{"id":54836,"date":"2022-10-12T07:18:15","date_gmt":"2022-10-12T11:18:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54836"},"modified":"2022-09-29T20:40:51","modified_gmt":"2022-09-30T00:40:51","slug":"deus-ex-pitch-part-6-the-man-behind-the-curtain-post-mortem-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54836","title":{"rendered":"Deus Ex Pitch Part 6: The Man Behind the Curtain (Post-Mortem post)"},"content":{"rendered":"

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Interlude: The Man Behind the Curtain<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span> 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Look, I’m just saying this would be a cool effect. Please don’t <\/span>pull a Ragtag<\/span><\/a> and blow weeks of development time on this, okay?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

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.<\/span><\/p>\n

After a cordial introduction, we get a dialog wheel or whatever we’re using to choose topics in this game.I was always partial to the list view of the original, but I guess it’s just somehow impossible to select things from a list with a controller.<\/span> I don’t want to map out full dialog trees here on a blog or this will become unreadable, but here are some of the major topics. You can probably figure out how they would fit together in a conversation…<\/span><\/p>\n

——————<\/span><\/p>\n

>Nice office. So this is where you pretend to run the world?<\/b><\/p>\n

Morgan takes no offense, “I like to think I do more than pretend. For the last thirty years I’ve guided financial markets, held dangerous leaders in check, and guided global discussions on public policy. I’m not perfect, but I think I’ve lived up to my predecessors.<\/span><\/p>\n

>So you’re, what? The Illuminati?<\/b><\/p>\n

Mogan Everett is visibly pained by the suggestion. “Please. It’s a cute name, but we would never adopt something so flashy. We simply call ourselves ‘Upper Management’. Our leadership… perhaps you’ve run into a few of them already? They’re called The Board.”<\/span><\/p>\n

——–<\/span><\/p>\n

>So what gives you the right to spy on Americans? Or meddle in our elections?<\/b><\/p>\n

“Please don’t think we’ve singled out your country. We keep an eye on everyone. As for having the ‘right’? That’s beside the point. The world needs our guidance, whether we have the right to give it or not. If not for us, the world would have collapsed into chaos a hundred years ago.”<\/span><\/p>\n

>I don’t know if you’ve watched any news in the last few decades, but the world isn’t doing all that great. If you do run the world, you’re doing a lousy job of it.<\/b><\/p>\n

Everett shrugs. He evidently expected this answer. “Originally we were just bankers. We kept an eye on financial markets, and we stayed out of politics. Then there were two world wars in three decades and a pair of nukes went off. We realized we couldn’t afford to leave the world to run itself. The stakes were too high. I know the world isn’t perfect, but it also hasn’t been turned to ash by an angry lunatic. Next year is the centennial anniversary of the end of World War II, and not a single nuke has been fired in anger since then. Our interventions have done far more good than harm.”<\/span><\/p>\n

————-<\/span><\/p>\n

>You’re trying to convince me you’re the good guy. But your organization killed a good man, and then framed me for it.<\/b><\/p>\n

“I understand you’re angry. You have every right to be. And you have my condolences. President Ellis was indeed a good man. I actually met him ’33, when he was still a senator. He was a bit too idealistic to be a world leader in this day and age. But he was a charming fellow, and unusually smart for a politician. Anyway, I had nothing to do with his assassination. The blame for that belongs to Maggie Chow.”<\/span><\/p>\n

If the player got intel X in Switzerland, then this option will be available:<\/span><\/p>\n

>You can’t blame all of this on Maggie Chow. I read some of your reports in Switzerland. You would have taken him out yourself if your friends on the Board hadn’t beaten you to it.<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“I would have taken him out of power with a scandal. Assassinations just make problems worse. My predecessors learned that the hard way during the cold war.”<\/span><\/p>\n

————<\/span><\/p>\n

“Scandal is less barbaric than assassination, but you’re still meddling with an election and overthrowing the will of millions of voters.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Everett gives a good-natured laugh. “I need to get out more. I’ve spent so many years behind the curtain that sometimes I forget what the world looks like from the other side. While I admire your youthful idealism, I’m sorry to tell you that President Ellis was not elected by the American people.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“Are you saying he rigged the election? Ridiculous.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“He didn’t rig it, but it was rigged. They all are, in one way or another. Once you control the narrative, box out third parties, and gerrymander all of the voting districts, you don’t need to resort to something as clumsy and obvious as direct voter fraud.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“If it wasn’t voter fraud, then what was it?”<\/span><\/p>\n

