29-May-2002 We catch up on the sequel to one of the greatest games of recent years and get an eyeful of updated graphics If you're into games, you've heard of Deus Ex. Designer Warren Spector's creation was the only title to survive the Ion Storm farce, gathering Game of the Year awards at an astonishing rate, saving Spector's neck while Romero and Hall faced the axe, and spawning a sequel. We took a first look at the upcoming PC and Xbox first-person adventure at E3 last week.
Deus Ex put players in the shoes of government agent JC Denton as he unravelled a futuristic conspiracy plot. The title garnered praise for its depth and freedom, features solidly added to the sequel.
The man answering the questions is associate producer Mike Orenich. Hear him roar.
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Orenich: This is DX2: Invisible War. Right now we're showing the game on Xbox: the PC version is on the showfloor. We're releasing on multiple platforms simultaneously in 2003. We have no specific month set yet and we can't say for sure as it's 2003. Once we get a little bit closer we'll have a better picture on exactly which month we're going to release.
DX2 takes place 15 years after the end of the first game. If you're familiar with the first game, you'll know there are three different clone chambers at Area 51. One had JC Denton, one had Paul Denton, and there was another one there that had Alex D. You start the game playing Alex D. At the beginning of the game we give you the choice of being a male or a female.
Unlike the first game, we're not going to start it off where you choose your hair colour, choose your sex, this and that. We start the game right in the middle. As you start to wake up and start to immerse yourself in the world, that's when you start to make decisions, like who you are, particularly in the first room where you have to enter your gender to get through the door so it can recognise you. That's the type of way you're going to make the decision on, "Who am I? Am I a male or a female? What do I want to play?" Once you make that decision you get into the world and that's where you begin as Alex.
JC Denton and Paul Denton still have very prominent roles in DX 2, along with a lot of the other characters from the first game.
[Points to screen] Check out the technology. It was one of the things that limited us in the first part. What we've done is license the Havoc physics engine, so all the objects in the world now have physics. Before, a lot of these objects were static. If I go ahead and throw a grenade over here, you notice that it moves the couches and plants around when it explodes. These items are no longer grounded and that goes for all the objects in the game now.
It looks like you've updated the graphics a great deal, as the first one wasn't really visually spectacular was it?
Orenich: Yes. Ion Storm licensed the Epic technology to begin this project, using the SDK editor to use the maps. Ion Storm has written its own renderer, allowing us to do real-time lighting, volumetric shadows, as well as doing a spectral pass with the lighting. If you look at these models, they're actually 3,000 polys, although they look closer to 40,000. If I turn a light on the model [snaps on torch], you can see that the shadows in the light actually affect the way the textures look. That isn't actually a 3D fold in his arm there, it's not polygonal.
In terms of game-play, you're making sure you can still react with pretty much anything in the world?
Orenich: Exactly. The game-play really isn't changing from the first game: it's something we know we really got right: the ability to interact with the world, making decisions and having consequences to those decisions.
So in addition to being able to pick up this chair you can knock it over. How are we advancing the game-play with the physics and the lighting? I'll show you in this next room.
Just like in the first game you'll be able to pick up boxes and move them around, turn lights on and off. Now you can actually knock lights over. If you take a look at this cleaner bot right here, the shadows are volumetric. As it comes out of the light it's casting over the entire floor, not just over the texture. He has his own light source as well, that's cutting into the shadow cast by another light source. There's only one other game at the show that's showing anything like this [Red Dead Revolver by Capcom - Ed], but nobody else is actually putting it into the game-play.
In our game you'll actually be able to move a box into the corner, create your own shadow and hide in it. Alternatively, the AI will be able to come over and look for you in the shadow. It will know that people hide in shadows, and that's something we've done on the technical front that we couldn't do before.
What's going on in terms of plot? Is it a similar situation to last time, involving a large conspiracy?
Orenich: It's very similar. We're all big on the conspiracy type of thing. We like the fact that different factions in the world compete for power and direction over humanity. The game occurs 15 years after the end of the first game, during which time there is an event known as the Great Collapse. There were three different endings available in the original, and in the second game you'll find out exactly what happened with those different endings.
What about the actual length of the game?
Orenich: You know, some people were actually able to play through the game very quickly, while others took 60 hours to play through. I wouldn't say we've actually shortened the game or the story, but it's not going to be as long; the story's more concise.
Have you had to adapt the game in any way to incorporate consoles? Is it the same game on each format?
Orenich: It's launching simultaneously for both platforms [PC and Xbox, with PS2 to follow - Ed], so we just wanted to do it as a game. We wanted to be able to make it accessible to everybody. Because we're doing it for consoles as well as PC, we've streamlined the interface. You're still going to have the keyboard control with all the different functions on the keyboard.
Don't you think the fact that you're making it for consoles as well as PC is going to water down the PC version? Do you think that PC users are going to be as impressed as they were with the first games?
Orenich: Actually, yes. I don't think it's going to be watered down at all. In fact, what you're seeing now on the Xbox is exactly what you'll see on PC. The PC version is running at a higher resolution right now with a GeForce 4: we went for the high end. In order to get everything we wanted for the game systems, such as the AI, the lighting, the audio and the shadows, we really couldn't count any one of them out. Our focus was really on the game itself, not on the platform we were developing it for. Clearly, if you want to develop for all platforms, you don't want to develop one version for PC and a dumbed down version for another. Our approach is strictly to make the game we want for every platform.
