Warren Spector: Exclusive interview!

In a month's time, Ion Storm's first-person shooter-cum-RPG sequel Deus Ex: Invisible War will arrive in Europe. March 5, 2004, is the current street date; and while European fans of the original may be grumbling about the US getting the game some 12 weeks earlier, the good news is that the developer has spent the intervening interim tweaking, polishing and fine-tuning the title for its arrival on these shores.

Hell, it's enough to make us feel all warm and gooey inside.

Naturally, Deus Ex: Invisible War's imminent arrival has meant one last tour for respected Ion Storm studio director Warren Spector. We trekked into the heart of London yesterday for what turned out to be a rather interesting chat...

Obviously there's been quite a lengthy gap between the US release of Deus Ex: Invisible War and the European release. What have you done to the game in the interim for the European release - what are the fundamental differences?

Spector: We shipped the game in the US on December 2, 2003, and here we are releasing the game in Europe on March 5. And what that did is it gave us time to actually gauge real player response. You know, as much testing as we did - and boy we did a lot - you never really know how a game is going to be received.

And there were some things that we read about that we just disagreed with - players were saying X, Y and Z and we thought: "No, that's crazy, we still like that." But there were some things where we were like: "Oh my gosh, they're right."

And so we were able to gauge real player responses. A lot of people have played the game now, and we've made some changes. In particular, there were some weapons that players thought were balanced incorrectly, and it was like: "Ooh, Well, they're not right about this one but they are right about that one - we should have caught that."

So we've adjusted some of the weapon balancing, Players hated our installer [laughs]. It sounds like nothing, be we wrote a new installer from scratch. We've also worked on performance. I've never done games that are blazingly fast, sadly, because I'm more interested in pouring in play features as opposed to smooth framerate - which is crazy.

But we've actually optimized the engine now to get about a 20 percent increase in framerate across the board. In some places it's really dramatic.

The user interface has also had some attention - there were a few things that we should have really caught with the UI.

And so, again... In the same way that Invisible War... what we were trying to do was take the best bits of Deus Ex and optimize them. There were things in the US release of Invisible that we loved and we've kept those, and the things that didn't work we've taken out. So we're trying to make the European version the best version possible.

Presumably you'll patch the US version of Deus Ex: Invisible War to bring it in line with the European version?

Spector: Yes, absolutely. We're taking all this stuff and US players will be able to download a patch.

Reaction to the Deus Ex: Invisible War demo was mixed, many making negative comments - did that surprise you, or were you prepared for those reactions?

Spector: I wouldn't say it surprised us but... Here's the thing. Deus Ex is not a game you can just pick up and play - I mean, I'm sorry. I do things, I tell Eidos all the time - I'm ready to make decisions and do things that are going to cost us sales; because there's a greater good, you know [chuckles]. And so you're going to have to invest your own time, as a player, to learn the ins and outs of the game. And if you give us time, I think we'll just absolutely win you over.

If what you want to do is run around and blow stuff up, it's not going to work for you, but if you start figuring out that instead of piling in headfirst you can go through that door or through that window... If you're a sympathetic player you're going to love it. It's hard to get that across in a demo.

In addition, one of the big things about Deus Ex, one of the things that makes players sympathetic I think is that we really try to make the story, characters and the situation as compelling as possible. How do you get that across in a demo that's only supposed to have 15 to 30 minutes of gameplay so too much isn't given away?

We've got a game that you have to invest time in to learn how to play, and we're not giving you what is in many ways the best bit! So either we have to give away four hours of the game in a demo or we have to hope that players understand that there will never be... I'm going to go on the record: there will never be a demo of a Deus Ex game that conveys even 10 percent of what the actual game's all about.

When we spoke last November, you were telling us that preliminary work has already begun on the third Deus Ex game. Can we expect three to be as much a departure from two as two is from one?

Spector: Absolutely. I mean, the day we start turning out sequels simply to make a quick buck is the day someone else is going to be making Deus Ex games.

So can we expect to see major changes in the core gameplay and the user interface that you have in Invisible War, in number three?

Spector: I think that what you'll see is us continuing to carve away the bits that don't work and add on the bits that will make it more Deus Ex-like. I can't talk specifics about that, but there are some things... I told Harvey Smith, Deus Ex: Invisible War project director, to give me ulcers - you know, make decisions that make me scream. And he did. And some of them ended up working, and some of them didn't. And I'm not going to tell you which is which [laughs].

But with the third game, obviously we're going to address the things that don't work in Invisible War; and so yeah, it's going to be as different to Invisible War as Invisible War is to the first Deus Ex. It's all about the Deus Ex gameplay experience, to make it better, purer, to give players more control over the experience.

Is Deus Ex going to remain a strictly single-player experience, or are you going to branch out into the online side of things?

Spector: Firstly, I hope that there is always a single-player Deus Ex. I can certainly see there being a multiplayer game set in the Deus Ex universe with a lot of the Deus Ex gameplay philosophy underneath it. Deus Ex was largely inspired by Junction Point, a game design that I did with some other people at Looking Glass which never got made - it was an online-only massively multiplayer game.

And so, I know that a lot of the stuff we do in Deus Ex would work in a multiplayer context. It wouldn't surprise me to see a multiplayer Deus Ex game, but there'd better always be a single-player version - because that's where you're really going to get the meat of the storytelling, with players collaborating with developers to tell a cool story.

Do you think we're ever going to see that kind of single-player experience in an online-only, massively multiplayer title?

Spector: Somebody way smarter than me is going to have to figure out how to do that. I'll start playing multiplayer games and stop saying things like "all multiplayer games suck", which they do, when someone solves that problem. So somebody get working on solving that problem.

Ion Storm's working on Thief: Deadly Shadows at the moment. How does it compare to Invisible War, in terms of the gameplay experience on offer?

Spector: Thief and Deus Ex are kissing cousins. The difference is that Deus Ex is a sort of "play it the way you want" experience, it's the Swiss Army knife - we can do anything with it. It may not be the best at anything, but it does everything, right? And Thief is all about stealth. You know, it's about different approaches to stealth, but it's about sneaking around [laughs]... And stealing stuff...

That focus gives Thief a completely different feel, but obviously there's a certain amount of crossover between the two games.

Are the games sharing technology?

Spector: Yes and no. The core technology is shared, but it's literally two separate code-bases. The AI is radically, radically different in Thief, because there we can tune the game completely and perfectly for the stealth experience - in Deus Ex, when you walk into a room you don't know if the characters in there are going to be your friends or your enemies or scared of you, you know.

A lot of the game systems are different. Deus Ex has the interactive conversation thing, for example, and Thief does not.

Does Ion Storm have other games to announce or reveal in the future that aren't in the Thief or Deus Ex universes?

Spector: To announce? No, no! Wink, wink, nudge, nudge. They'll kill me if I say anything [looks at patrolling Eidos PR and laughs].

Hmm. Should we be especially looking forward to E3 this year?

Spector: No, that's too soon. Sorry. But you should definitely look forward.

Stuart Bishop