Well here’s some rather big news.
Eidos have announced Deus Ex 3.
Details have emerged on Gamasutra that Eidos’ new Montreal studio will be developing the third part in the Deus Ex saga as their first project.
Almost nothing is known beyond that the developers have passed a proof of concept for the game. Stéphane D’Astous, Montreal’s general manager told Gamasutra,
“”We’re only working on AAA, major titles. We’re going to be developing only major AAA games, using only next-gen technology. We will want to limit our dev teams to a human-sized team of 80 people at the very highest of the peak in the production cycle. We don’t want to become a huge studio where there’s over 100 people on a title. We want a smaller, multi-discipline group that are tightly knit together. But by doing so, we will give them at least 18 to 24 months for the production cycle.”
However, it’s extremely unlikely Deus Ex’s daddy, Warren Spector, will have anything to do with the project, as Shacknews points out. His Junction Point Studios was recently bought by Disney, keeping him tied up in big-money development for the foreseeable future. Nor does it seem likely that designer Harvey Smith will be involved, being all wrapped up with the development of Blacksite 2 down in Austin, Texas.
While opinion was divided over the second game (seriously, if you’re in a pub with Alec and Kieron, bring it up: hilarious), our crazed love for the original Deus Ex is enough to have excitement oozing from every pore of the RPS bodymass, even with just a name announcement. Oh, and Eidos? Make sure it appears on PC. We have sticks.
Trailer below the clickileap.
Gametrailers: kthnxbai
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Kieron: Yes, when I reviewed Bioshock I was continuously experimenting and found it was one of its stronger points when compared to other shooters. In one part of the game I decided to run a experiment so I planned and executed four different ways of beating a Big Brother without getting “killed” and all were pretty different and creative enough to feel like it was “my thing” and not a careful planned set of actions placed by the game designer that I must execute as I was a puppet.
Rewarding for creative gaming would be pretty nice in a scenario when a) the game understand you are being creative b) there is something really useful for that. While in Bioshock you are rewarded with lot of improvements that make the game easier, maybe it could be better if they offered other type of tangible rewards that convince the player of the benefits of it. Is hard indeed.
Yeah, that positive feedback loop is tricky. I researched everything in Bioshock, and was swimming in ammo and resources by the end of the game. Which made the endgame being extra rubbish, since it was stupidly easy as well as lacklustre in terms of narrative and design. Especially after you get the invisibility tonic, it gets luidicrously easy to plan and execute very efficient attacks. Of course, it didn’t help that some weapons were genuinely unbalanced, with the chemical thrower w. electro-gel being the chief offender. You can take down a big daddy witout a scratch easily with that thing. (Security bullseye as well, though that requires a lot more patience.)
Progress in narrative-heavy games like Biohock and Thief is the big obvious carrot most people go for, me included. If there’s an easy path forward, most people will take it.
What Deus Ex did well was to spend much of the early part of the game hitting you with pointers as to how else you might be playing. If you’d gone in guns blazing early on, you were gently pressured into playing the next bit more calmly as a change of pace. When you triggered something, you’d get feedback on it almost immediately – the obvious example being blundering into the womens’ toilets and getting a dressing down during your first mission briefing. Even if the limitations became pretty clear on subsequent playthroughs, it made it feel that every choice you made could have an impact, giving the big set-pieces like Lebedev and going to see Paul a genuine level of intrigue the first time you went through them.
Conversely, Bioshock, and Invisible War for that matter, really didn’t care how you played. The choices were there, but the only thing most of the characters cared about was how your actions directly benefited them*. The moral dimension didn’t play a part, and the closest they got to suggesting you try something different was throwing some half-arsed threats (the bit outside the Nassif Greenhouse is pure comedy…) that hardly offered an incentive to try it their way next time… or even play the What If game. What if I’d gone with the Church? Well, most likely, I’d have pressed a different button and had an identical chat with the WTO.
When the macro-level is handled that poorly, the micro-decisions of whether to go through vents or hunt down a microtool really doesn’t have much chance. It definitely doesn’t help that the characters you’re busting your proverbials off for are nothing but a bunch of whiny, arrogant pricks, incapable of realising that the player wasn’t their errand boy/girl, or that choosing between their cack-handed schemes for world-domination was rather less compelling than… well… conquering it directly! Praise Helios!
No. Far from picking sides in the great conflict, I wanted a sub-quest to put my head on the do-not-call list. After a while, I resorted to the quickest, obvious solutions to problems simply to get it over with.
