Note: as before, this post was featured on GamaSutra. Also, my tendency to let incidental thoughts between parentheses meander into entire paragraphs has now been remedied through the use of footnotes.

Throughout Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s development, Eidos Montréal has joked that “we all played Deus Ex, and some of us were even forced to play Deus Ex: Invisible War”. It is a fairly flawed game, even when considering its near-impossible task of following and rivaling an iconic predecessor. My thoughts have already been mentioned in this post, and they were only affirmed by a recent playthrough. It occurred to me that there is a very specific way in which Deus Ex: IW fails to engage the player, beyond some of the more obvious shortcomings that the Short Script picks up on ^[1].

It first struck me when watching this post-mortem on Deus Ex: IW by its creative director, Harvey Smith. He specifically mentions the consolidation (console-idation? I kill me!) of the swimming skill and aqualung augmention in the first game into a single biomod in the second. While his example is technically a theoretical exercise (there is no swimming in Deus Ex: IW), it applies to many of the design decisions made for Deus Ex: IW and provides an interesting vantage point on what I believe to be one of its largest flaws. As Smith puts it, even though this consolidation process makes no difference on a mechanical level, it does curb a player’s fantasy that he is exercising his own authority in choosing how to develop his character and how those choices are reflected in the game world. In my opinion, Deus Ex: IW breaks this fantasy in a myriad of seemingly innocent ways.

The key is Smith’s use of the word “fantasy” and how it relates to player agency, a concept I previously broached in this post (which ironically includes a link to Smith discussing player freedom in Deus Ex). The relation can in fact be as simple as calling player agency a fantasy ^[2]. Without knowledge of multiple avenues inside a game, agency only becomes an impediment once that fantasy is broken. As long as the player has the impression that his actions and choices matter, he will lend them credence and meaning (regardless of how many avenues there actually are). The same principle applies to level design, which can make a world seem more alive and expansive than it really is. Crafting agency then goes beyond offering visible dialogue choices or gameplay approaches. The former influences the story while the latter influences gameplay (any crossovers notwithstanding), and Deus Ex: IW focuses on the wrong end of the equation.

The game attempts to offer the player full agency in its storyline by allowing him to align himself with every faction in the game. This is most significant when considering the Knights Templar, who are consistently portrayed as irredeemably evil and easy to hate. They are the only faction which the player has to fight until its leader, Saman, attempts to sway him to his cause close to the end of the game. This is sorely inconsistent with everything that preceded, even (and especially) if the player actually decides to join them. Contrarywise, Deus Ex offered no option to stay with UNATCO, but in light of its overarching narrative, it couldn’t, nor did it have to ^[3]. Of the “flaws” that Deus Ex had, this was one its sequel did not need to fix.

Gameplay-wise, Deus Ex and Deus Ex: IW are by and large similar beasts in their approach. Whenever the player meets an obstacle, he consumes a certain number of his resources to get past it, be they lockpicks or explosives for doors, multitools or nearby computer terminals for cameras, and lethal or non-lethal weapons for guards. Deus Ex: IW drastically reduces the number of available resources to streamline the interface and ease up the learning curve (for instance, doors are now indestructable and multitools also function as lockpicks), but it’s less about this reduction and more about how all the different approaches are implemented in gameplay so as to maintain (the illusion of) agency. The best illustration is how Deus Ex: IW handles keycodes.

The keycode is 2, okay? Think you can remember that?

In both games, keycodes are numerical and either handed out by characters or gleaned from datacubes. The difference is that Deus Ex makes the player physically type the code into a keypad, while Deus Ex: IW automates this process (using a keypad opens the corresponding door as if it were a simple toggle). The outcome is the same from a mechanical standpoint, because only one keycode is correct. But the agency effected by the player is diminished because he wasn’t allowed to enter that keycode himself. This also eliminates all possiblity of guesswork from Deus Ex: IW, since the successful operation of a keypad depends on having completed the interaction which yields the correct keycode, rather than the keycode itself.

