# 1: Deux Ex Machina
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"We were genuinely happy with the critical success and rising sales of
Deus Ex. After the Dallas team's disaster with
Daikatana,
Deus Ex felt like the miracle we were all hoping for at Ion Storm. You could say John [
Romero]'s decision to help me make my dream project a reality payed off. [
smiles]
Deus Ex managed to salvage a big chunk of Ion Storm's reputation in a rather dramatic fashion, in ways we couldn't have anticipated a mere few months before. By late August 2000, with all of the praise and solid sales coming in, we finally felt like we're back in control. We were eager to start work on the sequel.
(...)
Though Eidos had always felt rather skeptical about the game's concept, the acclaim and sales we managed to generate in just a few months convinced them that
Deus Ex wasn't an empty gamble. With that, though, came a further challenge. In autumn, Eidos notified us of their intention of getting the game to consoles, for some added exposure. Though we would have preferred to focus solely on making the sequel, the console port was something we were ultimately looking forward to, despite the added workload it created. We were genuinely eager to get
Deus Ex to a wider audience. Things were looking up, we were getting cautiously optimistic about IS's future. Especially the future of the Austin branch.
However, already in late 2000, a few members of the then team were starting to question Eidos' insistence on porting
Deus Ex to the brand new PlayStation 2. Among the most vocal critics of the Eidos decision was Chris Norden, my old pal and co-worker since the Origin days. He called me one afternoon and told me about a thing he realised the day before, late in the evening. The PlayStation 2 had 4 MB of RAM, not a meg more. Looking at the
Deus Ex PC specs, there was no chance we could fit all that content, with the exact same level of complexity, into a PS2 port. The game would have to be remade, bit by bit, the missions in particular would have to become segmented into smaller parts, tied together with loading zones. He argued that if we'd go for the PlayStation, the only thing we'd get out of the
Deus Ex console port would be a hassle to strip everything down. The limits were simply too strict. He even pointed out several articles online about the growing complaints on the difficulty of developing titles for the PS2. Partly down to the limiting RAM, partly down to oft-insufficient documentation provided for developers. [
1]
Naturally, though I was willing to hear him out, I told him quite clearly, that this isn't going to fly. Eidos had made a good fortune on titles that were published for the original PlayStation, the Tomb Raider games in particular. They weren't going to part with publishing games for the PlayStation. Besides, as I pointed out to Chris, there just wasn't a viable alternative on the horizon. He retorted with 'Really, Warren ? What about that XBox thing...'. The thought had actually crossed my mind, but I told them that Eidos will never allow us to pull a stunt like that. They were eyeing the XBox at the time as another viable console market, but no concrete plans were made at that point for any title. 'Face it, Chris, the XBox hasn't even been released yet,' I told him. 'And you want to tempt fate and the possible future of the studio on being a contrarian to Eidos ?! Sorry, but we'll never be able to convince Eidos to take such a massive risk.'. Little did I know back then, that's exactly what that man will convince me to do ! [
hearty laugh]
By the time I arrived at the office the next day, Chris had already managed to sway a few people on the team to contemplate whether the PS2 was really the best route we could go for. I felt like the disagreements from the development days of the first
Deus Ex were starting all over again, it was a sense of déja vu... [
chuckle] Little did I know that, in a week, I'd be already negotiating with the publisher about whether they could strike a deal with Microsoft concerning its new console. Obviously, at first, they thought I've gone mad... Me and Chris decided to visit a little while later. We gave them something of a lecture on the issue and on how we saw the future of the series and its place among other strong Eidos brands... Things were somewhat slow to move, but...
(...)
With the XBox port of
Deus Ex being a fairly unprecedented success story, Eidos started to feel more supportive of Ion Storm once again. We possibly ameliorated their opinion of us, as "that studio which makes weird, overly ambitious games", to something more appreciative. [
brief laugh]
The lessons learned with the first game, including the issues with the rather rushed Eidos-Microsoft deal and subsequent XBox port, were instrumental to us when we started the pre-production process on
Invisible War. While we knew we had to upgrade to the newer iteration of the Unreal engine, both for
IW and the third
Thief, we felt we had a better grasp on how to approach the whole thing. Obviously, the XBox port wasn't completely bug-free, as we were developing for a brand new console and our port also unintentionally became one of the launch titles for the system.
Invisible War was meant to fix the oversights of both the PC and the XBox version of the first game, and after the massive risk we took, Eidos now allowed us to specialise on the XBox when doing future console ports of our games. In early December 2002, work on
Invisible War was progressing well. We were fairly deep into design and the building of some "proto-missions" as we called them... And then, around mid-December, one of the newer team members we hired back when we were working on the XBox port, started to highlight a potential gameplay issue. I was aware of it, but it got somewhat burried underneath all the previous work and enthusiasm for additions and changes to the sequel.
