5 ms·

Annotated version of an original Deus Ex design doc surfaces

108 points by Impossible 10y ago

harlanlewis 10y ago
This is cool to see. I even more enjoyed the oral history of Deus Ex development that it links to from the intro. A really fun, nostalgic, and pretty relateable read. And somewhat in contradiction to this post, has the quote: > From what I can recall, there was no continuously updated design doc for Deus Ex. If there was, I never saw it and I didn't get access to it. Another cool excerpt: > Basic sounds in speech, like "ah" or "ooh" or whatever, they all have frequency fingerprints, basically. Even with the low CPU power at our disposal, I could do a really low-resolution fast Fourier transform to analyze the speech as it was being output to the sound card, chop it up and try to match it with phonemes. Then I could use that to send hints to the animation system to move the lips. > So I had the artists animate the face bones, of which we only had like two, I think -- it was super low-poly -- and I had 'em go with eight phonemes to animate face poses for. Except, they'd do it on the base pose and I'd blend in the animations on the face in real time based on what the audio does. … for a game that came out in 2000! Pretty cool. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex_An_oral_history.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex...
pluma 10y ago
Fascinating how the design doc simultaneously seems to describe an entirely different game yet already shares so many similarities with what would finally become Deus Ex. EDIT: The postmortem linked at the end of the post also includes an even older pitch for the game from 1994 which has even less in common with the final release. It's amazing how the game mutated from "rugged ex-cop action movie shooter" to "cyberpunk conspiracy drama" where it's actually possible to beat the game without killing anyone.
- Narishma 10y ago
  > where it's actually possible to beat the game without killing anyone. It's been a long time since I last played the game but I don't believe that's true without cheating.
  - skoczymroczny 10y ago
    without any bug exploiting, you can use killphrases on anne and run away from gunther (or use killphrase too). I think Howard Strong is the only guy you have to actually kill.
    - Paul_S 10y ago
      Technically you also kill (indirectly) the crew of the ship you scuttle, Maggie, the Area 51 staff who are outside when you diverted the missile etc.
  - pluma 10y ago
    http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19502/is-it-really-possible-to-finish-deus-ex-without-actively-killing-a-single-enemy http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19502/is-it-really... There's only one situation that requires tricking the AI to open a door for you (what some might legitimately consider an exploit). Other than that (which I consider a design flaw) it's entirely possible to get by without killing anyone (though using non-lethal weapons to render people unconscious is of course still necessary at various times).
arcanus 10y ago
One famous piece of trivia about Deus Ex is that, if you look at the city skyline during the missions set in New York City, the Twin Towers are conspicuously absent. The real reason for their exclusion isn’t very interesting: something to do with memory constraints. So in the game’s fiction, the Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Deus Ex was released in 2000, a year before 9/11. ---- 'How deus ex predicted the future' https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex-predicted-the-future-1616252703/amp?client=ms-android-att-us https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex-predicted-...
- fenomas 10y ago
  The specifics here are that the New York skyline was originally two big textures covering two faces of the skybox. Late in production, to save video memory they cut one texture and replaced it with a mirror of the other one, of course cutting the side with the towers so that they wouldn't show up twice. (Source is an old IGN interview that I hunted down ages ago, because every time this trivia shows up somewhere there tends to be a comment war about how removing a building from a skyline couldn't possibly save memory, blather blather.)
- rangibaby 10y ago
  The pilot episode of "The Lone Gunmen" aired in March 2001, and details a conspiracy by the US government to remote control an airliner and crash it into the WTC to furnish arms sales: "The Cold War's over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market's flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you'll find a dozen tinpot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility, and begging to be smart-bombed." https://youtu.be/EjbQ-BDh4PU https://youtu.be/EjbQ-BDh4PU
- eswat 10y ago
  Although less conspicuous, there’s a similar story with Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2’s box art depicting a NYC skyline being bombarded (also released in 2000).
biot 10y ago
Is the actual PDF available somewhere instead of having to jump through Scribd hoops?
- pmh 10y ago
  It's shared via Google Drive from the reddit post[0] linked in the OP: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs... [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5crvld/full_dx1_design_doc_with_annotations_by_warren/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5crvld/full_dx1_desi...
ehnto 10y ago
I am currently playing Mankind Divided and have been reading into the art direction from interviews with the art director. I just love the world they have created and the way they utilize it to tell the story. One of their ethos is "show don't tell" and you can see they have really taken it to heart. The locations tell the story just as well as the dialog does.
- frik 10y ago
  You simple cannot compare Deus Ex 3 and 4 with Deus Ex 1. Deus Ex 1 is a much different and better game, a lot of thought went into it, the player can do so much more it's not even funny. No other game with Deus Ex in the name comes even close. Play Deus Ex 1 first and come back later, though some may never get into DX1 because the graphics hasn't aged that well.
  - papaf 10y ago
    We used to play Deus Ex 1 in a pair. The game was so different for each player and their playing style that it never got boring. We completed the whole game in this way. One highlight that I remember was the explanation of mass surveillance being a replacement for less religion in a society. In the past people censored themselves because God was always watching. It was hoped that people would continue to censor themselves because Echelon was always recording and datamining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw This was an optional cut scene and not part of the main story -- my friend found this, I never got this cut scene when I played. I agree that Deus Ex 1 is so special that anything after does not compare. This does not belittle the sequels, its just that the original was so good.
    - int_19h 10y ago
      "God was a dream of good government" is a very interesting idea to ponder.
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
justanton 10y ago
Reinstalling.
- Paul_S 10y ago
  The installation along with mods is less than a GB so I optimised by not uninstalling it in the first place.
ivank 10y ago
https://nuwen.net/dx.html https://nuwen.net/dx.html also has a ton of information about the game
popeshoe 10y ago
Deus Ex got me at the perfect time in my life (15 y/o pseudo-intellectual nerd) so I really loved the game, so reading this was great. Such was my nerd infatuation with this game, that as I was reading about the various locations, the corresponding music would pop into my brain almost immediately, a testament to the great soundtrack (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI ) Especially interesting is seeing how the times and what we expect from videogames have changed, on page 23 there's a dejected nod to people expecting a 90s first person game to have multiplayer, even though it's primarily a single player RPG, but they'll do it as a bullet point to go on the back of the box.
- jscheel 10y ago
  Definitely agree about the soundtrack. I find myself listening to it while working quite a bit.
SticksAndBreaks 10y ago
Ah, the good old times, when the cost of creativity wasnt so astronomically high. If you wanted to risk something, you would just take some time of the working-charts and do it, letting the team then vote on results. No- push your idea in front of the high council, no guiding whats left of it along the pipeline, you just wrote the dialogue, scripted the mission, reused some existing assets, and polished it till it was accepted. Those where the days.

