Deus Ex: Invisible War Dev Diary #4

TotalVideoGames has continued their Deus Ex: Invisible War dev diary feature for the upcoming European release of the game. In the fourth installment, Ion Storm’s Warren Spector explains the differences in designing the game for a console versus a PC. An excerpt:

We decided that some of the complexity associated with the UI in the first Deus Ex game actually didn’t contribute to our core gameplay AT ALL. And we decided to eliminate what we considered to be unnecessary UI complexity. So, I suppose you could say that we chose the path of simplifying the controls for Invisible War. But it’s critical that people understand — though the UI decisions we made clearly benefited the console version, we made no decisions that we thought would compromise our core gameplay. And we would have made the same decisions even if the game had been PC-only.

We eliminated the unnecessarily complex spatial reasoning game associated with the DX inventory screen. Did the “inventory slot” approach make the game more “cerebral” or more “PC-ish?” I don’t think so (though it certainly made the game more Diablo-like!). The whole idea behind the original DX inventory design was to force players to make decisions about what they would and would not carry. We didn’t want you to be able to carry everything. When we did the PS2 version of the game, we realized that we could force the SAME decisions simply by limiting the number of inventory slots you had. The goal was to limit the number of items carried the shape of those objects was never the big issue. The end result of this was a simpler system for players on console AND on PC that accomplished exactly the same design goal we’d set for ourselves in the original PC title. Total win.