{"id":54337,"date":"2022-06-03T06:00:18","date_gmt":"2022-06-03T10:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54337"},"modified":"2022-06-02T16:25:32","modified_gmt":"2022-06-02T20:25:32","slug":"deus-ex-pitch-part-1-introduction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54337","title":{"rendered":"Deus Ex Pitch Part 1: Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This series is going to be a little weird, and I don&#8217;t know how well it&#8217;ll go over. I was having a terrible time getting back to work after the <a href=\"?p=54058\">recent troubles<\/a>, and I was looking for a nice softball project to ease myself back into it. So I&#8217;m going to pitch a Deus Ex game. I&#8217;ve been thinking about the game a lot over the past few weeks thanks to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bgJazjz9ZsA\">this video<\/a>, and I guess this is my way of coping with the fact that there doesn&#8217;t seem to be a new entry on the horizon.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/bgJazjz9ZsA\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bgJazjz9ZsA'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Imagine we&#8217;re all on the dev team and I&#8217;m proposing a new direction for the next game in the series. This isn&#8217;t anything as ambitious as a design document. This is just a starting point.\u00a0 This is a plot outline, a handful of ideas, some core characters, and a list of missions.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m only halfway serious with the overblown title &#8220;Pandora&#8217;s Gun&#8221;. It feels like the kind of absurd goofiness you&#8217;d get from a late 90s shooter. Which is good! On the other hand, this story is as connected to the Pandora myth as much as <i>Human Revolution<\/i> was connected to the Icarus myth.<span class='snote' title='1'>Which is to say: Not at all.<\/span> On the gripping hand, the title is promising outrageous bombast that doesn&#8217;t quite match what I&#8217;ve written. Still, it&#8217;s catchy and not worse than <a href=\"https:\/\/daisychainbook.co\/products\/deus-ex\">Icarus Effect<\/a>. I&#8217;m going with it mostly because it made me giggle when I thought of it.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve said before that the Deus Ex series is in a terrible rut. The first game is a classic. The second is a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=59PzmOLSf00\">hot mess<\/a>. The third game &#8211; <i>Human Revolution<\/i> &#8211; is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=bgJazjz9ZsA\">fine<\/a>, but can&#8217;t really compare to the original. And <i>Mankind Divided<\/i> is where the series seems to have <a href=\"?p=33885\">lost its way<\/a>. At this point, what are these games about? Conspiracy theories? Transhumanism? Cyber bigotry? The way our future society will be shaped by technology, corporations, and government? Belabored and ill-fitting Icarus metaphors? It feels less like the writers have something to say, and more like they&#8217;re throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.<\/p>\n<p>Another problem is that the Deus Ex timeline is full. We know the near future. (The original game.) We know the far future. (The world-changing events of <i>Invisible War<\/i>.) We know the recent past. (<i>Human Revolution<\/i> and <i>Mankind Divided<\/i>.) And if you go much further into the past you run into the modern day.<span class='snote' title='2'>And of course, the further back you go, the more mundane the technology needs to be.<\/span> There just isn&#8217;t much room left in the timeline to tell new stories where <i>Important Things<\/i> happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>The final problem is that this series is built around the idea that there&#8217;s a secret conspiracy running the world. Since all of these games are set in the same universe, we end up unmasking the same conspiracy again and again. But that reveal gets to be a little less interesting every time, and the accumulated lore cruft means there&#8217;s less we can do with it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m a big believer in the idea that the Deus Ex series should be like Final Fantasy: The games all draw from similar thematic elements and plots, featuring recurring character names and relationships. Each game should tell a unique story within its own universe, yet be full of familiar ideas and moments.<\/p>\n<p>So this is what I&#8217;m going to pitch. I&#8217;m going to propose a Deus Ex reboot.\u00a0<\/p>\n<h3>But I&#8217;m Sick of Reboots!<\/h3>\n<p>Yes, I know. Everything is getting rebooted these days. Tomb Raider. Doom. Wolfenstein. King&#8217;s Quest. Thief. Hitman. Fans are tired of publishers flipping the table on established lore and starting over when sales begin to fall.<\/p>\n<p>But we shouldn&#8217;t let bad reboots<span class='snote' title='3'>Thief 2014 comes to mind as a particularly egregious example.<\/span> put us off the idea of reboots altogether. Like sequels, prequels, and spinoffs, a reboot is a tool the storyteller can use to solve problems. The key is knowing when to do it and how to do it properly.<\/p>\n<p>Yes, we all love JC Denton and Adam Jensen. I understand that fans don&#8217;t want to see their heroes poofed out of existence by a lazy writer. But this idea of characters being &#8220;erased&#8221; only applies if you&#8217;re planning to run this new reboot into the ground with endless same-universe sequels. Nobody complains that <i><a href=\"?p=32341\">Final Fantasy X<\/a><\/i> &#8220;erased&#8221; the characters in <i>Final Fantasy VII<\/i>. Final Fantasy XII didn&#8217;t destroy FFX&#8217;s Spira and all of its characters. It just told a different, unrelated story.