I hereby declare

[Unstoppable]

I live bitches. Told you not to mess with me. Now I shall create le Deus Ex 3. By Eidos Montreal people who are way more talented than those that worked on Invisible War.

 

http://lenirvanadujoueur.blogspot.com/2007...s-montreal.html

 

Bow down to the best video game character/story/game ever created. I am JC DENTON! I am a nano-tech enhanced anti-terrorist agent who is going to whip your ass!

 

Edited May 16, 2007 by Unstoppable

[demagogue]

I believe that the worst problems besetting DXIW were preventable (from what we know by later dev confessions), and if/when development starts on DX3, the first thing they should do is a post mortum on those problems and start a development plan that gets on a good track early.

[jdude]

The problem about getting excited about games early in their development is that you will end up waiting years for the release

[Unstoppable]

That's fine an dandy I just won't think about it too much. I am not worried about Deus Ex 3 at all. I'm sure that it will be the worthy sequel fans wanted from Invisible War. Reason being is that there is less pressure this time around and fresh perspectives which will develop the game. Plus we are talking about a dev team of 30-40 people this time around. It will not fail!

[Crispy]

Just having a large team definitely does not guarantee success. Still, hopefully they will learn from the problems that plagued DX:IW and make sure they avoid them.

 

They'll probably make new mistakes instead, but hopefully they won't be quite so bad.

 

I wonder what platforms it's going to be on...

 

I also wonder how they're going to handle the multiple endings from DX:IW. DX:IW skirted the problem of DX1's multiple endings fairly well by saying that all of them happened, but I reckon the endings for DX:IW would be harder to tie together like that.

 

Should be interesting to find out.

[Unstoppable]

If there is one thing I do know is that early work began right after or during the end of Invisible War. If they were to follow those ideas then they are going to have something very interesting in store for us. I was able to contact one of the ex-devs of Ionstorm and he told me he really liked what they had planned. Of course he couldn't tell me anymore but it sounds good to me!

[demagogue]

They'll probably make new mistakes instead, but hopefully they won't be quite so bad.

 

Well, run-of-the-mill mistakes are one thing ... and nobody is immune, of course.

 

In the case of DXIW, though, they got railroaded into an awful engine by delegating its development to an outside a maverick inside source that not only seriously f'd it up, but then abandoned them with it so they couldn't get support on it. And it wasn't clear just how screwed up it was until later when it just made practically everything a pain to do (as everybody working on TDS know so well) and they couldn't get into the engine to clean it up, which led to other big problems as time was ticking down, forcing them to make hard choices on nothing but bad options.

 

If they get good technology and an organized team/leadership from the start, they're already halfway to a better game from the get-go (better potential, anyway, more flexibility, freedom, better choices, etc).

 

Bioshock is an example where, once they got organized and got great technology, things leap-frogged so fast that gameplay was looking incredibly fluid and interesting right from the earliest builds, which makes all the other stuff (the game making part), so much better when everyone is cheering you on and every build adds more and more marvels to the mix, rather than there being a lot of bickering and at each other's throats as they have to cut-out more and more stuff with each build, gutting it.

Edited May 18, 2007 by demagogue

[Ombrenuit]

Unfortunately, we pretty much know they are going to attempt to make it for both console and PC, and so far, I don't think they've been able to find a balance that makes such development outstanding on either. Also, as soon as a new team takes up an established series they feel like it's taboo to use the source material for inspiration, and rather, they feel trapped by it. This doesn't make for either an inspired team or an inspired story, but rather one that simply sacrifices its identity on the altar previous incarnations.

 

The original Deus Ex's strong point was it's immersion and it's story. It's very apparant that developers put their heart and soul into making that game. They wanted to exalt the game up to literary heights, not just produce pulp entertainment. I feel like it's a prime example that games, just like movies, can tread deeper water than we usually allow them. Give someone else that boat though and they merely go through the motions rather than explore it themselves.

 

The developers are probably too intimidated about disappointing fans, disappointing their publishers, and disappointing the original source material to allow themselves to really expand the game world into territory they want to tread. Prime example? Bioshock. They are merely taking a concept and using it as inspiration to make something more a spiritual successor, with its own identity, rather than being imprisoned by tagging on fan fiction. It wasn't necessarily their choice since they didn't get the rights though...^^; but that's beside the point.

 

I feel like there is a lot that could be said and done with Deus Ex 3 that won't be done; they'll be too busy honoring the first game. It will be an apprentice rather than the succeeding master.

 

We saw it with Deus Ex 2. We saw it with Thief 3. Canon scares the shit out of developers.

Edited May 17, 2007 by Ombrenuit

[Unstoppable]

I find all of your assumptions quite insulting. I know a hell of a lot more about what happend to Invisible War because I did research. I dug through hell and back and found my answers.

