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Deus Ex: Invisible War

The rise of the first person shooter in many ways marked the end of the thinking man’s videogame. You see, creating the art required for first person shooters was much more intensive than anything that had come before. Instead of taking two days to build a level for a side scrolling platformer, it took two weeks to build a rudimentary Doom map. Moving into a full 3D world required even more time and effort. Completing a Quake 1 map could take a month or more for a small team of people. Compared to isometric role playing games, strategy games, and old-school platformers, creating content for first person shooters is a bitch.

Because of the increased demands on FPS developers, and because devs really want gamers to get to see every portion of their game, shooters became more and more linear. Instead of presenting gamers with difficult choices and making them think about the direction they want to take a character, shooter devs simply create linear paths straight through a game, with loads of enemies to blow up. It’s the gaming equivalent of a big-budget summer blockbuster. Beautiful sets, great scripted sequences, but no real meat to your game.

Deus Ex: Invisible War breaks the linear gameplay mold. Instead of confining gamers to a set scripted path, Deus Ex creates a realistic world with rules, and gives players a wide variety of skills to choose from that will help them overcome the obstacles. Objects in the world have mass and take up space. The game also does reasonably complex physics simulations. When you encounter an obstacle, whether it’s a security bot, a defense grid, or simply a locked door, you can rest assured that there will be many different ways to get around it.

For example, in one mission you were tasked with burning a store’s supplies. There were many different ways to accomplish your mission. You could break into the shop, disable the alarm, and chuck a grenade into the stockroom, but there’s no way that would look accidental. You could sneak through a neighboring building’s ventilation shafts, drop a flare into the stockroom and make it look like an accident. You could make yourself invisible, follow someone else into the building, and then quietly steal all the product and chuck it into a flaming garbage can out in the street. Or, you could talk to the owner of the shop and hit him up for protection money so you wouldn’t torch his supply room.

By setting up basic ground rules instead of scripting actions, the developers at Ion Storm created a game that people can truly play any way they want to. If you don’t want to kill anyone, you don’t have to. If you’d rather kill everyone, that’s cool too, as is anything in between these two extremes.

Ion Storm applied this to the game’s plot as well. Every NPC in the game belongs to a faction, and your standing with their faction determines how they treat you. Friendly factions will give you assignments, while enemy factions will try to recruit you to join their side. If that doesn’t work, they’ll try to kill you. The missions you choose to complete, and the way you complete them will change your faction standing with the different groups. By choosing different missions as you progress in the game, you can have a totally different experience.

The point of all this is that Deus Ex is getting disappointing reviews, and I’m really not sure why. There were some serious problems with the initial demo, but those weren’t really present in the final game. The PC version’s interface is a bit wonky. It’s not always easy to tell what clicking the mouse is going to do, but the rest of the game is good enough that I was willling to overlook the interface’s awkwardness. Despite the annoying interface this is definitely one of the three best games I’ve played this year.

I’ve read the submissions for the stupidest news story, and they’re nowhere near as stupid as the iPod jacking story at Wired. You guys have to do better than that. I’ll extend the contest one more week, and announce the winner next Friday or Saturday.

Between now and then, I hope to finish the PC version of Knights of the Old Republic. I’m a little disappointed in the PC-exclusive extras so far, but the game is very good, even on the second play through. My PC Jedi is so evil that his skin has gone pure white, his eyes are yellow, and little smoky things rise off his portrait. People in the game are even starting to call me Lord :)