFF was screaming “Don’t Shoot!”) and it provides an easy method for using nametags and other information in a diagetic manner.
It’s a concern, but the character might be wiling to put off a problem in one system that isn’t some vague “wrong” things going on. And it offers some story possibilities: You could even have some circumstance where the player can find that the information given to the player is wrong, because it’s not the game having a bug – it’s a deliberate design choice to reflect the limitations of your cybernetics.
Although IFF brings up problems. On one side, it’s not a system someone can put off a problem in; anything that stops a weapon from firing is going to get people killed. On the other side, when dealing with spies and conspiracy threats you would already need a way to override IFF, so it should be solved before it comes up.
I guess those aren’t big problems though; it only needs to last a second for Leo to escape, and then we turn it off and guess at whether it was a glitch or something deeper.
Yeah that’s kind of where I was thinking. You could even justify this in-game; have the characters do a live test of the IFF in the prologue (which they know is dangerous and so do with full body armor to verify it) and then have the protagonist deactivate it after the “glitch”.
I don’t know what Shamus wants for this, but it may be revealed in a later column. However my guess is that somebody infiltrated part of the system rather than hacking the protagonists’ cybernetics. IFF spoofing would make a lot more sense (one agent on the inside might be able to get the temporary encryption); it would also mean that the system *didn’t* glitch which makes sense for why no one could figure it out.
I’m curious if Shamus would allow the protagonist to go full cyber-psycho and start shooting down civilians, or whether the game system would be there to stop it. I assume it would be allowed if deeply discouraged, just as in the mainline Deus Ex series.
An IFF that can override the user actually makes perfect sense to me given that the character is supposed to be on presidential bodyguard detail at the time. The perfect solution for the old palace coup issue would be to secretly make it so that the praetorian guard can’t go through with the act even if they wanted to. This also plays into some of the cyberpunk themes by having the character’s autonomy be secretly taken away without their knowledge or consent.
You could then have a quest later in the game to surreptitiously turn the IFF off (or put in a user override) so that Troy can fight a particular boss who’s using the same trick.
I have heard from Heather that there is a google doc with the rest of the un-finished series, but I don’t have access to it, so I can’t elaborate on how extensive it is.
Before we streamed last Thursday I had a chance to tell him how much I admired his ability to put work out and such, to which we then also shared the similar problem of having drafts that go unposted and unseen by the rest of the world. In that discussion, he said he had written 20,000+ words for this theoretical Deus Ex game, so I believe he at least finished the initial write-up. That’s the impression he had left me with, at least. Naturally, this means the latter posts are likely not as touched up, but I get the feeling we’ll see how this ends.
Of course, I could be wrong. He didn’t give me a ton of details. But that’s the impression I got.
I mean, I don’t know if he was addressing in part what I had commented in the last post, but I meant it as an “instead of” rather than an “in addition to.” The whole point he’s trying to make (and I agree), is that he doesn’t want to spend a few minutes of dialog (=money) on a point that’s not really salient. The VC actors, animators, and director’s time should be spent frugally, to say nothing of being narratively inefficient if he’s having to burn through minutes of screen-time on a point that doesn’t really matter.
What I was suggesting was some alternative dialog that still accomplishes what I thought he was trying to do without compromising Alex’s character or adding too many lines.
So…is this automated? Going by what Shamus has said in the past, he would wrote an entire series and then queue it up in advance, so it the website posting these updates by itself?
(EDIT: Oops, answered by Paul above and Heather in the other thread, never mind.)
Either way, I’m really happy to have the chance to read Shamus’ last series.
Also: Horribly Sunburnt Guy (HSG) should give Troy Denton a really loud hawaiian shirt to wear as a reward for helping him out – one that’s always visible regardless of armour etc.
No gameplay effects; just a really, really brightly-coloured t-shirt that sticks out like a sore thumb as he’s sneaking around, or in super-serious cutscenes about conspiracy theories. The game doesn’t even need to acknowledge it, because that makes the joke better.
Also also: one of your conversation options with HSG should be to slap him on the back. An ‘evil’ dialogue choice that’s both believable and funny!
