Deus Ex: Invisible War post-mortem: "We #@%!ed up."

[MattKeil]

Harvey Smith dissects what went wrong with DE:IW in Warren Spector's UoT class. Very interesting stuff that brings up some real life elements that I think a lot of people forget can factor into a game project's success and/or failure.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=MGIdYl2oN74

[JPR]

Anybody that hasn't hunted down those videos really should. Half of them are incredibly fascinating, and the other half are good, too.

edit: it might not be clear that I meant the set of all the videos from Spector's class this past year. Each of them is several hours long, and he talks to some really interesting, really significant people. I no longer remember where I got them, but they are out there.

[Charles]

Very interesting to watch. Also there's two vids on DX1 as well. Interesting to see some perspective on some of it.

[Sarkus]

Despite it's obvious technical issues (tiny areas), I thought IW was a pretty solid game. I still play it on occasion. Deus Ex is probably one of the best first person games ever; it wasn't likely that any sequel could have lived up to that.

[Charles]

Despite it's obvious technical issues (tiny areas), I thought IW was a pretty solid game. I still play it on occasion. Deus Ex is probably one of the best first person games ever; it wasn't likely that any sequel could have lived up to that.

I agree, however, we're in a pretty small minority, I've found. In fact, as I write this, someone is probably typing up a post calling you an idiot.

[Alex Dolce]

IW had its own charms and drawbacks, just like DX 1 did. The only things that really bothered me about IW had to do with what they did with the story more than anything. I don't like how the Dentons ended up, and they never did tell me what happened to Tracer Tong's face. Poor thing.

[ARogan]

Hmmm all I remember was I actually finished DX 2 but only got about half way through DX 1 though I think that's mostly due to length. That and I started listening to Kidneythieves.

[flyinj]

Anybody that hasn't hunted down those videos really should. Half of them are incredibly fascinating, and the other half are good, too.

edit: it might not be clear that I meant the set of all the videos from Spector's class this past year. Each of them is several hours long, and he talks to some really interesting, really significant people. I no longer remember where I got them, but they are out there.

Where are these videos? Link us up.

[flyinj]

Awww, if Harvey's wife didn't leave him, we would have had a better game!



Anyhow, interesting video. I would really like to know who these "fellow designers" were who told them that Deus Ex was broken.

I hope they weren't talking about a certain journalist....

[JPR]

I spent a couple of minutes poking around, and UT pulled the videos (because they didn't have waivers from the participants). The only one that appears to be left on ThePirateBay is Tim Willits. If you go searching around for Warren Spector Master Class, you might be able to find a torrent of the whole thing somewhere.

Here (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1253) is the article that RPS wrote about it, including a list of the lineup.

edit: Some (http://dl.127001.org/movies/spector/) links (http://www.ninjadodo.net/temp/spector/) including a torrent (http://www.gameupdates.org/details.php?id=2265) that might still work.

[Tim James]

Here (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/?p=1253) is the article that RPS wrote about it, including a list of the lineup.Wow, I never realized RPS was PC-only. I should read it. (Yes, I know I'm kind of slow.)

Too bad it is kind of broken on IE6 that I have at work and the text is well below the sidebar.

[TomChick]

Here's a working torrent with all 13 videos it seems (http://www.gameupdates.org/details.php?id=2265). Or maybe it's just 3GBs of 2 Girls 1 Cup repeating over and over. You never can trust the internet. But I'm downloading it now.

-Tom

EDIT: Doh, I've been made redundant by JPR!

[Pogo]

Or maybe it's just 3GBs of 2 Girls 1 Cup repeating over and over.

One can only hope.

[Roy Ziegler]

Despite it's obvious technical issues (tiny areas), I thought IW was a pretty solid game. I still play it on occasion. Deus Ex is probably one of the best first person games ever; it wasn't likely that any sequel could have lived up to that.

I agree. It's deeply flawed, but it's still fun and I play it on occasion. I'll enjoy a mediocre-to-bad Deus Ex more than most FPS games out there.

I also liked how they added more freedom regarding interacting with factions throughout the whole game, although those decisions lacked consequences most of the time. Still, it's better than the first game in that regard where you're forced into a role until the final mission.

[Royal Fool]

Thanks for the links.

[JZigish]

Thanks a lot! I'm going to turn "why DX 2 wasn't as good as DX1" into a long rambly blog post eventually.

Some of the things DX2 got slammed hardest for (short length, console-feeling interface) would be way less of a problem now, and the tech has progressed to where it needed to be for DX2. If they'd started working on that 3 years later (and had a better financial/personnel backing) it could have been as successful as BioShock, which shares a similar design in a lot of ways.

