Directed by James Herron, edited by Sean Dacanay. Click here for transcript . (video link)
Coming in under the wire here is our last video for 2021—and we tried to make it a fun one. If you play games, chances are you’ve played something that Warren Spector was involved in creating—with stints at Origin, Ion Storm, and Disney, he helped design and/or produce a whole giant pile of famous titles, including Wing Commander , various Ultimas , System Shock , and the title we’re focusing on today: the original Deus Ex .
But even for someone with Warren’s pedigree, and with an amazing and talented design team backing him up, Deus Ex was a challenge to pull off. The idea was to produce a game that enabled the player to approach things in whatever way the player wanted. If you’re playing a shooter like Doom and you run into a difficult section that you can’t get through, there often isn’t an alternate path that involves not shooting; similarly, if you’re playing a sneaker like Thief and you run into a difficult section of a heist where you keep getting detected, you can’t just pull out your sword and start whacking things. (Well, you can , but you’ll quickly wind up dead. ) Frustrated simply by the gameplay linearity of most genres, Warren wanted to do things a different way plus make a game where all play-styles were valid.
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