This new dev had scoured some of the fan forums, purely out of interest, to get an idea of players' opinions on the sequel in development. What surprised him was the frequency of posts expressing hope about AI improvements, on both PC and console platforms. Now, though the AI in the original
Deus Ex wasn't terrible, it has a few issues. With the dev team now increasingly aware of the AI complaints, we took to it as a challenge. This needs to be a sequel where we won't provide just a new narrative, interesting new mechanics, or a multiplayer component. We needed to make some improvements to the existing state of the series' gameplay. We had to step up our game when it came to the AI in the
Deus Ex sequel.
(...)
At the time, Tim Stellmach was contemplating pursuing a career over at Activision. [
2] I was lucky, I managed to catch him on the phone one afternoon, around the 18th, I think... We talked for several minutes and I tried to convince him as diplomatically as possible. I outright begged nicely at one point. [
brief chuckle] Finally, Tim says to me, 'Hm, okay, Warren. I'll make plans, get myself to Austin and I'll have a look at it. At least I'll meet some of the old gang.'. By 'old gang', he of course meant the former LGS members who were helping with work on the third
Thief, midway in production at the time.
I often wonder how differently
Invisible War could have turned out, had I not convinced Tim to help with reworking and improving the AI. [
a rather nostalgic smile] He previously did some work on the first game, but until I called him, everyone was convinced him working together with former LGS employees or the team at Austin was already a thing of the past..."
- Warren Spector, excerpts from a 2010 interview about the history of
Deus Ex and his thoughts on the upcoming modern sequel
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(...)
"OBJECTIVE RESULT: Typical case of 'Ion Storm
Thief console port syndrome', pretty much.
CORUNDUMNitrogenCONUNDRUM: Console port syndrome ?
OBJECTIVE RESULT: Sorry, forgot you don't play the third or even fourth very often. I'm referring to the fact that both
Deus Ex games to date had fairly decent XBox ports, while the the third
Thief game and the rebooted one had poorer XBox ports compared to the PC versions.
GARRETTtheSNEAKSIE: I wouldn't generalise.
The Invisible War console port has its issues, let's not overdo it with the praise.
OBJECTIVE RESULT: I'm not downplaying anything. It's not spotless, the port of the first game also had some issues, even if it was a surprisingly good conversion of the original.
GARRETTtheSNEAKSIE: Nevermind
Deus Ex. As I'm a PC guy, I'm just glad
Deadly Shadows and the reboot weren't given the consolisation treatment. Yeah, the reboot has a good few places where it feels they were compromising due to a lack of time, but it's still better than what the console crowd got. And the XBox version of
Deadly Shadows, though it wasn't
as bad, still doesn't hold a candle to the PC version. The loading zones
inside missions annoy me the most. That's not something that belongs in a
Thief game ! Nice-looking extra loading screens, I'll give 'em that, but otherwise, bleh. I suppose PC taffers can rest easy that we dodged a bullet there." [
3]
- from a discussion thread in the
Thief section of the ThroughTheLookingGlass.com fan forums, April 2008
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"One of the hardest things with bringing the rebooted
Thief into a more modern setting, with a more typical "urban fantasy" bent, was rethinking Garrett's methods of progression and evasion. Though we wanted to keep the broad spirit of the original trilogy in place, some shaking up of the stealth options available to the player was obvious and inevitable. From early on, once we were pretty sure the game will get made with a bit of effort put into it, we knew he couldn't be shooting moss arrows again. We knew the players deserved more options than just hiding from sentries, or running to hide from guards once spotted, until they cool down. With the revamped lore behind the game and all the narrative ideas we threw around, the idea of Garrett entering the shadow world as part of the gameplay was something that fascinated us from the start.
Obviously, you have to think about the ramifications of such a design decision on the rest of the mechanics... We quickly realised that if Garrett had little to no restrictions on abusing the dagger-derived powers for entering the shadow world, the game would become no fun, or just end up as a power fantasy. We didn't want things to end like that. Not with
Thief's pedigree in mind. After an evening of spitballing ideas in the office, we decided to make that brand new ability a double-edged sword. Not to the point of discouraging a player entirely from using it, but still give him enough pause for thought every time he was tempted to do so. Yes, Garrett can effectivelly become invisible and moving around a space can become a piece of cake. But the longer you stay inside the shadow world, or the more you harm or kill guards and civilians in the real world, the greater the repercussions. The shadow world will begin hunting you, dogging you. If you overdo your antics, you'll pay the price.
At its core, it's very intuitive gameplay logic, in typical
Thief series tradition. Players are encouraged to get immersed by the thin line between narrative and gameplay. This allows them to react and adopt tactics in a very natural way, even though the mechanics they're utilising are decidedly supernatural or outright horror-tinged in places."