[roguefrog]

Great find.

Any game Warren Spector has a hand in is automatically a day one instant purchase. I agree with his design philosophy 100%.

[Tim James]

800K/s. A couple people must've downloaded this today.

And don't spoil any of Invisible War. I had to put it in my backlog to see for myself if the complainers were right!

[Sam Jones]

He was bang on in his criticism of moving DXIW too far into the future. One of DX's strengths was its near-future setting, incorporating all your favourite conspiracy theories blended together, like "Illuminatus!" crossed with a prime-time cop show. It was much easier for the player to identify with the world in the first game, and nearly all that was lost in Invisible War, which became way too "generic Sci-Fi", and was too short, not giving the story time to breathe and build.

I was bitterly disappointed with DXIW when it was released, as I was expecting (wanted) something as epic as DX, and it wasn't at all. I've mellowed to it now, and it's still included in my annual DX runthrough.

One thing I did take from Harvey's two part DX talk was this - the common element in all his dissatisfying game development projects is *him*. For all the opportunities he's been given, and for all the (obvious) love that Spector has for him, he's never delivered anything spectacular when the onus has been on him to do so. He's clearly clever, and knows his stuff, but he's missing something somewhere.

[Charles]

One thing I did take from Harvey's two part DX talk was this - the common element in all his dissatisfying game development projects is *him*. For all the opportunities he's been given, and for all the (obvious) love that Spector has for him, he's never delivered anything spectacular when the onus has been on him to do so. He's clearly clever, and knows his stuff, but he's missing something somewhere.

Yeah but it's also unfair to think that a single person can sink or sell a game. A game is a collaborative effort, and even if the guy in charge is god's gift to gaming, a few bad artists, a few bad programmers, or a few bad writers can completely destroy it. The Guy In Charge can't do everything, and at some point he has to trust that the people under him are doing what they are supposed to, and at a point after that, you have to ship. So making sure everything is perfect is, for most development situations, completely unrealistic.

[Cubit]

Here's a working torrent with all 13 videos it seems (http://www.gameupdates.org/details.php?id=2265). Or maybe it's just 3GBs of 2 Girls 1 Cup repeating over and over. You never can trust the internet. But I'm downloading it now.

-Tom

EDIT: Doh, I've been made redundant by JPR!

Ah, I remember that day clearly... "Hey Cory, check this out. Its called 2 Girls 1 Cup"...*shudder*

[Rob_Merritt]

Anyhow, interesting video. I would really like to know who these "fellow designers" were who told them that Deus Ex was broken.

I hope they weren't talking about a certain journalist....

I thought of Tom as well but I really doubt he would suggest making the story uninteresting as possible, have a unified ammo that makes certain weapons useless, and have many tiny room with long loading scenes.

[anaqer]

One thing I did take from Harvey's two part DX talk was this - the common element in all his dissatisfying game development projects is *him*. For all the opportunities he's been given, and for all the (obvious) love that Spector has for him, he's never delivered anything spectacular when the onus has been on him to do so. He's clearly clever, and knows his stuff, but he's missing something somewhere.
Really? I thought his input on DX (at least the part he talked about - overall 'tightening' and making NPCs more involved in the game world, etc.) helped make the game noticeably better.

[Sol Invictus]

Deus Ex was far from perfect, but I always felt that Invisible War was a pile of junk. I hated it from the moment I started playing it due to the excessive load times (on my then pretty fast computer), poor framerate despite low textures, crappy graphics (thanks to console optimizations instead of PC optimizations), excessive bloom, characters that floated on the ground and small areas.

Really though, it was those excessive load times that got to me. I could somewhat tolerate them in Thief 3 because that game was slightly more optimized, but I eventually stopped playing Thief 3 for the very same reason.

[Sam Jones]

Yeah but it's also unfair to think that a single person can sink or sell a game.

Really? I thought his input on DX (at least the part he talked about - overall 'tightening' and making NPCs more involved in the game world, etc.) helped make the game noticeably better.

Sorry, I should have clarified - games on which he was the project lead. This is certainly true of DXIW (Spector has described it as "Harvey's baby"), and I would imagine his high profile stuff since, like Blacksite.

[Alex Dolce]

I think a lot of the IW hate originated in it being "dumbed down for the Xbox" more than anything else. People don't seem to have that sort of reaction to cross-platform titles today, but it was one of the early ones and it suffered for it. PC gamers, perhaps rightfully so, didn't want to have their game modified to deal with the limitations of a console and so, right from the start, they were set to hate the game.