<\/p>\n<p>I think people really underestimate the power and potential of a blank canvas. If you&#8217;re new to the world, then you don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going to happen next. You don&#8217;t know who to trust. You meet people along the way and discover the world, and that process is massively more rewarding than going through a parade of obligatory cameos. We want players to feel a sense of trepidation and mystery as the world is revealed. We don&#8217;t want the audience to sit there thinking, &#8220;Come on, I already know Bob Illuminati is behind this. When is he gonna show up?&#8221;<\/p>\n<h3>Blueprint<\/h3>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"images\/comic_deus_ex.jpg\" align=\"right\" width=\"256\" height=\"483\"\/><br \/>\nSo let&#8217;s take an inventory and see what elements we want to include in our new Deus Ex game. We can then replace all these pieces one at a time, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ship_of_Theseus\">Ship of Theseus<\/a> style.\u00a0<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Transhumanism: We don&#8217;t have to make the game about cyber-racism, and it doesn&#8217;t have to be a huge part of the setting, but I feel like fans expect that we&#8217;re going to be playing as some sort of enhanced individual.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Conspiracy Theories: Conspiracy was such a big part of the original, I think you need to feature this sort of thing. It doesn&#8217;t need to be central and the conspirators don&#8217;t need to be the central antagonists, but I think it would be a disappointing Deus Ex game if you were to play everything perfectly straight with no hidden agendas, secret powers, or major twists.<\/li>\n<li>Technology, Government, Individuals: The first game was really interested in the interplay between these three things.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>Globe-spanning adventure: Our story should take us to a variety of locations around the world, from the dirtiest slums to the shiniest labs. We can start off in the USA so the world feels like a standard Hollywood setting, but the story should quickly escalate to something global.<span class='snote' title='4'>Obviously the story is still going to be pretty western, simply because the author of this series is from the USA.<\/span><\/li>\n<li>This is a modern shooter: I&#8217;m sure you could use Deus Ex to make a really interesting Telltale-style game about choice and consequences. I&#8217;d prefer gameplay that felt a little more like the original and less like the recent cover-based stuff. But to keep this pitch plausible let&#8217;s assume we&#8217;re sticking to roughly the same gameplay style as the last couple of entries.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>While we&#8217;re not <b>obligated<\/b> to respond to player choice, there does seem to be a hope and expectation among fans that the game will respond to some well-telegraphed choices. This isn&#8217;t a BioWare game and we don&#8217;t need to do a ton of branching, but the audience will probably appreciate some narrative reactivity.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>We don&#8217;t have an infinite budget. In fact, the last game was apparently a bit of a disappointment in terms of sales.<span class='snote' title='5'>Then again, Square Enix was going through a weird phase where they projected that every game was going to meet ridiculously implausible sales targets.<\/span> So we should be looking for ways to keep costs down. My story is 10 missions long. Yes, that&#8217;s more than either of the previous two games.<span class='snote' title='6'>Although a fraction the size of the original. Alas for the days of affordable gamespace.<\/span> However, I don&#8217;t have any enormous open-world hub locations like Detroit or Prague from the previous games. Also, several of the locations pop up more than once, so we&#8217;re not going to need 10 distinct maps. I&#8217;ve never worked on a AAA project before and I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ve got a few budgetary blind spots, but I&#8217;ve done my best to keep the scope under control.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Feel free to suggest other elements in the comments below, but for the purposes of this write-up, we&#8217;re going to pretend the above blueprint is the plan.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In terms of tone, I want to head back in the direction of the original. It&#8217;s been said<span class='snote' title='7'>By whom? I&#8217;m like 90% sure it was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/c\/ErrantSignal\">Chris Franklin<\/a>, but I can&#8217;t remember when he said it.<\/span> that the original <i>Deus Ex<\/i> was a smart game that pretended to be stupid, and that <i>Human Revolution<\/i> is a dumb game pretending to be smart. I can&#8217;t claim that I&#8217;ve made a smart game, but I did do my best to avoid pretension and embrace a little absurdity in the name of fun. I&#8217;m sure you&#8217;ll let me know how I did.<\/p>\n<h3>The Conspiracy Problem<\/h3>\n<p>So now I guess we need to talk about the elephant in the room. The original game dealt with conspiracy theories. It embraced some ridiculous and amusing ideas, and made them fit together in a crazy over-the-top world. But a lot has changed in the past 22 years, and conspiracy theories aren&#8217;t what they used to be.