So you know how Adam Jensen’s apartment had all the clock-making stuff? What if you go to Troy’s apartment, and his closet is half work clothes (suits and fatigues) and half rather garish streetwear. Lots of bold colors, interesting cuts, maybe a Bathing Ape jacket with the tags still attached.
He just really, genuinely likes that shirt.
You get to Sunburned Guy’s room and get to pick which clothes to bring back down to him. You can bring him back, like, a speedo, or a cosplay suit he’s got up there for some reason.
You have always been able to identify such precise moments of doubt, Shamus.
We’re about to really get going and leave the tutorial, to encounter your version of the series-defining stuff, and then you back up. There was a moment missed, back in the tutorial. Tech that you believed intrinsically reliable, both mechanically and narratively, has shown itself to be unreliable. You’re just going to gloss over that? In a Deus Ex game?
And then, proceeding to flesh it out, unraveling just how much moment it could truly be, you summarily dispense with it. Why bother making it the main narrative of the game when conjuring its mere possibility has a much greater effect? It’s overhanging presence will make cooler so many other already-cool future moments later.
This series has felt like the fruition of your creative deep-dives. Delegate away to imaginary departments the details you don’t want to deal with. That’s the stuff I always come here for. Let’s hear the spine of the story, along with a few of the more interesting vertebae. And, oh, just because I can, here is a taste of the dialogue, the moment-to-moment whorls and swirls on the edge of a distant fingertip.
Your corpus has meant so much to me.
“A [blog] is more than a verbal structure or series of verbal structures; it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader and the intonation it imposes upon his voice and the changing and durable images it leaves in his memory. A [blog] is not an isolated being: it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (edited)
It feels weird to leave a comment like this, but I know he’d have liked the feedback and discussion, so here it goes.
This is something that would need to be handled carefully. Players, especially hoarders and collectors, are a stubborn lot and a locked door would be perceived as a challenge. They will scour the entire map five times over seeking out the key or passageway to get past that door to their own detriment. Somehow, it needs to be made clear that this door is not going to open at this point in time, and the only way I can think of that off the top of my head is to try and have some lines of dialogue that suggest to leave it alone. The problem is… well, as I said, players are a stubborn lot.
Otherwise, reading this makes me wish I was actually a skilled programmer myself, or 3D artist, or something of worth, so I could try and start putting this together myself. Wouldn’t be an official Deus Ex, but just build it to make it as much a reality as I could, in memory of Shamus.
I’m glad we’ll be able to see the rest of his series. I know it must be hard, but thank you, Heather and family, for sharing what you can of his remaining work.
Nah, the original Deus Ex did this all the time. Locked plot-critical doors would be given a lock strength of “Infinite” (or an unhackable keypad with a long number code) so that the player knew that they had to do something else to get through the other door. Heck, they even put one of the later levels right under UNATCO HQ, behind a nondescript metal door that most players probably wrote off as “this door doesn’t go anywhere, it’s just to give the impression that the HQ is bigger than it is.”
Sure, a speedrunner might find some absurd way to clip through the door and jump straight from the 2nd level to the 10th, but that doesn’t matter to the casual player. Having a door that’s explicitly unbreakable/unpickable is a pretty clear signal that the door is a plot barrier rather than an obstacle to overcome.
If I was developing the level, there wouldn’t actually be anything behind the plot door in the Mission 2 version of the level.
Although, another fun way to deal with it might be a gauntlet of impossible barriers, just to play with the player a bit. For sure, the first door should be completely impregnable by all non-cheating players.
For example, instead of making it say “Infinite lock” or “Inaccessible”, just give it the very hardest lock type available in the game, Very Hard, lock level 100, what have you, a skill level, of course, which should be completely out of the players reach at this point even if they min-maxed for it (or maybe just barely possible, if they absolutely forgo every skill point and power up available at that point being used for anything but lockpick). That way, instead of it seeming like a “plot cheat”, it feels like a part of gameplay an average player just wasn’t prepared for, and maybe a hint that they’ll be coming back here later. And for any player that uses a mod or a trainer or something to max out their lockpick skill, they get to face the second level of the gauntlet – a hallway full of the most deadly high-level laser turrets in the game!
And if they have insane patience and combat skills (or Godmode) and get past the turrets, a high-level flying telekinetic guy or something! I dunno! Something that would actually appear later and is totally out of the player’s league at this point, to the degree that they get killed off in a scripted death move or something.