“A computer error. I created an AI to help me monitor voting patterns. It was designed to be an analyst, a passive observer. I was hopeful that it would someday project future voting patterns. For reasons I’ve never been able to work out, at some point it began tampering with the results instead of simply reporting them.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“So your AI supposedly stole the election for Ellis? Even though he was the most beloved president in a generation?”<\/span><\/p>\n

“Beloved and electible aren’t the same thing. We engineered the US system to make third-party wins basically impossible. Without my AI helping, Ellis wouldn’t even have broken into double digits.”<\/span><\/p>\n

—————-<\/span><\/p>\n

There’s also an optional conversation here if Troy decides to ask about the Chess board.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Everett will launch into this extended chess metaphor where he explains that the American President is like the queen in chess: It’s the most powerful piece, so some people mistake it for the most important one. They get so obsessed with capturing the queen that they lose sight of winning the game. Troy shrugs and sarcastically says something about all of this being too much for “a pawn like me”.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

“Don’t sell yourself so short. I see you more as the knight. It’s an unassuming piece. Often overlooked by novices. But with their unconventional movements, in the hands of a master they can change the game.”<\/span><\/p>\n

—-<\/span><\/p>\n

The previous games had their tortured Icarus metaphor for Adam Jensen, and so my game is going for a horse \/ knight motif for Troy. You can think of him as being a “white knight”, in the sense of filling a heroic role. But he also works as a “Trojan horse”, given how he was used for assassination. In fact, the Trojan Horse metaphor cuts both ways: He was betrayed by his own augmentations, and thus betrayed his boss. He’s both the perpetrator of, and a victim of, Trojan Horse-ery. Elsewhere we might use horse symbols to represent Troy.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

If he has a computer login \/ password in the game, it should feed into this metaphor. Maybe we can find an excuse to put a horse head logo on one of his weapons, or on the heli. Maybe we want to be really comically blunt about it and make his last name “Colt”, or “Steed”.Eh. “Troy Steed” sounds sort of clumsy to my ears, and “Troy Colt” is even worse.<\/span> If we want to make our protagonist of Arabic descent, the last name “Faris” means “knight”. Roswell is another surname that could work. It’s derived from <\/span>an Old English place name meaning “horse spring”<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Whatever. I’m not changing his name, mid-story. I’m just saying if you actually wanted to produce this game, we’d have to come up with something better than reusing “Denton”.<\/span><\/p>\n

—–<\/span><\/p>\n

“But now we come to our mutual problem. Maggie Chow has wrested control from me. I don’t know how she got the Board to follow her, but she is very eager to use her new power. She’s not qualified to lead Upper Management. In fact, she’s exactly the kind of leader that Upper Management was designed to prevent.”<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“This is a lot to take in.”<\/span><\/p>\n

“There’s more you need to know, but I feel like we should get started. Maggie Chow’s coup needs to be put down before she does any more damage. Whether or not you believe me\u00a0 – or agree with my methods – I think we both know that she needs to go. Once we’ve removed the traitors, I’ll be free to grant you a new life with a new identity, so you don’t have to spend the rest of your days as a fugitive.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Everett doesn’t know where Chow is right now, but the rest of her followers need to be dealt with as well. His first task is for you to head to Russia and track down Russian intelligence leader Leonid Sidorov.<\/span><\/p>\n

Back outside, Alex asksOn behalf of the player, really<\/span> if we should work with Everett at all. Troy replies that we need Evett’s help to track down the rest of the conspirators. The message to the player is: You can try to kill Everett later if you want, but you have to work for him now to undo the conspiracy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The conspiracy might call themselves “Upper Management”, but Alex is having none of it. She refers to all of them as “Those Illuminati dipshits” going forward. Including Everett.<\/span><\/p>\n