108 points by Impossible 10y ago

This is cool to see. I even more enjoyed the oral history of Deus Ex development that it links to from the intro. A really fun, nostalgic, and pretty relateable read. And somewhat in contradiction to this post, has the quote: > From what I can recall, there was no continuously updated design doc for Deus Ex. If there was, I never saw it and I didn't get access to it. Another cool excerpt: > Basic sounds in speech, like "ah" or "ooh" or whatever, they all have frequency fingerprints, basically. Even with the low CPU power at our disposal, I could do a really low-resolution fast Fourier transform to analyze the speech as it was being output to the sound card, chop it up and try to match it with phonemes. Then I could use that to send hints to the animation system to move the lips. > So I had the artists animate the face bones, of which we only had like two, I think -- it was super low-poly -- and I had 'em go with eight phonemes to animate face poses for. Except, they'd do it on the base pose and I'd blend in the animations on the face in real time based on what the audio does. … for a game that came out in 2000! Pretty cool. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex_An_oral_history.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex...

pluma 10y ago

Fascinating how the design doc simultaneously seems to describe an entirely different game yet already shares so many similarities with what would finally become Deus Ex. EDIT: The postmortem linked at the end of the post also includes an even older pitch for the game from 1994 which has even less in common with the final release. It's amazing how the game mutated from "rugged ex-cop action movie shooter" to "cyberpunk conspiracy drama" where it's actually possible to beat the game without killing anyone.

Narishma 10y ago
> where it's actually possible to beat the game without killing anyone. It's been a long time since I last played the game but I don't believe that's true without cheating.
- skoczymroczny 10y ago
  without any bug exploiting, you can use killphrases on anne and run away from gunther (or use killphrase too). I think Howard Strong is the only guy you have to actually kill.
  - Paul_S 10y ago
    Technically you also kill (indirectly) the crew of the ship you scuttle, Maggie, the Area 51 staff who are outside when you diverted the missile etc.
- pluma 10y ago
  http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19502/is-it-really-possible-to-finish-deus-ex-without-actively-killing-a-single-enemy http://gaming.stackexchange.com/questions/19502/is-it-really... There's only one situation that requires tricking the AI to open a door for you (what some might legitimately consider an exploit). Other than that (which I consider a design flaw) it's entirely possible to get by without killing anyone (though using non-lethal weapons to render people unconscious is of course still necessary at various times).