And if they just type “killall” into the console and stride confidently past the TK guy? One last locked door… beyond which is a blank wall and a sign that says “You weren’t supposed to be able to get here.”
Yeah, it’s a long tradition in games to have the game find a way to state that a door can’t be opened, including KotOR’s “This door is magnetically sealed”. Assuming that Deus Ex uses some means to have the character or other characters in the game tell the player things, all you’d to do is put it in there with a “Yeah, you’re not getting through this door any time soon” and you’d be done. Even a “You don’t need to get in there” or “Trying to get into the inner sanctum is a bad idea right now” would work. This could trip some of the “Blocking someone from useful actions” criticisms, but in this case it doesn’t seem important enough and it really does seem like they’d make getting in there really, really difficult to do.
Based on the replies you can tell I never played the original game, or many like it. I learned things today! :D
I’m actually fond of the idea that there’d be a really, really difficult way of gaining access, but leave it as an Easter Egg, just leave it empty, or perhaps have a challenging gauntlet that, by the end, puts you up against an actual impossible door that you cannot break through.
Moreso, give the player a way to perhaps modify the castle’s security so that, when you return, you’ll have shortcuts and other tools available to make your passage easier. That would be quite a reward for putting time and effort into something challenging early on.
I agree that a locked door would be a cruel tease for completionists. I don’t know if the plot would allow it, but the thought that jumped to mind would be for there to be no door at all there, and the “inner sanctum” still under construction. You could set up at that point the thickness of the walls, the immense infrastructure being installed, maybe even the paths of future alternate routes of entry. There wouldn’t be anything really valuable there at the time, so security would be light or non-existant. Even if you didn’t ever come back later it would establish something of the scope of what you’re dealing with.
The trick is to just leave the door uninteractable – there should be plenty of non-interactable “set-dressing” doors previously and this would be one of them in the early mission.
Any other attempt at a solution says “you’re supposed to open this”
I missed this discussion the first time around, so I might be restating things already said, but the key here would be to make the glitch noticeable and noticed by Troy, but something subtle enough that it’s plausible that Troy just didn’t activate it properly. It makes it an especially good hint for the future — potentially — if it’s a new augment or a newer function that Troy has never really used in the field, even if he has practiced with it. So when he mentions it to other people they can say that he likely just misfired it or misused it, but we could potentially see at the time and could certainly see later that it isn’t that because it was just too convenient and so seemed too intentional to be just Troy messing something up, while given the situation and how subtle it was it’s perfectly reasonable for Troy to not be worried about it, even if we are and think that it will mean something later.
That is how a lot of tense drama works in most films: the audience knows something but there is good reason for the characters to not know that. Done properly, we keep the two things in mind and don’t call the characters stupid and yet let what we know about things make us tense and afraid for them.
I know this was scheduled to go up already, but damn, it’s hard not to think about it. This whole entry starts with a blurb about the value of feedback and now there’s not going to be any more of it. Granted, we as readers can still give feedback, it just won’t influence any next entries in any manner.
I still can’t believe it, man.
Something I never really got about Deus Ex is the inclusion of shooter elements. Both the original, HR, and Shamus seem to agree that shooting is way less cool than sneaking and talking. Why not just make a stealth game and make it so the player needs absolute secrecy to complete the mission, or cannot take much more than a love tap? Why include it if you’re just going to downplay its effectiveness, de-focus the mechanics, and skimp on rewards?
Because then we’re making a stealth game and not a “play how you want” RPG/ImSim.
Any individual component of the original DX was compromised on compared to games dedicated to just shooting or sneaking, but the trick was how they added up to a value greater than their sum. Some of jank was permissible given the tradeoff.
Now, that was fine with early 00’s production value. I don’t know if the same tolerance would exist today. Maybe it would be better to lean into stealth for the sake of gameplay efficiency. But then I don’t know why you’d bother treating this as a DX entry.
Because that’s what a significant number of people want from their stealth games, somehow. I believe Shamus described it as “playing the game wrong” in regards to Hitman at some point. Hitman is more of a stealth game than Deus Ex though, and there are situations in DE where it really is reasonable that the player goes on the (loud) offensive. DE was never purely a stealth game, though you can easily argue that it’s the optimal playstyle, so it’s reasonable and to be expected that the sequels allow for the same blend of possible playstyles. Giving the player that choice of approach, as well as the choice of lethal and non-lethal combat, is a cornerstone of DE.