 

First off Invisible War failed for a variety of reasons. It had to do with the poor coding and the engine they chose. They tried to make their own renderer and failed. That took a lot of time out of the project. Thirdly Warren Spector was not spear heading the project. It was Harvey Smith and he had trouble dealing with people. Also there appears to have been a lot of amateurs on the team which hurt the project. (Poor programming) There were a lot of mistakes made. The studio shut down.

 

However Invisible War was decent and I really liked it for the run it provided. As for Deadly Shadows I liked that too. It might of not been the epic game we all wanted but it was a game no less. It didn't sell well but oh well it brought a conclusion that I needed. It satisfied me but at the same time dissapointed me.

 

Eidos Montreal will be comprised I believe of industry veterans. It would be foolish to think they would make the same mistakes again. Not all of them are the same people and different people will be making decisions this time around. This is a new studio and with it come new leaders. I'm giving them my full support. The game is no where near done and you're already acting like it's garbage.

 

Well when it becomes what it is destined to be you will remember this post. Deus Ex 3 is coming. Be afraid, be VERY afraid. JC Denton is back. :chuk chuk: "You're gonna burn all right!"

Edited May 18, 2007 by Unstoppable

[demagogue]

I find all of your assumptions quite insulting. I know a hell of a lot more about what happend to Invisible War because I did research. I dug through hell and back and found my answers.

 

Are you talking to me, Unstoppable?

Anyway, I would agree with everything you said, so I don't see why you might think I had insulting assumptions, since they must be the same as yours, considering that I also did the research on DXIW's post mortem (do you think you have a monopoly on DXIW knowledge or something?), and again I would probably agree with everything you just said.

 

Anyway, one source that I found particularly enlightening was Krypt's reflection on the Flesh engine (1, 2). It's what I had in mind when I made my last post. (There are a couple of other sources straight from the horses' mouths I could link ... but don't want to be bothered looking them back up right now. Unless you have an inside connection, I'm sure you are referring to the same sources. And if you do have an inside connection, by all means enlighten us! It's not like I'm in competition with you; I'm really interested in the details and am happy to learn more about what happened! I think we're on the same side here.)

 

But so far as I know, they really did lose control over the engine as they handed it over to a programmer to get in dynamic shadows, and the guy apparently rewrote the whole engine on his own initiative and disappeared (well, was fired), which engine really handicapped them (I shouldn't have used the word "delegated" though; I meant more to refer to the self-initiative of a maverick programmer, so it was effectively like delegating, and because I was citing the fact from a blurry memory, but he wasn't an outside guy so it's not a good term for it. But the gist of the point remains, I think). But anyway, the post that I'm going to quote remains for me at the root, around which the other problems blossomed.

 

Of course, there were other problems surrounding the development of DXIW and TDS, but this, IMO, was what turned them from run-of-the-mill problems into the problem scenario that became DXIW (e.g., I think that some of the interpersonal problems / leadership problems / lack of experience on the team / etc, as you rightly mentioned, wouldn't have been as much a problem if they had technology that was working more in their favor. Seriously, try to work with the Flesh engine and you'll see why it breeds frustration and why the TDS forum is all but dead at TTLG. But I recognize that these things were also problems that contributed in their own right. And I also agree with what you seemed to imply, that really at the root was a leadership problem that allowed things to get out of hand).

 

And I can even agree DXIW wasn't even that bad. I'm happy they were able to get out what they could given the stories that came out later about what a mess they were having of it. Anyway, here's the quote that summed it up for me:

 

The creation of the Flesh engine wasn't really planned. Early on in the development of DX2 and T3 we bandied about the idea of using dynamic shadows for gameplay. A certain programmer who will remain nameless was given the task of adding this into the Unreal engine. He went off on his own for a couple weeks and programmed an entirely new per-pixel lighting renderer. No one really asked him to make a completely new engine, but we didn't mind at first because it looked pretty cool. This was before we discovered the crippling limitations it would put on us.

 

It wasn't until we had worked with it for a while after said programmer was let go that we found out how crappy the engine really was. By the time we realized how much it sucked, we were already beyond the point of no return and just had to try to make the best of it. Out of necessity our efforts shifted from design to figuring out how to get the game to actually run. Instead of developing the game we wanted, we had to develop whatever we could get to work. We had to cut features left and right, shrink down the levels and comprimise our design because of the craptacular engine and physics implementation, and the difficulty of fitting it all into 64mb of Xbox memory.

 

DX2 suffered the most from this because it was our first try in the engine and we were under a lot of pressure to ship the game for Christmas. T3 fared better because we had more experience on how to get a game working and didn't have to make quite so many comprimises. Still, if we had stuck with Unreal we could have made both games a lot better, I think.