- Jordan Thomas, excerpt from the article "
Thief: Dagger of Ways postmortem", Gamasutra, 2006
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"I'll be perfectly honest, the decision to go ahead with the development of
Division 9 was one of the hardest in Irrational Games' history. At that point, with
SWAT 4 and its expansion published to a great reception, we were sure the time had come to move over to bigger budget development.
BioShock represented an obvious new chapter in Irrational's history, as the last three years have shown. [
4] But at that time, there was plenty of uncertainty for both us and the Canberra team too. Bluntly put, we didn't have a f***ing pot to piss in.
We needed some extra income until
BioShock could come out. Publishers were expecting some prototypes, we made what we could with the resources at the time... The
Thief reboot was coming out, Ion Storm was starting to go under... Though we felt it would be odd for us to sort of compete with our traditional affiliates, I eventually gave my blessing for the project. The day after, I already felt it was the foolhardiest decision I've done in nearly a decade of leading the studio. But I was confident we could do this. Attempt it, at least. It was a project on the side, with most of the effort focused on
BioShock anyway. I'm still surprised we made the decisions we did, given the very limited time left to a potential release. It's no secret we reused some basic
SWAT 4 assets for
Division 9 wherever we could, but still worked hard on giving the game a unique gameplay and atmosphere. Yes, it would try to pose a bit of competition to
Dagger of Ways, or the likes of
Condemned, but we were adamant about not aping either. By far the best decision we did in early active development was to ditch zombies and other... you know, clichéd undead... as the monsters in the game, the primary threats.
To this day, I'm as stumped as anyone else that the game made at least an average profit, even if it was quite obviously destined for a cult following at best. 2K almost gave us hell for the game underperforming. With
BioShock becoming the success we were hoping for just half a year later,
Division 9 quickly slipped off their radar. We thankfully managed to bury the hatchet. Still, it was a tense few months, and I'm hopeful our team members will never have to work under such strict demanding deadlines again, anytime soon. Considering the circumstances
Division 9 was created in, I suppose I can say we did our absolute best, time constraints be damned. Looking at what trends are popular in the industry now, aside from aping
BioShock, we're still surprised at the influence
Division 9 has left. No one could have anticipated that these... base-building, tactical survival horrors... [
an IG colleague is heard laughing in the background over the struggle to label the genre] would be a growing thing now..."
- Ken Levine,
Irrational Behaviour podcast, episode 1: "The Old Irrational Times: Tales of Vengeance", March 2010 [
5]
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Notes:
[1] - this is the POD. Norden takes a good hard look at the PS2 specs, notices the 4 MB RAM limits, and quickly realises Ion Storm would have to do plentiful chopping to make a PS2 port for
Deus Ex. As the ATL interview with Spector highlights, their effort to convince Eidos about the Microsoft XBox deal almost didn't happen, so this ATL wasn't exactly smooth sailing from the start.
[2] - in OTL, Tim Stellmach had worked on the first two
Thief games, including much of the complex AI stuff and some of the level design, and then went on to work for a while at Ion Storm Austin on the first
Deus Ex. He eventually went to work for a subsidiary of Activision in 2003, before moving on again to Harmonix around the mid 2000s, and elsewhere. Currently, he's been reunited with some former LGS colleagues and
they're working on Underworld Ascendant, a spiritual sequel to the famous
Ultima Underworld spinoff games that LGS developed for the
Ultima series in the early 1990s.
[3] -
Thief : Deadly Shadows is almost exactly identical to its OTL counterpart, but one of the minor divergences are some technical tweaks. Unlike in OTL, the PC version utilises less loading zones for different parts of the city and the main missions themselves. The XBox version keeps the extended number of loading zones though, something that both versions kept in OTL due to development time constraints.
[4] -
BioShock has a few differences in this ATL, but it's not unrecognisable and is still a massive success. While I won't focus too much on these differences, I plan to revisit the topic in some of the later chapters.
[5] - second podcast episode overall. The ATL equivalent of "Introducing Irrational Behaviour" came out in January 2010 just like in OTL, under that same name. However, content-wise, it was more of a clear-cut prologue episode compared to the OTL version, focusing on IG's staff members past participation in
Thief, and their work on the second
System Shock and the
Freedom Force RPGs. The ATL episode 1, from March, focuses on the development of
Tribes: Vengeance,
SWAT 4 and the unmade-in-OTL
Division 9 (though the ATL version
is different from
what was planned in OTL). The latter two games ran on the "Vengeance" engine (an Unreal 2 derivative), hence the episode name.
Wasn't the PS2 notorious at the time for being harder to develop for (or am I confusing that with PS3 around 2006/7) ? And wouldn't putting the game on a brand new and untested platform like the XBox be a bit of a gamble at the time ?