Deus Ex: On Design Philosophies and How The Market Has Changed

Once upon a time, long, long ago (yes, ten years is really such a long time anymore), there was a sudden boom in the video game economic model. It almost literally exploded, and people games were spreading like wildfire. It was an amazing time, and probably had a lot to do with the economic boom in the late '90's. Game companies were cropping up all over the place, and things were good.

Sure, you still had a lot of shit games. Daikatana, may you rest forever in eternal agony. There were also a lot of games that really stood out on their own, and re-envisioned what games could be. Myst, Fallout, Starcraft, to name a few. I would place other lesser-known games too such as Descent, and the spinoff series from the same team called Descent: Freespace (which later came known simply as Freespace - one of *the* best space combat sims ever, go look it up if you don't believe me). There were other games too - Homeworld, Baldur's Gate, the list goes on and on.

Some were critically-acclaimed hits. Others went softly into the night, only to be rediscovered a generation later as the gaming industry started shifting gears. One of those titles, however, was Deus Ex.

Few games offered what Deus Ex did. Even by today's standards, it's pretty amazing. Deus Ex was really an open world game which had as many solutions as you had ideas for getting around. Ion Storm really threw away the idea of having a single linear path to a goal. This was a game whose entire design philosophy was based upon the simple statement "This is where you are, that is your goal, and these are the things that are between you and it. Figure it out." It's a design philosophy I have always utterly adored, because it really speaks to the heart of what a game should be. It's not a matter of needing to have a certain item to perform a task, or needing to do X, Y, and Z in order to move forward. You could kill enemies, or you could stun them. Or you could bypass them entirely and just focus on your goal. Metal Gear Solid was pretty well acclaimed for this, but Deus Ex... that was just something else entirely. These were not closed-in environments - some goals had you crossing entire city districts, with all manner of obstacles and other things to find along the way. This was a game that really put you into an environment - these were not rooms simply for the sake of being rooms, these were rooms that had a very distinct purpose to them.

There was no wrong way to play the game. Morality played only a small part in it - money was necessary to survive - would you do everything in your power to conserve what resources you have, or do you abuse your power and hack every ATM you come across, stealing everyone's money? When you were in a town environment, you were in a *town*. If you failed an attempt to hack something, alarms would go off, and the police would come running. If you tried to just shoot someone in broad daylight, hell would break loose and the authorities would be on their way.

This was a game that really hammered into you that there were consequences to your actions. The fact that it had a pretty solid story and multiple endings really helped to seal the deal. The gameplay was great, and the graphics were passable for its time. This was a game that had a lot of substance to it.

Flashforward to now. Deus Ex: Human Revolution has hit the shelves, and by this time many people have completed the game (myself included among them). The game is truly designed like its predecessor, and while it did fall flat in many respects, overall the heart and soul of the game remained intact.

I can hold this game up to any other that hits the market, and you can see how very different the design philosophy is in them. Most other games are designed with a very linear approach: go to point A, perform task E, so that you can go to point B to complete objective F. In most FPS games, the goal is "Get from this hallway to the end of the next hallway, and shoot everything in your path." Crysis 2 did a pretty good job attempting to tackle this, but still fell flat in that as open as things seemed, there wasn't a lot of actual area to explore. Crysis 1 was great because you had an open-world island, and you could bypass entire villages if you wanted to in order to get to your goal.

Why do we use such flat design philosophies in our games? Because a lot of it deals with graphics and story costing so much more now. Final Fantasy XIII is an amazing example of game design failure. Don't get me wrong, it's a great experience for the most part. But as a game, it fails horribly. XIII fails because there is a distinct lack of actual gameplay taking place, and it doesn't feel like an RPG should. RPGs in particular are about exploration and adventure - but XIII is pretty much one long, endless corridor, with the occasional branching path that goes absolutely nowhere. The entire game is one long, drawn out tutorial until you get right up to the very final chapter - which it is kind enough to inform you that hey, this is the end of the game, better go back and see if there's anything else you want to do before you complete this, and also by the way, if you're looking to max out your bestiary better fight everything in this dungeon because after you beat the game they'll all be gone.

I don't play a game because I want to be coddled all the way through. I play a game because I want to play a freaking game. I want to challenge myself sometimes, and if challenging yourself isn't for everyone, I'm cool with that. But don't force me to be coddled the entire way.

That's the other reason that Deus Ex: Human Revolution is so refreshing right now. Because you *can* choose to do things the easy way. Or you can choose to do them the hard way, and try to play the game the way it's supposed to be played - with stealth and careful tactical choices. Yahtzee put it best in that the original let you simply bypass entire boss fights if you didn't want to do them - why can't more games let you do this?

Because some games are too full of themselves, and they've spent far too much money on the 'story' to let it be changed in any way, shape, or form.

Maybe this is one reason I love Star Ocean 2 so much. There's so much to do... two ways to play through the game, and how characters turn out at the end can vary drastically depending on who you picked up in the game, and who likes whom the most. The core of the story itself doesn't really change... but how things play out, that can change, all depending on the choices that you make.

I'd think this was an important thing developers would be taking notes on. But then again, I also like to think that people care enough to want to improve their methods, and that they want to do what is the right thing to do, as opposed to the easy thing. Or the same thing.

There's a game coming out relatively soon, and one of the main villains asks, "Did I ever tell you about the definition of insanity? It's doing the same fucking thing, over and over again, expecting the result to change. That is the definition of insanity."

Somehow, I think this is possibly a jab at the industry itself, and I sure hope that it's listening.