(* The Little Sisters are an obvious exception in Bioshock, but to be honest, I was never convinced that their sad story was more than a subplot in the city’s history – if a good one)
I think my issues with IW are very similar to Richard’s above, only I had much less time with the game. The reason for this is that the game was so buggy it was unplayable after certain points*. One of deus ex’s huge draws was how many things you could find that weren’t required for game completion — I’ve found entire zones of levels when I replayed the game. I was constantly reloading old saves to see if I could do something different.
I think a lot of the problems with IW were directly related to the fact that it was for both PC and Console — the controls felt ‘off’ to PC users; needlessly simplistic changes were made to core mechanics of the previous game (one ammo for all guns? Wow…); there were no really memorable ‘chats’ in the game (compare to the rather lengthy talk with the bartender in Hong Kong [in Deus Ex] about the benefits of free-market economies with little government interaction vs. restricted economies of the ‘western’ nations); the NPC’s were much less memorable, and really.. well, character..ful.
I don’t hate linear gameplay as a standard; Deus Ex made me feel that I had a lot of choice in what went down. IW, on the other hand, made me feel like my choices were 1a or 1b, not a real difference in the end.
(Err, my * was for the following errors: audio would start normally, and then speed up to the point it was essentially instant. If I threw a basketball at someone, the game would crash. Invisible walls, textures missing, etc.)
Oh. Jesus. I… I really, really want this to be good. But it won’t be.
If anything people might go a little easier on this on the basis of “Well, at least it’s better than Invisible War”. Assuming it is better than Invisible War of course.
Richard: if Invisible War had been an obscure Russian title, it would, if anything, be better regarded than it is now for not being subjected to the massive backlash it received.
Of course there’s a ton of things wrong with Invisible War. But the amount of hate it’s generated (which has far eclipsed the initial “pretty good” reviews) has always been way out of proportion with how bad it actually was.
You know, I’ve found just as many different ways to play Invisible War (after completing it 5 or 6 times, I have tried to exhaust them, I promise) as I have with Deus Ex. I don’t get where this “and at the end of IW none of your choices mattered” thing comes from, anyway. In Deus Ex, the final three endings were the identical no matter how you had played the game? In fact, in IW how you played the game would even change where you started certain missions from, for example, something you don’t seen in DX at all.
Grr. I accept IW is no where near as DX but most of the criticisms people level at it are complete nonsense.
And +1 to what Duncan just said – if this game had been called “Invisible War” and not featured a character called JC Denton or one called Tracer Tong, it would have been received with open arms, not CLOSED FISTS.
Fooks sake. *”Invisible War” and not “Deus Ex: Invisible War”. Yes, I know you have a PREVIEW box.
Yes, I would have almost no beef with it at all if it was simply called Invisible War. The problem is, it wasn’t. It was the sequel to a fantastic game of the year, and it was mediocre.
And the thing is, there’s no reason for it to not be at least ‘good.’ They had a great story to work with, great characters, setting, and so on. Instead they went “ok, let’s shave this down, remove these key elements from the original (skill points, wow.)”
It would be really interesting to have seen how the game would have fared sans the Deus Ex name.
No. At best, I think would be regarded like Stalker – a brave attempt, but one that only the hardcore are really going to remember a few years on. Possibly an action-RPG Gothic.
But that’s not the point. The point is that the Deus Ex name was more than a millstone round its neck, especially on launch. In much the same way as a marine will seem to have better AI than a zombie simply by dint of looking human, people mapped their expectations on it both ways. The difference is that while there’s a backlash now, the initial response was very much “It’s Deus Ex, therefore it must be awesome. Even though…”
What really stuck in my mind: the pub conversations at the time it was released didn’t revolve around what was great about it, but rather “Name another game that does it better.”
There weren’t any around t the time, sadly. And wouldn’t be until Bloodlines. But that doesn’t change anything.
I don’t get where you’re getting that line of argument from. It’s not something that anybody’s said at any point in the thread. However, the endings aren’t a particularly great example to bring up, simply because the only break-point that I remember is whether you help the Templars. Once you get to Liberty Island, you can still pick and choose whatever ending you like. The difference is that instead of making it as a moral, personal call, as Deus Ex invited you to do with its choice of apocalypse, all of Invisible War’s endings are straight up “Pick the incredibly unpleasant people you want to rule the world.” Even the independent ending screws you in that respect when the Omar turn the planet into Fallout 3.
The problem with the choices in it isn’t that they’re not available, it’s that the game does a very bad job of inspiring you to make use of them. Compare… well… any of it to Liberty Island in the first game, where it hands you a toybox and says ‘This is your world – go play!’
It never builds the connection to the world that makes you want to save it – to hate the baddies and connect with the good guys in the way that you could when wandering through Hell’s Kitchen. Where was the scale? Where was the discovery? Where were the set-pieces and the moments that really inspired you to be a hero?
