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Deus Ex: Invisible War - Dev Diary#3 Feature
Derek dela Fuente
25/02/2004
Harvey Smith and Kent Hudson, Project Director and Designer of Deus Ex: Invisible War explains the concepts of open-ended game design...
3 - Emergent/open-ended gameplay. How have the challenges been structured to suit players of varying tastes? Stealth, tech and action are pretty varied approaches. How has the team developed content that fits these three styles?
Harvey Smith (Project Director)
Deus Ex: Invisible War is a game that wraps itself around your playstyle. If you go into an area blasting, it attracts a lot of attention and the fight gets tougher. If you sneak in, you trigger overheard conversations between guards that provide useful information. If you hack into the computer system, you can do all sorts of cool computer-hacker type activities. We want you to play the game as you see fit. On the subject of emergence, our game objects and characters behave according to consistent, global rules. This allows for numerous emergent (yet meaningful, not just chaotic) interactions. Here are a bunch of 'game mechanics' for the following example: Spiderbombs are grenades that launch small allied (ro)bots called spiderbots. The bot domination biomod allows the player to possess bots (but after the player ejects from the bot, it is disabled). Damaging a disabled bot causes it to explode. Doors can be opened with keys or lockpicks, or they can be knocked down with demolitions/explosions. So we found that playtesters were tossing down a spiderbomb, then possessing their own spiderbot, running it up to a locked door and ejecting. Then, when the player needed to get through the locked door, he'd back up and shoot the bot, blowing it up. The explosion would 'open' the door. And this sort of thing happens *constantly* when creative players are running through the game.
Kent Hudson (Designer)
With a game like Deus Ex: Invisible War, playtesting is meaningful. It's not enough for the testers to just look for the obvious bugs and crashes; at Ion Storm, we test with a purpose. For example, Dane Caruthers, our QA Lead, created an enormous spreadsheet that dictates an insane number of playstyles. Each playstyle has requirements, ranging from which weapons and biomods you can (and cannot) use to which organization you have to ally yourself with. So as we got the game into serious testing, we had people constantly trying wacky setups and trying to find ways to play that were not well-supported. We collected the data on these various playstyles and continually tuned the levels and our resources to support everyone. That's one way we solved the problem.
Secondly, as Harvey has touched on, we avoid hard-scripted scenarios. Instead, we lay out fundamental relationships between our various game elements, and these elements allow the player to be creative in his or her approach. For example, in one mission you are sent to disable a missile battery so that you and your pilot can take off and leave the area. The standard route, of course, is to fight your way through the level and destroy the missile battery with explosives. However, here are some of the other possibilities:
- 1) Hack into a security computer and shut the batteries down.
- 2) If you cannot hack, you can explore the level and find the login, then shut down the missile batteries with the security computer.
- 3) You can dominate a rocket turret and use the turret to destroy the missile battery.
- 4) You can control the turret through the security computer and destroy the missile battery.
- 5) You can intentionally let the rocket turret see you, and then use your speed biomod to dodge its assault and trick it into destroying the battery with splash damage.
Basically, before we even get to the playtesting level, we review the game maps as a group and collaborate on how to support our playstyles. It is a core value of this studio to support the immersive, emergent gameplay experience, and so from the very start we build the maps with multiple solutions in mind. Add to that the creative tools, weapons, and biomods we allow the player to build a character with, and the game environments become a playground in which each player can come up with a unique playstyle and make the game his own.