The New Status Quo<\/span><\/h3>\n

I’d like to use Olympus Financial as our “home base” going forward. Maybe Denton can even have a small office here where he can check email or whatever. The important thing is that the player will come back to speak with holo-Everett and get a briefing for the next mission.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, if this game is going to be cursed with long load times then I’d rather forgo the idea of Olympus being a home base. Imagine how this would feel for a gameplay-focused player: They sit through a long load, then sprint inside and click through the briefing in 10 seconds, then run back out and sit through another long load. Yuck.<\/span><\/p>\n

Olympus should be a modest location in terms of space. There’s Everett’s office, where you talk to his hologram and poke through his belongings to learn who he is. Beyond that, there are a few other small rooms that the player might open up using keys and passwords they find on their missions. I’ll talk about these rooms later.<\/span><\/p>\n

The elevator doesn’t work,Er. I’m sure it’s <\/span>operational<\/b>. I just mean the player can’t use it.<\/span> so the player is of course trapped on the top floor.\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n

If it looks like load times are going to be a burden, then I’d just as soon skip these visits and move their exposition and loot into the missions themselves. If load times are going to exceed 45 seconds then I’ll just tell the team to switch to the 1999 build of the Unreal Engine like the original Deus Ex and we can make a giant game with no loading screens and then we can all go out for ice cream and free pony rides.<\/span><\/p>\n

For the purposes of this series, I’m going to assume that load times are reasonable. I’m hoping that I can make these pitstop visits quick and painless by keeping our home base small. Olympus is just a few rooms and a skybox. It’s not a huge sprawling building like Sarif Industries or an open city like Detroit. And it’s not behind an extra loading screen <\/span>and<\/b> an elevator ride like Jensen’s apartment in <\/span>Human Revolution<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

So to sum up this location, a visit to Olympus will have the following content available:<\/span><\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Discuss a specific topic with Everett\u00a0<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    This is optional, of course. This will give us a chance to ask him some questions or argue with him a bit, or squeeze extra exposition out of him. The topic will probably tie in to the previous mission in some way.<\/span><\/p>\n

    Like your discussions with Mr. House in Fallout New Vegas, you can bicker with him the whole way, or you can just shrug and do what you’re told.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

      \n
    1. Check out a side room.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

      There are a few smaller rooms adjacent to Everett’s office. These rooms belonged to the other members of the conspiracy, or to past members. The player will have a chance to find keys or passwords to these rooms during missions, and then they can come back here and open them for loot and lore.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

        \n
      1. Check Email.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

        Everett gives Denton a small office here, and we can use that office as a place for the player to check emails. I think a parting email from Edward Webb would be cool, and maybe one from Sam Carter if you managed to end things peacefully with him.<\/span><\/p>\n

        Beyond those, I don’t actually know if we’ll have a use for emails in this game. This high-level overview is pretty short on characters, and it’s hard to know what we’ll need without actually doing all the detail work. <\/span>Deus Ex Human Revolution<\/span><\/i> had emails, and they seem like a good tool for “Thanks for doing that sidequest, here’s how I’m doing as a result” type messages. I guess it depends on what kinds of sidequests we come up with.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

          \n
        1. Chat with Alex.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

          Let’s get Alex out of the drone cockpit during these visits, because we’ve already established that the thing is small. Maybe she leans on the heli like Malak in Human Revolution, or maybe she just hangs out the side and types on her laptop. Ideally she might be doing something slightly different for each visit.Coding on one visit, playing hacky sack, playing a handheld game, eating. Whatever.<\/span>\u00a0 We just want to make her feel alive and not like the voice inside your helicopter.<\/span><\/p>\n

          Alex can offer her perspective on things, often providing a counterpoint to the discussion you may have with Everett. Thematically, Everett and Alex are opposites. Everett represents the cynicism of “This isn’t nice, but we’re doing what’s necessary to keep order in a messy world”. At the other extreme, Alex represents idealism and faith in people. “The world can be better if we choose to do better.”<\/span><\/p>\n

            \n
          1. Mission briefing.<\/b><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            Everett will explain the next mission. These are all going to involve tracking down the other members of the conspiracy and dealing with them. This might mean killing them, or it might mean stripping them of their power. In at least one instance it will involve simply getting them to switch back to Everett’s team again.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

            This isn’t a Hitman game and we don’t want these missions to be a simple kill list, but all of the conspiracy members will need to be dealt with in one way or another.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54836","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\/54836","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54837,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54836\/revisions\/54837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}