As the story goes, it’s because Warren Spector was playing Thief while they were making it, and he couldn’t get past the stealth and wanted to be able to fight through the guards. And well, as Deus Ex was his game specifically, it’s what he made.
And it somehow worked. I could say that it’s possibly the tension of it; that you *could* fight through it but you’re choosing not to, or that there’s always an option to resort to direct violence. Or that if you’re heavily armed enough you can go through the front door in a way that others couldn’t.
The other thing, of course, is that if you forbid violence – or at least severely punish it – you’re putting additional constraints on a game that’s largely about fairly open-ended systems interacting with each other. It’s about choices, and how you apply power. I guess you could draw a comparison with that to the actual plot in itself…HR tried to do it, I think but fumbled it quite a bit.
It’s in relation to a different series entirely, but rutskarn’s ‘Altered Scrolls’ kind of addresses this in a different context. I’ll just copy + paste:
tl;dr: You can’t make a choice if there is no choice to be made; having a half formed but functional system to not do stealth is essential to making it feel like you’re actually choosing to stealth your way through the game. It gives a sense of empowerment that you are responsible for your own choices, even though in reality those are probably the ‘correct’ choices to make.
I play Deus Ex games as “stealthy until you’re caught then all bets are off.” To play a stealth game optimally requires patience, reloads, and the foresight that comes with reloads.
I don’t play stealth games optimally. I’ve never had the patience or time to spare.
I think the way I play Deus Ex is closer to the “norm” than adherence to “optimal” stealth.
As an aside, I totally didn’t expect this series to go up, but I am heartened to see his work and passion continue.
The second mission is giving me shades of the the Dishonored series. Not a bad thing at all. I wonder if Troy could have an Aug that aids in disguises (not just stealth camo). Something like the face-swap idea in Dishonored.
The illuminati type conspiracy in this game is exactly what I’d want from a Deus Ex type game. It does make me wonder how early the ‘reveal of the secret plot’ is here compared to the other Deux Ex games. My memory is bad, but I feel like Deus Ex Mankind Divided didn’t really kick off the plot until you get through the aug-city level.
I have to be honest: it’s going to be a long time before I stop periodically coming to this site fully expecting to see a post like: “So, you may have heard that I died last month. I got better. Mostly. But let me tell you a few things that really annoyed me about it…”
A sigh and a tear. You will be so much missed, Shamus.
Maybe it could happen when the Mass Effect trilogy sequel comes out.
This first part of your comment made me chuckle. I’d like to think it’s in accordance with the spirit of the man and the community he fostered.
>>some completionist players will be compelled to scour the entire building
I’m in this post and I don’t like it.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to have Reks heal himself until he gets just the right sequence of numbers, and then I need to have Fran enter the Tchita Uplands solo, take exactly eight steps, punch herself in the face exactly thirty-four times, and then open this chest to get the last item I need for a Bazaar package.
(and yes, I too sniffed and wiped my eyes when I saw this post go up.)
This videogame writing/worldbuilding is the combination of so many of Shamus skills. The programming and game-dev to keep the scope realistic. The DM and worldbuilding analysis to create an interesting game space instead of simply a plot. And of course the writing for character dialogue and scripted sections. It’s really a lot like authoring a roleplaying campaign. He would say occasionally “I don’t know why it’s still called TwentySided, I never talk about TTRPGs anymore” but, in a way, he never stopped. He had a vision that computer games could be as flexible, creative, engaging, and immersive as the role playing campaigns he used to run with his friends all those years ago.
This is exactly the type of Shamus content I like best. This is why I was so excited for this series! But just a few paragraphs in, and I can’t go through with it.
Especially after that little yellow box where he addresses some of the reader feedback he got on the last post. Which is something I totally expected him to do, because that’s just the way he was with these things. And knowing that this is the last time he was able t? do that…
I don’t know. I guess I’m just not in the right head space right now. Hopefully, in a couple of weeks I’ll be able to read this :/
Yeah, it’s heartbreaking. The rest of us will look forward to hearing your thoughts though. Whenever you find the heart to collect them.
