Deus Ex 3 Announced

Gamasutra has the news that Eidos is already hard at work on a Deus Ex 3 . The company announced this project along with a brand-new studio in Montreal, which will be developing the title. "According to [General Manager Stéphane D'Astous], Eidos Montreal currently has two groups -- a Q&A group that is responsible for testing all of the developer's games from anywhere in the world, and an in-house development team that D'Astous says has just passed proof of concept for Deus Ex 3. 'This game was very highly rated at its release in 2000, and we have this great huge mandate to do the third one, and everybody is very excited,' added D'Astous"

Comments

I think I speak for everyone ...

[k_187]

When I say "please don't suck, for heaven's sake, please don't suck."

Re:I think I speak for everyone ...

[Elemenope]

I guess I was one of the lucky ones who had no problems running DX:IW smoothly. (Vampire Bloodlines, OTOH, can suck my...). I loved the original DX with a passion, as one of the few games that broke through the glass ceiling into art from mere entertainment. I liked the sequel very much (from the looks of the comments around I'd say I was one of the few), and while it wasn't quite art the way the first was, it had its own charms, and FWIW in my opinion it did not sacrifice the philosophical and environmental richness of the first, but merely extended it in a direction most people didn't care for.

The "Pequod's/Queequeg's" mini-story was fantastic, and previewed the main plot twist without being clumsy.

Re:I think I speak for everyone ...

[CronoCloud]

On a PC you have at least 104 keys, at least 2 buttons and a pointer.

I have 12 buttons (4 face buttons, 4 shoulder buttons, select and start and L3/R3) and 2 analog sticks. Surely with properly designed UI, that should be enough. Just because one has 104 keys, doesn't mean that a game should use them all, that's just bad UI design. I remember the old days when games couldn't assume one had a joystick and defaulted to keyboard control. Keyboard control...for action games. It didn't work then, it doesn't work now. Sure, if you're playing a turn based game like Nethack using the whole keyboard works, but why have UI more complex than it needs to be, when it comes to UI, simpler is better. Which makes more sense, having ";" as reload or clicking down the left analog stick for L3. Holding Ctrl + W for move slowly forward and Shift +W for running or actually having analog movement. Having functions that are rarely used assigned to keys, or putting those functions in a menu that one accesses with a menu button and joypad/stick.

Notice how I haven't said anything about mice, I like mice, I own the SNES mouse, PSone mouse and I hook up a USB mouse to the PS2. I like having mouse support as appropriate in games where it fits. It's the keyboard as a game controller (especially in action games) I dislike.

In addition console demographics are inherantly less sophisticated than PC demographics. A console player puts disk in, plays. A PC player checks requirements, updates drivers, patches, installs and/or creates modifications and/or maps, and in general is willing to spend FAR more intellectual effort on a game than a console player.

Intellectual effort spent getting the game to actually work is not the same asl intellectual effort on playing the game. Wouldn't you rather spend more time actually playing games, and less time downloading patches, updating drivers and whatnot? You and I both know that there are console games every bit as cerebral as the most supposedly cerebral PC games. Now you might have had a point back in the 80's when there was a higher proportion of graybeard table top gamer/wargamer/ flight sim grognards among PC gamers, playing the latest from Jim Dunnigan, SSI, and whatnot. But these days when the most popular PC game genre is FPS, I don't think there's much difference in "intellect". Really, is there that much of a difference between a Halo obsessed fanboy and a PC FPS fanboy?

It'll suck as bad, or worse, then then 2nd did...

[Zenin]

I remember reading all the articles and developer interviews as the 2nd game was being designed and built. What was clearly apparent more then anything else was how completely blind they were to what made the first game such a huge hit. They gave themselves credit for a long list of aspects of the first game that barely had anything to do with its success and completely ignored everything that made the game great. The file result was no surprise to anyone that read those interviews and dev blogs.

And then...in the aftermath of the sequel...their interviews again showed they had no idea why their game was a complete and total flop.

They'll screw it up; There's really no chance in hell of them not completely screwing the pooch again. They haven't a clue what they did right or what they did wrong. Go replay the first game; It was great, it's still great, but it was a fluke. The industry isn't setup to create great games like that anymore.

It's All in the Design.

[Plekto]

The two biggest problems with Deus Ex 2 were the levels and the perspective.

- The levels were cramped and very much like Doom 3. You didn't get the feeling that you got in the original, where long-range sniping and so on was possible as well as being way out of the hearing range of others. The original also had a lot of locations, almost reminiscent of Hitman. Multiple ways to get places and do things(and screw up as well), and a dead-simple interface.

We would rather figure out our levels and make things happen and have a lot less DOOM push the button, go through the twisty maze. Otherwise, I might as well play MYST. Pretty pictures... find the button in the room...

- The perspective in the second game as a disaster. It made everything look oddly semi-first person, but not really. So distance and movement was just off. A good example is to compare it to the original Halo. If you get this wrong, you end up with something that feels like you're playing in a PS 1 game instead of a simulation.