It was a pretty big departure from what DX was in a lot of ways, some better and some worse, but it wasn't the horrible failure that a lot of people say it was. At least, I don't think it was, but I've been known to like "crappy" games.

[Neopythia]

My first experience with the franschise was Invisible war on the xbox. I'm one of those in the minority that really liked the game. I especially liked the fact that one was never railed to a particular path once you've "allied" yourself with a faction. I've tried to play the original on Gametap, but it's just not connecting with me. I guess the cynic in me was hoping for more of the "every faction is just out to screw you" vibe I got from Invisible War.

[Linoleum]

If they had built around an Xbox native engine and architecture and ported that to the PC, it would have been a lot better technically. Shoehorning a PC engine on the Xbox was always an exercise in pain.

And then there are the poor bastards who tried to make Unreal work on the PS2. *shudder*

[Zylon]

I think a lot of the IW hate originated in it being "dumbed down for the Xbox" more than anything else.
No. If IW had been a great game, there's no reason why anybody would have cared whether it was an XBox port or not. But it wasn't, so its XBox roots were villified.

A lot of the problems were indeed the Xbox's fault (simplistic controls, oversized HUD, tiny maps), but most of them were not.

[Kyle Wilson]

If they had built around an Xbox native engine and architecture and ported that to the PC, it would have been a lot better technically. Shoehorning a PC engine on the Xbox was always an exercise in pain.

I think that a bigger problem is that they jumped on the bandwagon of the Doom 3 stencil-shadows-off-everything lighting model. Bungie tried that for Halo 2 and ended up giving it up and going with something simpler after wasting a year of development. Ion Storm didn't have the luxury of starting over. The cost of all those stencil shadows are the reason why DX:IW has spare environments and never more than a couple of characters on screen at once. And that's why the game lacks the epic feel of the first Deus Ex.

[Sam Jones]

I guess the cynic in me was hoping for more of the "every faction is just out to screw you" vibe I got from Invisible War.

That is very much the case in DX1 - everyone is out to manipulate you, even Paul to some degree - but the story burns slower and longer, and it doesn't really manifest in player options in terms of who you work for.

To be fair, the "options" in DXIW were not particularly well defined, as you can switch sides for any given mission, then back again for the next and nobody really minds.

[Jarmer]

Despite it's obvious technical issues (tiny areas), I thought IW was a pretty solid game. I still play it on occasion. Deus Ex is probably one of the best first person games ever; it wasn't likely that any sequel could have lived up to that.


That's exactly it, the expectations. Deus Ex is my number one favorite game of all time, and there was NO way any sequel could ever have surpassed it, especially when I played the first on pc, and second on xbox. The expectations and hype killed it before it was even released.

That said, I still had fun playing IW, but I consider it almost a totally different franchise than the first one.

[Zylon]

The expectations and hype killed it before it was even released.
Kind of like how the expectations and hype killed Bioshock?

The whole "it bombed because it couldn't live up to the hype" argument is as facile as it is popular. Yes, lots of hyped games bomb. Well, welcome to statistics-- MOST games bomb. There are just as many games that get hyped out the wazoo and go on to do very well... because they're good games.

So I always find statements like "it could never live up to the original", and "the hype killed it" to be the worst sort of lazy apologist thinking.

[AndrewM]

To be fair, the "options" in DXIW were not particularly well defined, as you can switch sides for any given mission, then back again for the next and nobody really minds.

Hey, if the unstoppable cyber-enhanced super ninja is willing to do anything for you, you should be grateful. Or you'll find him coming in through your ventilation system, nano-sword swinging.

[Zylon]

Hey, if the unstoppable cyber-enhanced super ninja is willing to do anything for you, you should be grateful. Or you'll find him coming in through your ventilation system, nano-sword swinging.
Now that does touch on one of the worst problems with IW (aside from the over-reliance on vents in the level design, which was apparently Eidos' fault)-- the half-baked game fiction.

All through the game, it seems like every faction in the world is tripping all over themselves to get Notorious Alex "D" on their side (and to a much lesser extent, your two classmates). This made sense back in DX when you were a two-of-a-kind multi-billion-dollar prototype. But by the time of IW, the game takes great pains to establish that you're just one in a long line of cyber-modded graduates churned out by the Tarsus academy. Yes, you're also a clone of JC Denton, but that's not even relevant until the endgame.

