Deus Ex Retrospective Articles and Interviews

Rock, Paper, Shotgun continues to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Ion Storm’s Deus Ex by posting a third and fourth installment to their “Deus Ex Made Me” series, as well as interviews with Tom Chick (the man who hated Deus Ex) and Emil Pagliarulo. The interview with Bethesda’s designer is probably the most interesting, so I’ll quote from that:

RPS: Thinking about it, Deus Ex was more in the Bethesda model of open spaces with people in it. The closest an actual Looking Glass game came to that was Ultima Underworld. but by definition UNDERWORLD. Shock killed all its supporting cast. Thief was intense and non-communicative. So what’s the problem in the larger scale sort of game? Why don’t we see them?

Emil Pagliarulo: A reason you haven’t seen a lot of those games recently is because there’s the big concentration on console gaming, and the boom of the console markets. well, games like that are very hard to do on the console. A game like Oblivion or Fallout 3 on the console is difficult. It’s only because we have experience in doing it that we can conceive of doing it. When you’re making a game on the PC, your Hard-drive is however many gigs. Everyone has 80Gb at least! Those aren’t luxuries you have on the console. For Oblivion, we came close to running out of space on the disc for just the audio. So when you want to have that many people to talk to, with this giant open world with all these people there are technical limitations which present themselves which other studios have tried to handle and have had problem with and for good reason, because it’s hard.

…

RPS: Looking forwards, Bioshock and Fallout 3 have shown there is an audience for this kind of game. What now?

Emil Pagliarulo: I look at other companies and what they’re doing, and how they’re trying to approach this sort of thing and how they streamline the experience companies who are good at distilling the essence of open world type games and distilling the greatness out of them. And I look at Red Dead Redemption, which is probably by far one of the best games I’ve ever played. It could quite possibly be my new favourite game of all time. And I love everything they achieved, and the fact they have been able to distil the essence of what is great in an open world game into its core elements. That’s interesting to me. It’s very much a console game. It’s easy to play. It’s easy to pick up. It’s got a great story. Great music. It’s sort of the unicorn for me.

And I look at that and I wonder how can we get our games more. well, I look at Fallout 3 and think (how could it be more accessible? How could it be maybe a little easier to play?). Because I think, it’s got a lot of old-skool PC Games soul in it, and sort of inherent in that is some inherent kludginess which I’d like to get rid of. So I’m really looking at how to make the same sort of experiences better.