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
I'm thinking of something like this.
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.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex Pitch Part 3: Housekeeping”
Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.
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