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Game Developers On Game Criticism: Spector & Church
Milktoast writes "Warren Spector and Doug Church, the developers of Deus Ex and Thief hosted a session where they critiqued each other's videogames apart at the game developer's conference. You can see the coverage here."
Those games rank in my top 5 FPSes of all time not necessarily in that order. I have played Deus Ex quite a while back and i was impressed at the number of choices i had but as the article says i had three ways of dealing with a mission. The graphics werent the best i have seen and the system requirements are quite high. On the other hand the other games dont demand the computing power DeuxEx asks of you. You want to test AI? get yourself Halflife and DeusEx. You want to get scared while solving puzzles and using stealth? get yourself System Shock...RTCW well the name is enough. Thief makes me feel live out my fantasies...Im sure Sherlock Holmes would have loved it too. aTaRi2.6K
The Doug and Warren Show: Thief and Deus Ex Criticism
from the this should be on tech tv department
Posted on
Mon Apr 1st, 2002 07:24:15 AM
At the end of the last day, The Doug Church and Warren Spector show was perhaps my most anticipated session. Deus Ex and Thief are two of my favorite games, and to see their respective creators pick apart each other's game sounded like a great opportunity to learn more about their designs. It turned out to be the best session of the week.
I headed over to the auditorium to find both Doug and Warren sitting down and joking with their microphones off. When the session got started, Warren explained that the purpose of the session was to critique games without jeopardizing their professional or personal relationship. He also quipped that since the audience was all game developers, they could feel safe without a site like fatbabies.com picking it up (sorry guys.)
After they had their introductions, they both stressed how the game developer is only one part of a large and important team. At this point I started taking notes... Usually I write down what I think is important in a session - but the session was so interesting, I started taking their main points down verbatim (more or less). Since I'm not a transcriber, I apologize in advance for not getting this 100% right, but I think I nailed most of the dialogue behind their critique, and if you find their words half as interesting as I did, then I think you'll be pleased with the result.
Overview of each other's game:
Warren: Thief is a mission based, first person game with an emphasis on stealth. The players interaction is with the world. The AI is really a foil for the player, making the player feel powerful. Audio is state of the art. There's a deep fictitious setting and deeply simulated gameplay. It was a new type of game.
Doug: Deus Ex is a mission based first person action game with expansive fiction. There are a large scale of possibilities, with a lot of different contexts and roles. The game blends genre with a mix of action, RPG's and other genre's mixed in. There's a lot of choices that impact who you are and where you're going. The game goes in one direction, but you get a lot of say in how you approach the process.
Narrative and Control of the Narration: Neither game has significant control:
Doug: The narrative of thief was in the cutscenes. Deus Ex combines in into the game, but neither game has significant control, so why did you integrate it?
Warren: A lot of it was my frustration with Thief. I produced it for years and it (the narrative) was so minimal, that I got frustrated with it. Thief was constraining in gameplay. What we wanted to do was bring together a variety of things. We wanted to bring out some action, some stealth and role-play. Inventory management, object manipulation, and conversations. We wanted to include conventional role play conversation into Deus Ex.
Doug: But the player can't impact the narrative..
Warren: The conversations talk to you about the world, and that propels you through the narrative.
Warren Fights Back:
Warren: Why can't I fight my way through a Thief mission?
Doug: Well you can... but you'd be playing your own game.
Doug- The game isn't about defeating the AI, they're foils like you said... not the enemy. The AI could defeat you if we wanted it to. "I think I hear something
Doug: Thief is a game about territory. In each game the player and the AI have their safe zones, but to get to the player's goal they need to adjust that territory by changing the environment.
Warren: How is standing and waiting fun?
Doug: Make the player about to do something. Those moments are loosing someone and waiting for the AI to calm down, or waiting to bonk someone on the head when they turn around. We have to provoke those feelings in the player to make the game fun.
Is there really player choice in Deus Ex?:
Warren: Almost everyone on the Deus Ex team argues that player control is much more powerful, but here's the secret, much of that choice was fake. We did some simulation, much more than a lot of games, but much of the gameplay, much of what people thought was the depth of the solution was hardcoded like Ultima... Some of the most memorable parts were the most scripted. look at mission 6, Hong Kong. On the PS2 version we were 5 months late just because we tinkered with it and broke that fragile mission. Preplanning everything makes things fragile and takes too much time. Mission 6 felt much more like a traditional game mission.
Back to Thief:
Warren: Is there a difficulty curve in Thief? How is it implemented, and how did you test it?
Doug: There is a difficulty curve. The environments get more difficult. For example, the drunk guards at mission one are easy vs. the alert guards at the end. In Deus Ex you (the player) get more powerful, but in Thief, we decided not to do that. We wanted the environment and the player to be the two factors. To balance the game we just tested it a lot.
Warren: Deus Ex is a different game - we forced them to play through the game in radical ways to test it. One tester never drew a weapon and could beat the game. We had other testers run through it never increasing their skill level or not using augmentations. It may not be as much fun, but they can do it.
Doug: Someone played through Thief in 42 minutes. It shows you how skill can be an impact. Let the player play their own game with their own "scores" and you will end up with a new game.
Give me Direction!
Warren: Why in Thief am I given so little information about the mission and what I'm getting into?
Doug: We did it deliberately, not that it wasn't discussed endlessly. There was lots of team chaos and discussion. We wanted Thief to be a game that forces the user to dynamically react to what occurs. We didn't want a lot of planning, we wanted it to be played on the fly. Give the player enough information for an initial plan of attack.
Warren: (shakes his head) I want more direction on how big the mission is. You never know how close you are to your goals or some general difficulty information.
Warren: The other thing is that I'd be less upset if you'd replenished my inventory. It's so inconsistently replenished that I don't know if this is a time to use my fire arrows.
Doug: But that's not strategy... the player shouldn't know.
Warren: I just want informed choices..
Doug: We didn't want our players to hoard inventory... we wanted them to run out and use them. In games like first person shooters, inventory and powerups are very short term (like quake). That's true of most games of that style. You don't get a large stream of powerups and the play is determined by skill. This isn't final fantasy with 3000 healing potions.
Warren: (emphatically) But I have no way of knowing that the barracks is full of guards!
Doug: SCOUT THE BARRACKS!
Doug gets the final blow
Doug: Thief has a strong focus, with approachability and clarity. What do you lose by not having that focus?
Warren: Part of the Deus Ex game is that it gives players a large number of ways to approach it. Clearly the game is important, but we wanted to appeal to fans of sneakers, RPG's, and FPS. I was so nervous when we signed off on the game, because I had no idea how it would be received. What if people compared it to the best of each genre? What if they said you couldn't sneak as well as Thief? Our success was that people were excited about choosing how they played.
Doug: Attempts to do things out of Thief's focus results in failure. You can't change the narrative because we wanted that focus.
They wrapped up by reiterating that game development was a team effort. They are just the most visible of the team, but that doesn't make the team less valuable. They also expressed their hope that other game developers could have the same type of dialogue about similar games like Halo and Half Life. Personally I think this is a great idea.. I think we could all learn something about game criticism by hearing the developers deconstruct each other's games.
What people fail to recognize are all of the people who read the articles without reading the posts. Back from the open chat that
Deus Ex 2 and Thief 3 are both due to come out just before Christmas this year.
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