Ostensibly trivial design decisions such as this, when added up, contribute to the player losing his feeling of agency, even if it is just that: a feeling. At the time of writing, player agency’s most devoted advocate Clint Hocking has posted another piece on its (d)evolution, which neatly dovetails with the above assertions.

1. To anyone thinking about (re)playing Deus Ex: IW, I highly recommend downloading John P‘s Unified Texture Pack here. It dramatically enhances and improves the quality and resolution of the game’s textures, and I can’t imagine playing without it.
2. This is not the case when a game is specifically designed around multiple choices that aren’t readily apparent (in story and/or gameplay). An example in Deus Ex is the fate of Paul Denton. JC’s actions decide whether he lives or dies, but this is never made explicit. Many players attested that they didn’t realise they could save Paul until it was pointed out to them. Only playing the game both ways provides the full story. Outright gimmickry in other media (such as Run Lola Run‘s structure) would be needed to compete with the elegant multiple narratives that separate playthroughs in games can provide (a point gleaned verbatim from this article).
3. Ironically, unused audio files suggest it was initially planned by the developers. This conversation has JC disbelieving Paul’s evidence of UNATCO’s corruption, but it’s likely that a subsequent event would have made it untenable for JC to keep refuting Paul (perhaps the raid by UNATCO troopers that follows that scene anyway).

This blog will not only serve to disseminate my opinions to whoever might be interested in them, but also as a repository for a series of Short Scripts on games. Some of you may be familiar with Rod Hilton’s Editing Room, where he periodically posts abridged movie scripts which poke fun at recurrent flaws in their stories and presentation. I applied this idea to games and used Hilton’s approach to write up a quick script on one of my favorite games: Deus Ex. Because it was so fun to do, I plan to write more of these and post them here on an irregular basis. The Deus Ex script has been made available and can be viewed by clicking the link at the top of this post. I will also be using each accompanying post to briefly elaborate on (the story of) the game in question, beyond what the script itself touches on.

I first played Deus Ex when I was 15 years old, and as I matured (or tried to), I acquired a deep-seeded appreciation for it, more so than my initial substantial one. The fact that I can play it today and still come across things that I hadn’t encountered before is a clear demonstration of the depth of its experience. This might sound like I’m talking about game mechanics and exploration, and in a way I am, but its narrative fits the bill just the same. Because the way you approach the game has a direct influence on the story. The broad strokes of the story may be set in stone, but the minutiae are left up to the player. I found myself genuinly affected when I had killed every last NSF terrorist on Liberty Island (because I approached the game like I did every shooter before it) and my brother Paul suddenly told me I was a jackass. And rather than reloading a save game and trying again, I went with it, determined to do right by my brother on my next mission. The game managed to influence my playstyle.

Deus Ex perfectly embodies a tenet that I embrace fully, namely a narrative as deep as the player chooses it to be (a point I made in my previous post). While playing Deus Ex, I found myself compelled to seek out every datacube, bulletin board, newspaper and terminal to soak up every piece of information on the game world I could. I’d even hunt for logins so that I could read all the mails stored on every computer. And if I couldn’t find one, I’d hack it and read as quick as I could before time ran out and my bioelectric reserve was tapped. The fact that all this content is optional, that a run-and-gun player can speed past it to go shoot the next guy, is very telling. Because putting in content that the average player will never experience just goes to show the amount of dedication and detail the game developers poured into it.

I love a game which has crafted a well-defined universe of its own, complete with its own nomenclature, factions and atmosphere. And in Deus Ex, we have UNATCO, the NSF, the Gray Death and Silhouette (among many others). It of course helps that I’m an avid science-fiction fan. I encourage everyone who is a fan of Deus Ex to go here and read Warren Spector’s first proposal for Deus Ex as well as his post-mortem. Scratch that, read the whole page and see the quality of the writing and how it contributes to a comprehensive and engaging game world. If I can make a game one day that is half of what Deus Ex is, I will die a happy Narrative Designer.