T w e n t y S i d e d

And speaking of missions, let’s get back to the job at hand…

Mission 9: TBD

This stretch of the game is really light on details. I don’t have a setting for this mission, except that it should probably be some sort of industrial facility owned by South African industrialist Samkelo Mensah.

We need to take care of Mensah. Also here is fellow board member Camila Ferreira, a Brazilian Environmentalist / Politician. We should find these two together, plotting. Camila is evidently an environmental crusader, and here we learn she doesn’t actually care about the environment and it’s all part of the game to her.  Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex Pitch Part 8: Resolution (Post-Mortem Post)”

Heather Young

Troy is dropped off at a rusty old Soviet-era aerospace facility. This is a mashup of several different classic Soviet locations. There’s a nuclear missile silo to explore, an intelligence building filled with spy satellite stuff, and a decommissioned aerospace hanger inspired by the one in Kazakh. The place should be a sort of “greatest hits” of cold-war era tropes. We’re here to take out Russian intelligence leader Leonid Sidorov, one of the conspirators. 

Mission 7: Space Race

Like I said earlier, this series is going to use brute-force monologues to convey most of the information going forward. Obviously in a properly designed game, all of this would need to be spread out and delivered organically in bite-sized portions. But here Morgan Everett is just going to talk our ears off. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex Pitch Part 7: Space Race (Post-Mortem Post)”

Heather Young

There aren’t a lot of really tall office towers In London, except for a peninsula that’s surrounded on three sides by the Thames river. According to Google maps, this spot is called the Isle of Dogs. London is one of the major financial centers centres in Europe, and a lot of that power is focused on this small patch of the city.

This is a really good spot for a cool view, and so this is where we find the Olympus Financial building, which is where Everett wants us to meet. 

Interlude: The Man Behind the Curtain

So our protagonist arrives in London to meet with the Head Conspiracy Guy. The rooftop landing pad should be really fancy. Fancy how? I dunno. Maybe a reflecting pool with some lights? A garden? Some statues of literally ANYTHING that isn’t Icarus? Whatever. It’s posh. You get the idea.

On top of the building is a glass enclosure that houses a really swank executive office where the hologram of a silver-haired man is waiting for him. Yes, Morgan Everett attends this “in person” meeting via hologram. Everett is perhaps sixty.I figure he’s a millennial, probably born in the early-to-mid 80s. Remember that the current year is 2044. He’s got a friendly smile and a tasteful gray suit with an orange pocket square. He’s healthy and handsome for a man his age. He looks like the kind of guy that could have played James Bond in his prime.

I’ve always been bothered by hologram tech where the projected person fits seamlessly into the environment. I’d love it if we had a version where Everett paces around like he’s giving a TED talk. But he’s sort of oblivious or indifferent to the layout of the room he’s being projected into. So he ends up walking through bits of furniture, making parts of his hologram glitch out. 

Look, I’m just saying this would be a cool effect. Please don’t pull a Ragtag and blow weeks of development time on this, okay? 

There’s a chess board and a single chair on one side of the room. Morgan is standing beside a massive oak desk. The far wall is made of windows, looking out over the city lights.

I have to confess that the game is going to get very monologue-y from here on. This second half of the game isn’t as developed as the first, and I’m going to be dumping a lot of raw exposition on you. Obviously in a finished game you’d take the exposition and space it out, working it into multiple conversations broken up by large chunks of gameplay. But this blog post doesn’t have any gameplay, so I’m going to bombard you with walls of text.

This conversation should offer the player a choice of what posture to adopt with Everett. Do they want to be friendly, hostile, or do they want to play things close to the vest? It won’t impact the trajectory of the conversation, but this is a moment where players are going to have strong feelings on how they want to respond. We need to accommodate that or they will begin to resent their protagonist. For the purpose of this write-up, I’ll assume the player is mildly belligerent towards Everett. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex Pitch Part 6: The Man Behind the Curtain (Post-Mortem post)”

Heather Young