Now, I can’t remember which game it was, but I remember a presentation years ago that described the revolutionary change in level design brought about by being able to place groups of pre-rendered trees. No longer did each tree have to be created on the spot. Wow, what a far way things have come, and even from the Systemic Level Design strategies of Deux Ex senior designer Harvey Smith. Applying properties to object types as opposed to single objects is fairly common these days, but had ironic negatives. If a team isn’t well-organized, good chances are more than one person is modifying master objects/assets and their properties at any given time, without knowing about the changes the other team member is making. Later on, files conflict, and cause a whole mess of problems. To remedy just this very issue, Bungie’s Halo 3 team incorporated an automatic exporter in their art/animation pipeline with details on if the asset was in “checked out” status and by whom to avoid any overwriting of files.
It would have been particularly important for Deus Ex to use this systemic global setting method, given all of the different kinds of gameplay they attempt to tackle. Warren Spector put it well in an E3 interview before Thief: Deadly Shadows’ launch by calling Deus Ex a Swiss army knife and Thief a scalpel. How diplomatic! The only issue I really have here is that Thief’s claim to fame is its stealthing mechanics, sometimes optional, and too much gloating on being “the stealth game” makes me go–hey, hey, now, don’t forget Metal Gear Solid. Deadly Shadows, built on the same technology used for Deus Ex: Invisible War, doesn’t cut it for me in terms of smoothness for a stealth game, but this is not to say the game is not enjoyable. Maybe it’s just hard for me to switch from current games like Uncharted and Assassin’s Creed back to Deadly Shadows because I keep thinking, “Woah, squarey.”
Thankfully, the game does redeem itself in its use of lighting in the form of shadows (I’d hope so!) and time put into A.I. But there’s just something missing in the overall look and feel of the game. So what happened? A rather pointed interview with Deadly Shadows designer Randy Smith asked just that. Here’s where we go back to his good friend Harvey Smith, who advocates for global object properties and enabling emergent gameplay. Unfortunately, the Deadly Shadows team just wasn’t organized enough to really meet the deadlines they needed to. This is also alluded to in Warren Spector’s interview where he points out that the optional third person view was added quite last minute after the team convinced him to drop more money into it. For me, this was an added bonus and saved a lot of the gameplay for me, since I always prefer third person to first person. I often feel too trapped in a certain viewpoint in first person modes. Side-scrollers and god view games like Diablo were really what made me a gamer, so I always feel more comfortable there.
To end on another positive note, the sound depth in Deadly Shadows is a prelude to games like Halo 3 now. Bungie uses a test level covered in different swatches of terrain tiles to test out anything from walking to bullets hitting the ground to rocks that break off a surface also hitting the ground to explosions and so on. Directional audio is even further improved on in Next Gen games. It really matters where you face and how far you are from the origination of the sound. All of these “invisible” elements really enrich games, and I only see them vastly improving the further technology comes.