<\/p>\n<p>Consider these three, which I&#8217;m making up right now:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Halloween was invented by chocolate moguls Paul Ghirardelli and William Nestle in the early 1800s as a way to sell more candy. The new crop of cocoa beans would come in and they needed to get rid of last year&#8217;s stock to make room, which is why the holiday was placed in October.<\/li>\n<li>Microwaves are sensitive to short-wave radiation. That&#8217;s just how they work. That means every microwave oven is effectively a wi-fi listening device. Since the 1990s, General Electric has been working with the NSA, allowing the government to use their microwaves to listen in on everyone&#8217;s internet activity.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li>The Levi corporation makes clothing using forced labor camps in Sudan, where children as young as 11 work in terrible conditions. Hundreds of these workers die every year, and hundreds more are maimed by the industrial equipment.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>I submit that the first two conspiracy theories are kind of fun. They&#8217;re silly and absurd. I&#8217;ve met people who were into this sort of stuff: Flat-earthers and moon-fakers. Some of them are serious about it, and some of them treat it like a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/12\/09\/technology\/birds-arent-real-gen-z-misinformation.html\">joke \/ troll<\/a>, and enjoy the challenge of defending their absurdity against mundane facts. I don&#8217;t know why people are into this stuff, but I see them as generally harmless.<span class='snote' title='8'>I said GENERALLY harmless. Yes, there are exceptions. But for the most part this sort of recreational absurdity doesn&#8217;t cause any harm beyond being annoying.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>But that third conspiracy theory is a bit different, isn&#8217;t it? That&#8217;s not a joke. That&#8217;s not something we can just agree to disagree on. Either that theory <b>is<\/b> true and we need to fight against it with whatever might we can summon, or it <b>isn&#8217;t<\/b> true and is therefore a cruel and dangerous lie.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Over the last couple of decades, the conspiracy theory meta-game has evolved away from the quasi-harmless paranoia of the first two and towards the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc\">outrage-feeding<\/a> intensity of the third kind.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>At the same time, our society is much more divided politically.<span class='snote' title='9'>Eh. This is true in North America. I get mixed reports from elsewhere.<\/span> This means it&#8217;s very dangerous to toy with political topics. Stray too far into either camp, and the opposition will bury you in outrage. You can avoid this by pulling an Ubisoft and not saying anything, but art that has nothing to say is usually very boring art.<\/p>\n<p>In short, we can&#8217;t just do like the first game did and make a big mixtape of popular conspiracy theories. The whole thing would blow up in our face.\u00a0The goal is to make something that can be broadly enjoyed by people all over the political spectrum without coming off as tone-deaf or sanctimonious.<span class='snote' title='10'>For example, Picard Season 2.<\/span> <\/p>\n<p>I have a two-prong plan for how to deal with this:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>We&#8217;re going to make up our own conspiracy theories, rather than remixing extant theories the way the original did.<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;re going to avoid hot-button stuff. This doesn&#8217;t mean saying <em>nothing<\/em>, it just means we&#8217;re not going to talk about a woman&#8217;s right to raise taxes on multi-gendered gun control for critical race theory. Instead we&#8217;re going to talk about&#8230; eh. You&#8217;ll see.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>Of course, I&#8217;ve got my own biases and blind spots. Maybe something I&#8217;ve written will hit a nerve or stumble into a nest of controversy that I&#8217;ve been oblivious to. But I did what I could to make this ideologically inclusive. <\/p>\n<p>It should go without saying, but I really, REALLY want nothing to do with the current crop of conspiracy theories. I don&#8217;t want to discuss them, and I don&#8217;t want those keywords to show up on my site. I&#8217;m going to nuke any discussion regarding them, because I don&#8217;t want the Google bot to get the idea that this site is interested in that sort of thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So that&#8217;s it. I&#8217;m going to pitch a AAA shooter that uses the Deus Ex name in a rebooted universe to tell a new story. We&#8217;ll start next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This series is going to be a little weird, and I don&#8217;t know how well it&#8217;ll go over. I was having a terrible time getting back to work after the recent troubles, and I was looking for a nice softball project to ease myself back into it. So I&#8217;m going to pitch a Deus Ex [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-projects"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54337"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54371,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54337\/revisions\/54371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}