At the risk of sounding like a luvvie, where’s the motivation, dahling?
Really, the biggest moment in the whole game happens in the intro. Nothing you experience as Alex D comes close. Even the nanobot Statue of Liberty – the iconic ending – just splutters.
Hate’s too strong a world in most cases. Vivid disappointment is closer to the mark. For my part, I don’t think Invisible War is a mediocre game – I think it’s a bad one. I don’t insist that everyone agrees, and I’ll give it some kudos – it’s an ambitious enough game, no question about that. And I won’t say it doesn’t have some good moments (NG Resonance for instance). And it has the finest comedy line in any serious RPG, thanks to:
…which had me howling with laughter in the office. But sadly, that wasn’t enough. Not for a Deus Ex sequel. Not as an individual game in its own right.
Richard – apologies: I am having this discussion on several other forums/comments threads as well, so am having difficulty remembering what has been said where.
Basically this all boils down to personal preference (what doesn’t?!) – I found that there was a lot of choice in IW, which you admit, but I also found that there getting inspiration to experiment with the choices wasn’t something I found lacking. Evidently I am in the minority – but that was my experience, and that is why I don’t understand the hate.
I thought it provided just as much of a toy-box as the original. I prefer the original because of its story line, length, depth (in terms of interface and conversation trees) French people, and so on, but in terms of the freeform lovin’ that DX is often remembered for – I found enough of that in IW as well. And you can’t take that away from me, IW-Hate-Brigade! :)
Fairy nuff.
Aha! A challenge! (clicks fingers) SEND IN ZE DOKTOR!
Richard: I agree it could have been Stalker — but isn’t Stalker held in better esteem than IW is these days?
I think you and I are focusing on separate critical responses to IW. I think the (delayed) negative reaction has completely outweighed the initial reviews, which I agree were too blindly positive. “Name a game that does it better” is a poor defense. All I’m really saying is that there was an overcorrection.
Actually, you’re misremembering. The Omar don’t cause the apocalypse, they’re just the only ones fit enough to survive the mess humanity makes when it doesn’t have strong, guiding hands to lead it towards an eternity of techno-communism/hyper-capitalism/fascism. *snarl*
I’m not nearly as hard on Invisible War as most people, but the fatalism, lack of any ambiguity or hope of those endings really pissed me off.
Yeah, I’m probably getting things mixed up, but I remember the implication of them messaging you with a thanks after you take out the other faction leaderes as it being ‘their’ ending. Especially coupled with their agressive philosophy that Leo was trying to break away from at that point.
But I may well be wrong, it’s been a long time since I watched that ending.
Good catch! That would certainly be a solution to the otherwise seemingly intractable problem of following on from the ending(s) of DX2.
That’s because the vent solutions were presented so transparently; at one point an NPC even explains the three possible routes you can take out of a situation, including the vent. You don’t get the joy of finding a well-hidden vent for yourself, exploring, and feeling like you’re coming up with your own creative solutions nearly as much as in DX1.
DX2 also had very little element of mystery compared to the first game. I hope DX3 chucks out all the people constantly spewing lazy pleas into your head and leaves you to work it out yourself for a bit.
Agree with the points above about their unlikeability of most of the characters, which just makes their paths even more obviously mechanical. (I seem to remember enjoying the hologram, though… the character that’s not supposed to be real, natch.)
Still, I don’t hate it. It could have been a lot worse. They could have licensed it out and given us Deus Exxxtreme: JC Denton Radical Skateboard Racing.
hey, alec, just spotted your icon.
Freelance Peacekeeping Agent, yes?
Yes, yes?
sorry for double posting, but i have just read the rest of the thread…
the first Deus Ex changed my perception of gaming radically, to go into detail would be to repeat most of what has already been discussed above. The second game i enjoyed too, but my faults with it stemmed from some very basic flaws in the physicality of the game itself, namely incredibly bad motion/lip synch in cutscenes, which left you feeling as if you were watching a puppet theatre rather than interacting with a dystopian film noir (sorry, i have been watching blade runner)
Comparison of the two games is difficult, particularly because of the high regard in which the first game is held despite the fact it is not without its flaws-for instance, you are the pinnacle of human/technological integration, a super spy in every sense, but your aim with a ranged weapon is like that of a small child until you upgrade your skill in that area. NOLF 2 had a similar skill system, but at least you could aim properly to begin with.
Regarding DX3, the first question shouldn’t be “is it going to be any good?” it should be “Why do we need another DX?” Sequels rarely stand up to the originals (with a few exceptions such as HL2), in fact another badly made game bearing the DX name will make the original have less impact-and that’s most definitely not a good thing