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Warren Spector Starts His Own Shop
Gamespot has the word that designer Warrren Spector has gone ahead and formed his own development shop. The company, Junction Point, is titled after a MMOG that Warren designed but never got off the ground. From the article: "The company has started preliminary development on a "fantasy" title created by Spector, who worked at Dungeons and Dragons creator TSR in the 1980s. Although Spector said the title was rapidly evolving, he did not give any indication about what specific subgenre the game would fall under or what platforms it would be released for."
"Daikatana 2: Electric Boogaloo"
System Shock, the 1994 classic in which he was involved, affected me so much I wrote an entire novel based on the game.
Amazing guy.
--This sig is in beta. Please let us know abut any errors you find.
You can look up Warren on the IMDB.
I guess it was about two years ago when IMDB started listing video games.
Now I've seen Everything
It startled me to see a Gamespot story linking to my own bibliography. This was part of the reporter's detective work in trying to deduce the nature of Warren's current project. I worked for Warren at the Austin, TX office of Looking Glass Studios (then Looking Glass Technologies) in the mid-'90s on a game with the working title "Junction Point." I don't know what Warren's current plans are, but I'm willing to bet he isn't trying to resurrect that game. I expect he chose the name purely for sentimental reasons.
By the way, in case anyone cares, the Gamespot story gets one detail wrong: I didn't work with Warren at TSR. Rather, we worked together at Steve Jackson Games in the mid-'80s, where he was Editor-in-Chief and I was the lowly assistant editor. Warren worked for TSR after leaving SJG, and was involved in AD&D 2nd edition there. I never worked at TSR myself, though I did a lot of freelance work for them.
That's ok. That's what the millions of uninformed "experts" spouting vague conjecture on internet forums are for.
I personally know for a fact* that the new game will "employ massive scalability, breathtaking 3D environments taking place in a rich story-based realm, immersive best-of-breed interactive e-benchmarks, and breasts."
Why yes, I did just concieve that using eBizWeb's Game Press Release Maker Gold v1.5! Why do you ask?
* fact n. Reasoning based on inconclusive evidence; speculation or supposition
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
Sorry guys, but after the heartbreaks that were DX:IW and T:DS, I simply can't jump back on the bandwagon so easily.
I *really* need to see some proof that the man hasn't lost his touch before coming back to the Chapel of Spector. Proof as in a playable demo to something truly innovative, and doesn't show any compromises in either Art Design or Play Dynamics.
Show me what you promised the world when you made the greatest games on the crappiest hardware, and I'll be there along with the rest of those who still think LGS are the holiest letters in the alphabet.
Show me you're not washed up, as your latest work seems to indicate. I've been fooled twice in a row. Only Peter Molyneux has gotten me worse. And that won't happen again, ever.
I still don't get why everyone acts like Invisible War ran over their dog
It wasn't a horrible game, and was certainly worth playing. But it certainly wasn't the great game everyone was expecting. My laundry list of problems with Deus Ex: Invisible War:
1) The shadows were a gimmick: Dynamic shadows had massive potential for inventiveness in stealth gameplay (shooting out the lights a-la Riddick for example), and they were squandered. Essentially they hugely raised the system requirements for nothing except a bit of eye candy.
2) The textures: You could tell that DX:IW was a console port by the textures. No matter what resolution you ran at, they just looked awful on a PC. This was fixed by a group of fans who made their own (excellent) high-res texture pack, but it shouldn't have been an issue in the first place. The later European and DVD versions of the game came with official high-res textures, but they didn't offer them to anyone who had previously bought the game.
3) The great ballooning UI monster: Without tweaking, the game's HUDs and menus were huge and clunky. This is obviously yet another concession to the Xbox port, as a nice compact HUD would've been hard to read on a TV. Once again fixable on the user's side, but not something you should have to deal with.
4) Chairs on Ice!: The physics of the game were sorta entertaining, but way unrealistic. It really breaks the immersion of the game when you bump into a chair and it slides like it's on greased ice.
5) No more skill points: Half of the joy of the original was gaining skill points, and using them to tailor your character to your approach to the game. It just added an extra element of freedom that was missing from the sequel.
6) No exploration bonuses: This goes along with the previous complaint, but I thought it deserved its own heading. The original game provided a real incentive for you to poke around every nook and cranny of the level if possible. In the sequel you can still explore as thoroughly as you like, but you're not gonna get much for it except maybe some ammo or money.
