
Annotated version of an original Deus Ex design doc surfaces - Impossible
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/285520/Annotated_version_of_an_original_Deus_Ex_design_doc_surfaces.php
======
harlanlewis
This is cool to see.

I even more enjoyed the oral history of Deus Ex development that it links to
from the intro. A really fun, nostalgic, and pretty relateable read. And
somewhat in contradiction to this post, has the quote:

> From what I can recall, there was no continuously updated design doc for
> Deus Ex. If there was, I never saw it and I didn't get access to it.

Another cool excerpt:

> Basic sounds in speech, like "ah" or "ooh" or whatever, they all have
> frequency fingerprints, basically. Even with the low CPU power at our
> disposal, I could do a really low-resolution fast Fourier transform to
> analyze the speech as it was being output to the sound card, chop it up and
> try to match it with phonemes. Then I could use that to send hints to the
> animation system to move the lips.

> So I had the artists animate the face bones, of which we only had like two,
> I think -- it was super low-poly -- and I had 'em go with eight phonemes to
> animate face poses for. Except, they'd do it on the base pose and I'd blend
> in the animations on the face in real time based on what the audio does.

… for a game that came out in 2000! Pretty cool.

[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240456/Developing_Deus_Ex_An_oral_history.php)

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arcanus
One famous piece of trivia about Deus Ex is that, if you look at the city
skyline during the missions set in New York City, the Twin Towers are
conspicuously absent. The real reason for their exclusion isn’t very
interesting: something to do with memory constraints. So in the game’s
fiction, the Towers were destroyed by terrorists. Deus Ex was released in
2000, a year before 9/11.

\----

'How deus ex predicted the future'

[https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex-
predicted-...](https://www.google.com/amp/kotaku.com/how-deus-ex-predicted-
the-future-1616252703/amp?client=ms-android-att-us)

~~~
fenomas
The specifics here are that the New York skyline was originally two big
textures covering two faces of the skybox. Late in production, to save video
memory they cut one texture and replaced it with a mirror of the other one, of
course cutting the side with the towers so that they wouldn't show up twice.

(Source is an old IGN interview that I hunted down ages ago, because every
time this trivia shows up somewhere there tends to be a comment war about how
removing a building from a skyline _couldn 't possibly_ save memory, blather
blather.)

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popeshoe
Deus Ex got me at the perfect time in my life (15 y/o pseudo-intellectual
nerd) so I really loved the game, so reading this was great. Such was my nerd
infatuation with this game, that as I was reading about the various locations,
the corresponding music would pop into my brain almost immediately, a
testament to the great soundtrack (eg.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9FZ-12a3dTI)
)

Especially interesting is seeing how the times and what we expect from
videogames have changed, on page 23 there's a dejected nod to people expecting
a 90s first person game to have multiplayer, even though it's primarily a
single player RPG, but they'll do it as a bullet point to go on the back of
the box.

~~~
jscheel
Definitely agree about the soundtrack. I find myself listening to it while
working quite a bit.

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SticksAndBreaks
Ah, the good old times, when the cost of creativity wasnt so astronomically
high. If you wanted to risk something, you would just take some time of the
working-charts and do it, letting the team then vote on results. No- push your
idea in front of the high council, no guiding whats left of it along the
pipeline, you just wrote the dialogue, scripted the mission, reused some
existing assets, and polished it till it was accepted.

Those where the days.

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ehnto
I am currently playing Mankind Divided and have been reading into the art
direction from interviews with the art director.

I just love the world they have created and the way they utilize it to tell
the story. One of their ethos is "show don't tell" and you can see they have
really taken it to heart. The locations tell the story just as well as the
dialog does.

~~~
frik
You simple cannot compare Deus Ex 3 and 4 with Deus Ex 1. Deus Ex 1 is a much
different and better game, a lot of thought went into it, the player can do so
much more it's not even funny. No other game with Deus Ex in the name comes
even close. Play Deus Ex 1 first and come back later, though some may never
get into DX1 because the graphics hasn't aged that well.

~~~
papaf
We used to play Deus Ex 1 in a pair. The game was so different for each player
and their playing style that it never got boring. We completed the whole game
in this way.

One highlight that I remember was the explanation of mass surveillance being a
replacement for less religion in a society. In the past people censored
themselves because God was always watching. It was hoped that people would
continue to censor themselves because Echelon was always recording and
datamining.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1b-bijO3uEw)

This was an optional cut scene and not part of the main story -- my friend
found this, I never got this cut scene when I played.

I agree that Deus Ex 1 is so special that anything after does not compare.
This does not belittle the sequels, its just that the original was so good.

~~~
int_19h
"God was a dream of good government" is a very interesting idea to ponder.

~~~
ZenoArrow
If you'd like more to ponder, the formation of the Roman Catholic church may
be worth exploring.

~~~
int_19h
Eastern Orthodoxy, with its "symphonia of powers" caesaropapism, is equally
interesting IMO.

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pluma
Fascinating how the design doc simultaneously seems to describe an entirely
different game yet already shares so many similarities with what would finally
become Deus Ex.

EDIT: The postmortem linked at the end of the post also includes an even older
pitch for the game from 1994 which has even less in common with the final
release. It's amazing how the game mutated from "rugged ex-cop action movie
shooter" to "cyberpunk conspiracy drama" where it's actually possible to beat
the game without killing anyone.

~~~
Narishma
> where it's actually possible to beat the game without killing anyone.

It's been a long time since I last played the game but I don't believe that's
true without cheating.

~~~
skoczymroczny
without any bug exploiting, you can use killphrases on anne and run away from
gunther (or use killphrase too). I think Howard Strong is the only guy you
have to actually kill.

~~~
Paul_S
Technically you also kill (indirectly) the crew of the ship you scuttle,
Maggie, the Area 51 staff who are outside when you diverted the missile etc.

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biot
Is the actual PDF available somewhere instead of having to jump through Scribd
hoops?

~~~
pmh
It's shared via Google Drive from the reddit post[0] linked in the OP:
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_-knUokw90RzIwUEJsU2pYdWs/view)

[0]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5crvld/full_dx1_desi...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/5crvld/full_dx1_design_doc_with_annotations_by_warren/)

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ivank
[https://nuwen.net/dx.html](https://nuwen.net/dx.html) also has a ton of
information about the game

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justanton
Reinstalling.

~~~
Paul_S
The installation along with mods is less than a GB so I optimised by not
uninstalling it in the first place.