So the inexplicable fawning over my character and the willingness to immediately forgive any backstabbing on my part, combined with the tiny level design and the vastly simplified game mechanics, ultimately produced the impression that the entire game world existed for my benefit. There was little sense that anything was ever happening that didn't have something to do with me. Contrast this with DX, which labored to create the sense of a huge, messy, layered world that JC, even in all his special prototype awesomeness, was still just a bit player in.

[Damien Neil]

I think a lot of the IW hate originated in it being "dumbed down for the Xbox" more than anything else. People don't seem to have that sort of reaction to cross-platform titles today, but it was one of the early ones and it suffered for it. PC gamers, perhaps rightfully so, didn't want to have their game modified to deal with the limitations of a console and so, right from the start, they were set to hate the game.

One problem was that the developer used the existence of the console version as an excuse for the technical problems in the game--in particular, the tiny levels. (Meanwhile, of course, GTA was putting absolutely giant worlds onto the PS2. The problem there was never the hardware.)

Another problem was that the game really was technically terrible in ways that would have been easy to address if they'd put a minimal amount of effort into the PC version. They used the same textures for both versions, rather than having higher-resolution ones for the PC. The UI used gigantic fonts on both versions, rather than having separate UIs as Morrowind did.

The presence of the XBox version did result in an inferior PC port. The root cause was developer sloppiness, however, rather than console limitations.

[Zylon]

One problem was that the developer used the existence of the console version as an excuse for the technical problems in the game--in particular, the tiny levels.
A large part of the blame lies with the stencil shadow lighting system. It apparently did not play well with large outdoor areas.

Perhaps one of the resident devs could answer this for me-- Is it terribly difficult to set up a RAMdisk on a PC, to rapidly load assets that would normally have to be loaded from the hard drive? IW's maps were limited to the 64MB of RAM available on the XBox, but it always seemed to me that the PC version should have been capable of significant caching, what with the typical gaming PC having at least 16 times as much RAM when IW came out.

[flyinj]

A large part of the blame lies with the stencil shadow lighting system. It apparently did not play well with large outdoor areas.

Perhaps one of the resident devs could answer this for me-- Is it terribly difficult to set up a RAMdisk on a PC, to rapidly load assets that would normally have to be loaded from the hard drive? IW's maps were limited to the 64MB of RAM available on the XBox, but it always seemed to me that the PC version should have been capable of significant caching, what with the typical gaming PC having at least 16 times as much RAM when IW came out.

This is exactly what PC games do. It's a matter of filling up your available RAM with content, then streaming the rest off the drive.

The problem with consoles is twofold. First of all, you have much less RAM than a PC to play with. Secondly, once you use up that RAM, you don't have a harddrive to stream data off of... you only have the slow disc.

This is alleviated with these enormous PS3 installs, though. The Blu-Ray drive is also significantly slower than the 360 DVD drive, so even games that were programmed initially on the 360 have to sometimes rely on a hard drive install for the PS3 SKU.

Also, on the 360, because of the non-hard drive SKU 360s, no game can rely on the presence of a hard drive. A developer may copy a small amount of core data to the 360's temporary HD cache to increase performance if a drive is present, though.

Some games were allowed through MS cert that required a hard drive, and these are becoming (thankfully) more common these days.

[Zylon]

This is exactly what PC games do. It's a matter of filling up your available RAM with content, then streaming the rest off the drive.
Well obviously (and not even close to all PC games stream their content). But since IW was coded so that each level is loaded as a discrete map, it seems as if a good old-fashioned RAMdisk would have been a quick bolt-on fix to the slow and frequent map loads.

Y'know, I should try installing IW to a RAMdisk this weekend. Might make for an interesting experiment. Now I just need to find one.

[malkav11]

Kind of like how the expectations and hype killed Bioshock?

The whole "it bombed because it couldn't live up to the hype" argument is as facile as it is popular. Yes, lots of hyped games bomb. Well, welcome to statistics-- MOST games bomb. There are just as many games that get hyped out the wazoo and go on to do very well... because they're good games.

So I always find statements like "it could never live up to the original", and "the hype killed it" to be the worst sort of lazy apologist thinking.

Have you read some of the backlash on Bioshock? I mean, Bioshock is (in my opinion, obviously) a significant better game than Invisible War, but still. I think a large part of the hate for both games (more prevalent for IW) is that people came in expecting one thing and got another. Same thing goes for, say, Fable. Or, hell, Assassin's Creed.

I don't want to claim that any of these games didn't have issues (some more than others), but I think the effect of those issues was magnified by unmet expectations.