- #3 (there are way more than two things wrong with the second game)- The graphics in the original were fantastic. They had a simplicity and a lot less eye-candy, but game designers need to understand that raytracing and applying visual effects to everything just doesn't cure poor design. A good example of this is to compare Halflife 2 to FEAR. HL2 has a look and feel that is crisp and clean and low on silly blooming and effects, and FEAR is a CPU destroyer despite having tiny levels - because they put four tons of eye-candy in it. A good example of this is a game like Gran Turismo. Our eyes don't change how they operate short of silly speeds and acceleration, yet if you compare this to Need for Speed, where they artificially introduce motion blur...

Well, you see my point.

#4 - make it for PC only and THEN port it. Console games that end up on PC are essentially crippled right from the start.

We still have the HDTP...

[andrewd18]

Well, even if DX 3 is a massive failure, we'll still have the High Definition Texture Pack to keep us going.

http://offtopicproductions.com/hdtp/about.php

Re:I'm surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh c'mon, Thief 3 wasn't THAT bad. You just had to spend an hour or two de-consolizing the UI before you could play it. Afterwards it was actually kind of fun. And lets not forget that Thief 3 is home to one of the best horror levels to ever grace a FPS (The Cradle).

Unfortunatly, Deus Ex 2 was beyond redemption.

Re:It'll suck as bad, or worse, then then 2nd did.

[Plekto]

Probably so. The levels in the original are not merely large. They are a "You are here... what you going to do next, punk?".

Hong Kong in the original was excellent. You had an entire section of the city to explore and when you got there, you had no real idea where to go. "find person X" as opposed to "here's a glowing dot on the GPS". Hitman does this well, especially in the later levels. Your target is in this hotel or other large structure. Find him, get out undetected. That's ALL you know the first time playing.

And the skills were trainable. It had RPG elements and paths and options that forced you to not change. It was common to hold onto an upgrade or even half a dozen of them in order to modify and use that new weapon you knew was coming (Sniper Rifle usually). And if you wanted to say, jump a mile high and do levels easier and in unique ways, well, stealth was forever not an option.

But this is lost in designers from what I can tell. Looks great and less filling? We can't survive on light beer forever. We also need some real thinking games in our diet.

The Missing Moment

[jacobw]

For me, everything that was so impressive about the original DX can be summed up in one moment of the game. (SPOILER coming for the original Deus Ex--although if you're reading this thread, I'm sure you've played it through.)

For the first part of the game, you spend a fair amount of time killing bad guys. Or, at least, you have the option of killing them; you also have the option of knocking them out. And, indeed, the NPC character of your brother urges you to take this non-lethal option. But if you're like me, you took the easy way out, and killed most of the bad guys.

Then comes a scene in a warehouse. As you enter, you banter with various friendly NPCs. And inside the warehouse, you discover that the folks you thought were the bad guys are actually the good guys. And those friendly NPCS you chatted with on the way in--they are now your enemies, and you are probably going to have to kill a bunch of them to escape.

Suddenly--for the first time ever in a videogame--I actually thought about all the people I was killing. In fact, I actually felt guilty about killing all those (entirely imaginary) people! Deus Ex had managed to make me question one of the fundamental tenets of videogaming--that it's OK to kill bad guys. And from that moment on, I found myself wrestling with the ethics of every choice I made in the game.

DX2 never managed to achieve that level of moral ambiguity. It never even came close. Sometimes it would make me ask, "Should I do the wrong thing?" But it never made me ask, "What is the right thing to do here?"

Re:The Missing Moment

[lazyl]

I agree. But as well as that, for me, this was the only game where there were moments when I felt I was really, truly, role-playing - pen & paper style.

-spoilers here-

My favorite example was the scene where you're in your brother's apartment and the bad guys are on the way. You brother tells you jump out the bathroom window and get away. He can't follow for some reason I don't remember (he was wounded maybe). He tells you repeatedly to get out. The first time I played it I felt compelled to obey based on my experience with purely linear games. So I jump out, run away, and the scene ends. I immediately regretted it and reloaded. I decided to RP the scene and see what happens (despite the voice in my head saying that never works). All the furniture in the game is movable so I pushed the couch over in front of the door to block it a bit. Then I pushed the two chairs over by the wall opposite the door to provide cover. Then I crouched behind one of the chairs and waited for a while. I actually had to wait longer than I expected with my brother repeatedly telling me to leave. Eventually though the bad guys busted in and the fire fight started. It was sweet. They were blocked in behind the couch as I intended and I had great cover behind the chairs. Eventually, after you kill enough of them, your brother says something like "Ok, I can handle it from here, you get going".

Along with a good story, that's the sort of thing that makes a great RPG in my mind - it's not about the number of choices, it's about having a situation that forces you to actually role play in order to even *identify* the choices.