 

As for this:

 

Eidos Montreal will be comprised I believe of industry veterans. It would be foolish to think they would make the same mistakes again. Not all of them are the same people and different people will be making decisions this time around. This is a new studio and with it come new leaders. I'm giving them my full support. The game is no where near done and you're already acting like it's garbage.

 

I couldn't agree with you more. I'm giving them my full support, too, and have full faith they can bring back that old time DX magic.

Edited May 18, 2007 by demagogue

[Unstoppable]

My post was directed to Ombrenuit the poster right above mine. I got no problems with anyone here. I Just really love Deus Ex and given the chance to ever work on that game is a dream.

 

As for who and what I know I basically get it off videos. (There were some on Gamespy about Harvey Smith you could tell he was very unhappy at the end of DX:IW) Also I was able to talk to someone (Forgot his name and shouldn't mention it anyway) and he told me exactly what happend.

 

When you got people up top who don't take into consideration what you tell them about a project, things will turn out how they want. Harvey had a lot of power and he made some poor choices. If I was ever in that kind of leadership role I would involve my team members.

 

Vanguard failed for that very reason. Check out this interview.

http://www.f13.net/index.php?itemid=561

 

It's official btw in case I didn't post that Deus Ex 3 will be made.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/789/789321p1.html

Edited May 18, 2007 by Unstoppable

[demagogue]

Oh, well cheers then. (I don't know why I read it that way...)

Like I said, I agreed with everything you were saying, and it's interesting to hear the other little tidbits you had to offer. Yeah, I remember some of those things coming out about Harvey (and later Randy with TDS) ... sounded like trying times. I could only imagine.

 

As for Ombrenuit's post, sounds to me like he was mostly just venting about his own gut feelings, intuitions and worries on the subject ... even when some of the sentences looked like they were trying to say something hard about "the way things really are" and what's "obvious", that's really the better way to read his post. He wasn't citing facts so much as feelings and observations.*

 

I don't personally worry as much about this team falling into the trouble he foresees for them because I think game developers are, more than anything, professionals (artists, too), but primarily professionals in the job of creating good games. They'll respect canon, sure, but if it's a functioning team, they'll do what they have to to put out a good project. Like Unstoppable, I prefer thinking about it from the perspective of process ... here's a team with these people doing these jobs in this kind of environment. Does it grok? If something breaks down, it's usually attributable to some pretty concrete hitch in the process.

 

Since I don't know anything about this Montreal team, really, I can only have faith in them. Later on we'll probably start getting more indications leaking through about whether and how well it's grokking.

 

 

*Edit. A little in Ombrenuit's defense, I found this interesting bon mot that sort of acknowledges a little of what he was talking about, and how Spector dealt with it for DXIW, although it didn't turn out maybe as well as he'd probably imagined it would.

 

Kieron Gillen: Something else I chatted to Mr Church about was how it was very easy to innovate in System Shock, since they had no idea what they were doing. Do you think it was harder to innovate in Deus Ex 2 because you were returning to philosophical ground you covered before?

 

Warren Spector: I think it would have been harder for me personally to innovate in Invisible War, which I identified very early. I felt my bones calcifying. I was stiffening up. That is exactly why Harvey Smith is the Project Director. Well, that and that fact because... he's my guy. He's been in my shadow for twelve years, and it's time to let the poor guy get a little sun on his face. Which is why I'm peeved he's not here...

 

But putting a different project Director at the helm, with me being chief Kibitzer and fingernail biter, ensured that it would have enough difference from the first one to feel fresh. And a few new people on the team too.

 

Actually, this whole interview is interesting (http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=53753) and makes me look a little more sympathetically at IW, at least from Spector's point of view.

Edited May 18, 2007 by demagogue

[Unstoppable]

All that is left now is the green flag from Eidos. I read they will probably start work in September as it's when the Studio will be ready. I was thinking about creating a fan site.

[Ombrenuit]

Sorry for being cynical, but I guess it's my only defense for being let down one too many times when it comes to anticipating games. I'd rather be pleasantly surprised than right. I'm not spouting out facts, nor do I know -anything- about the development process particularly. I don't know what went wrong with DE:IW etc. etc. I don't know why the flesh engine is ugly as sin. I can only make my uneducated guesses. Explain my worries. And simply warn that you're a gluten for punishment in the entertainment industry if you harbor high expectations =p. I'm not here to rain on your parade; I didn't even play Deus Ex 2 and I've only played the first few levels of it's big brother. You just asked if I was excited for this and let's just say I'm being incredibly cautious. History has shown us a few lessons to learn, but who says this new team is going to magically learn them? We can't know until we see it ourselves. If anything at the moment, I can only hope for an average game until I'm convinced otherwise.

Edited May 23, 2007 by Ombrenuit