arcanus 10y ago

One famous piece of trivia about Deus Ex is that, if you look at the city skyline during the missions set in New York City, the Twin Towers are conspicuously absent. The real reason for their exclusion isn’t very interesting: something to do with memory constraints. So in the game’s fiction, the Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Deus Ex was released in 2000, a year before 9/11. ---- 'How deus ex predicted the future' https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex-predicted-the-future-1616252703/amp?client=ms-android-att-us https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex-predicted-...

fenomas 10y ago
The specifics here are that the New York skyline was originally two big textures covering two faces of the skybox. Late in production, to save video memory they cut one texture and replaced it with a mirror of the other one, of course cutting the side with the towers so that they wouldn't show up twice. (Source is an old IGN interview that I hunted down ages ago, because every time this trivia shows up somewhere there tends to be a comment war about how removing a building from a skyline couldn't possibly save memory, blather blather.)
rangibaby 10y ago
The pilot episode of "The Lone Gunmen" aired in March 2001, and details a conspiracy by the US government to remote control an airliner and crash it into the WTC to furnish arms sales: "The Cold War's over, John. But with no clear enemy to stockpile against, the arms market's flat. But bring down a fully loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you'll find a dozen tinpot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility, and begging to be smart-bombed." https://youtu.be/EjbQ-BDh4PU https://youtu.be/EjbQ-BDh4PU
eswat 10y ago
Although less conspicuous, there’s a similar story with Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2’s box art depicting a NYC skyline being bombarded (also released in 2000).

biot 10y ago

Is the actual PDF available somewhere instead of having to jump through Scribd hoops?

pmh 10y ago
It's shared via Google Drive from the reddit post[0] linked in the OP: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs/view https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs... [0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5crvld/full_dx1_design_doc_with_annotations_by_warren/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5crvld/full_dx1_desi...

ehnto 10y ago

I am currently playing Mankind Divided and have been reading into the art direction from interviews with the art director. I just love the world they have created and the way they utilize it to tell the story. One of their ethos is "show don't tell" and you can see they have really taken it to heart. The locations tell the story just as well as the dialog does.

frik 10y ago
You simple cannot compare Deus Ex 3 and 4 with Deus Ex 1. Deus Ex 1 is a much different and better game, a lot of thought went into it, the player can do so much more it's not even funny. No other game with Deus Ex in the name comes even close. Play Deus Ex 1 first and come back later, though some may never get into DX1 because the graphics hasn't aged that well.
- papaf 10y ago
  We used to play Deus Ex 1 in a pair. The game was so different for each player and their playing style that it never got boring. We completed the whole game in this way. One highlight that I remember was the explanation of mass surveillance being a replacement for less religion in a society. In the past people censored themselves because God was always watching. It was hoped that people would continue to censor themselves because Echelon was always recording and datamining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw This was an optional cut scene and not part of the main story -- my friend found this, I never got this cut scene when I played. I agree that Deus Ex 1 is so special that anything after does not compare. This does not belittle the sequels, its just that the original was so good.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    "God was a dream of good government" is a very interesting idea to ponder.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago

justanton 10y ago

Reinstalling.

Paul_S 10y ago
The installation along with mods is less than a GB so I optimised by not uninstalling it in the first place.

ivank 10y ago

https://nuwen.net/dx.html https://nuwen.net/dx.html also has a ton of information about the game

popeshoe 10y ago

Deus Ex got me at the perfect time in my life (15 y/o pseudo-intellectual nerd) so I really loved the game, so reading this was great. Such was my nerd infatuation with this game, that as I was reading about the various locations, the corresponding music would pop into my brain almost immediately, a testament to the great soundtrack (eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI ) Especially interesting is seeing how the times and what we expect from videogames have changed, on page 23 there's a dejected nod to people expecting a 90s first person game to have multiplayer, even though it's primarily a single player RPG, but they'll do it as a bullet point to go on the back of the box.

jscheel 10y ago
Definitely agree about the soundtrack. I find myself listening to it while working quite a bit.

SticksAndBreaks 10y ago

Ah, the good old times, when the cost of creativity wasnt so astronomically high. If you wanted to risk something, you would just take some time of the working-charts and do it, letting the team then vote on results. No- push your idea in front of the high council, no guiding whats left of it along the pipeline, you just wrote the dialogue, scripted the mission, reused some existing assets, and polished it till it was accepted. Those where the days.