7) Stupid AI tricks: Let's face it, the AI in DX:IW is dumb as paint. And while I admit that the original AI that was just as stupid, wasn't that one of the things they promised to fix in the sequel?
8) Choices? We don't need no steenking choices!: Despite the promise of a branching storyline and tough choices to make, DX:IW does not give you much of anything in the way of choice. Yeah you can choose to do or not do a mission, but that doesn't really matter. I was able to complete every single mission thrown my way with no consequences whatsoever to the plot. In fact, no matter what path you take, it's still possible to get all of the possible endings when you reach the last level.
9) Universal ammo: The one that pissed people off the most. Not only does it make no sense (carbon doesnn't make particularly good projectiles, it's too brittle), but it rips tons of strategy from the game, and has other obnoxious gameplay repurcussions (see #10 for what I mean). Ammo management was one of the most important parts of the first game. If you ran around sniping everyone with the rifle, you were going to run out. So you needed to pick and choose when to use what. It also allowed for cool stuff like multiple ammo types for the same weapon (mmmm... white phospherous rockets...). This was sorely missed in IW.
10) Retarded damage modeling: Walk up to a guy point blank, place a pistol straight to his head, and fire. Is he dead? Nope, he's running around barking the in-game equivalent to "Ow! Quit it!" To balance out the universal ammo, the developers made different weapons cost more based on their power (which, once again, doesn't make much sense - does a pistol round take all that much more to make than a sniper round?). Unfortunately, there's a wrench thrown in this when people keep picking enemies off with cheap pistol ammo. The solution? Make the pistol weaker than a Darringer. This means you can say goodbye to the efficient stealt
I'm more in a "24" type of mood these days than I was 5 years ago.
... I patiently await my first ever troll mod points, even though you know it's true)
I'm assuming "24" refers to the current length of your attention span, in minutes, hence your lack of experience with one of the best games of all time. It's a common theme nowadays, just check out any PC game translated to console.
(Now for the irony, the ps2 version of Deus Ex 1 is one of the few pc->console game conversions that hasn't ripped out the guts of the game and turned it into something completely different. But then, that was before they realised that the people that like deep games like that will play them on a PC instead
OK, you win.
Despite how much I enjoyed the game, all of those things did piss me off (particularly the damage modeling and how fast the sniper rifle burns through ammo).
In terms of choices, though, I did feel like it was a nice, streamlined, lighweight version of the first one. I think it offered a nice middle ground between DX and Snowblind (which I haven't actually played yet, but it looks like just another FPS with just a few DX touches). I liked that it had the side missions that you didn't have to do, but were fun (such as fixing the Greasel fights). I always loved setting a turret to attack the bad guys and then having them chase me into the trap. And as far as the physics are concerned, I liked that you could just walk through a room and you'd have made it look like a warzone with all of the tables and chairs and stuff kicked over. Unrealistic, but fun.
I agree.
I've played all three games. While I understand some grumblings (loading times, smaller town) about the 3rd Thief game, it was pretty faithful to the first two.
The most nerve-shattering level is the infamous Shalebridge Cradle area. Try playing level alone at night in your house with the lights off and the volume turned up abit. You can read how people felt when they played this level. Very immersive and well done.
Just reduce all of that to one overarching problem:
The game was too compressed and felt trivial, from the scripting all the way down to the engine. It was still a good game but all these "little" things screwed with the fantastic atmosphere of the original.
For example, the first game had BIG, magnificent, significant places to explore. But when you finally reach Liberty Island in the second game, it's split into two pieces, shrunk down to mini-size, and you stay at ground level the whole time. It wasn't THAT bad, but there is an anti-climax in having to acknowledge that they sacrificed something key to the original's feel.
Similar with the interface and character streamlining - I liked the choices of mods and weapon upgrades that were there, but there should have been more of them because by the end I had already tinkered and tweaked enough to be satisfied. The first game was overly stingy about giving you stuff, and that made it a bit too hard but when all was said and done it was satisfying; the second game, OTOH, hands out multitools and canisters and ammo in every single nook and cranny. I only ever ran into an area where I died over and over during the final parts of the game when the rocket soldiers became common, which was more a mod-choice issue than a real challenge.
I'm covering the same ground as you now so I'll leave it at that; the micro-size of IW is what really hurts it. You don't even get areas in the game where you can just navigate silently past random challenges - it's all plot and subplot in every single room.