Re: “different ways to play” above:
I always thought that one of the ‘play how you want’ games might be better off if, instead of leaving it entirely open-ended with different paths, you could “pick” your style at the beginning. i.e. Stealth guy? Steer you towards stealth power-ups and only let you have limited opportunities of violence if you’re caught before you fail. Shooter guy? Let the situations justify full on guns with limited opportunities to sneak. Some sort of weird magical/cyborg tech/psi/hacker weird build? Sure, stick that in too. Even pick if you want to be lethal or non-lethal as a secondary choice. Then you can streamline each version of your game to cater to the playthrough rather than having to have a bevy of upgrades, some possibly contradicting (no “swim” skill trap).
I think streamlining is working opposite the appeal of this kind of game. A full, classless skilltree gives the player a honeycomb of options; they can bluff, hack, stealth or fight their way through each individual encounter, as they feel is appropriate. So they’ll explore the area to see all the actions they can take, and decide which one looks most satisfying this time. That’s where the immersion comes in.
Locking them out of options turns it from a honeycomb into parallel lines; this is our fighting character, so we’re looking exclusively for the fighting solution, and the hacking, stealth or bluffing options don’t exist this time through.
Since Shamus wanted this content to keep being posted I figure should keep commenting.
Just reading, this feel a lot more hitman than deus ex. Obviously they’re both similar game (and you’re not assassinating someone at the end) but the two actually play quite differently, so it’d be interesting to see how playing this hypothetical game would feel. Maybe its the focus with fantastical/resort location, while I associate Deus Ex with more mundane location?
Yeah! You know, I got the “Hitman” impression too for whatever reason. I think, maybe, DE leans more toward industrial/cyberpunk and HM more toward resort/luxury locations?
Hitman: Deus Ex would be an interesting crossover. Following the adventures of the cybernetically enhanced Agent 74.
That sounds like Terminator: the game. That would also give you an in-game reason why you can survive bullet wounds. As wel as an in-game reason to select a most appropriate response to a question. (There is a scene in the terminator where you see a selection screen where the robot evaluates a proper response to a question).
Hmm, it seems like the Terminator lore blends very well with RPG mechanics. But nobody made an RPG yet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Terminator_video_games. i think it would be quite cool to level up your terminator as it learns to adapt (xp!) to the time it has been sent to.
Terminator: Princess Maker would be a very interesting crossover.
“I lead the resistance in the future?”
“No. You are a princess.”
In the pawn shop.
Terminator: “A high fashion 18th century dress in the 40.000 dollar range”
Clerk: “Just what you see, pal”
Terminator: “All your tablecloths and Singer: The Complete Photo Guide to Sewing”
K, I finally found the stomach to read this (thank you for the encouragement, Paul!). And I must say I’m quite impressed! Like some of the other commenters, I also got a lot of Hitman vibes, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Hitman needs to use exotic locations, because it takes place in the present day. Cyberpunk stories generally don’t need exotic locations, because the technology and the way everything works is exotic enough. In that context it’s actually preferable to use as mundane of a location as possible so that the experience is relatable to the audience.
But this story takes place close to the modern day – 2044, so the tech could be closer to today’s. And also, ever since Chung Kuo I’ve been a sucker for resorts and castles in a cyberpunk setting, so I am a bit biased :D
Really, the only thing I find fault with is this:
Ain’t no way that’s flies in a modern AAA game! Maybe I could see a Japanese dev doing it – Souls games are notorious for having secrets like this.
But Eidos (who own the IP) or any of the other big names who could fund this game? No chance. I remember listening to a Diecast where Shamus interviewed Ross about working for Ubisoft. At one point Ross said how a tester put in a ticket, because there was a mission where there were 10 seconds during which there was no quest marker. Even though the objective was extremely obvious, and an objective was set to automatically after those 10 seconds were up. But 10 seconds without an objective marker was too much, it seems.
So even though I would love a secret like this, I just can’t see it happening.
Other than that, I’m bitter-sweetly excited for the next part of this series. Really interested to see where he takes it…
4A games maybe? They hide all sorts of stuff and lore in levels in the metro series. You can play things in a linear fashion, but exploration is rewarded.