Deus Ex: Invisible War Dev Diary #3

TotalVideoGames continues their Deus Ex: Invisible War dev diary feature for the upcoming European release of the game. In the third installment, project director Harvey Smith and designer Kent Hudson explain the concepts of open-ended game design. An excerpt:

Deus Ex: Invisible War is a game that wraps itself around your playstyle. If you go into an area blasting, it attracts a lot of attention and the fight gets tougher. If you sneak in, you trigger overheard conversations between guards that provide useful information. If you hack
into the computer system, you can do all sorts of cool computer-hacker type activities. We want you to play the game as you see fit. On the subject of emergence, our game objects and characters behave according to consistent, global rules. This allows for numerous emergent (yet meaningful, not just chaotic) interactions. Here are a bunch of ‘game mechanics’ for the following example: Spiderbombs are grenades that launch small allied (ro)bots called spiderbots. The bot domination biomod allows the player to possess bots (but after the player ejects from the bot, it is disabled). Damaging a disabled bot causes it to explode. Doors can be opened with keys or lockpicks, or they can be knocked down with demolitions/explosions. So we found that playtesters were tossing down a spiderbomb, then possessing their own spiderbot, running it up to a locked door and ejecting. Then, when the player needed to get through the locked door, he’d back up and shoot the bot, blowing it up. The explosion would ‘open’ the door. And this sort of thing happens *constantly* when creative players are running through the game.