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Junction Point Studios - Spector Interview @ GamesIndustry

We had fun hotly debating the last Spector interview, so here's another courtesy of GamesIndustry.biz:

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How is life after Deus Ex? How have things moved on from that point?
Well, you know, you're only as good as your last game. I think I got a little too far from the games, for one thing. I really became enamored with being a part of Eidos. I mean, the folks there at the highest levels of executive management actually listened to me for a while, which was a new experience for me.
It was a company I really thought I could help move to the next level. I got so distracted with publisher level stuff that I kind of lost sight of the games. I had very, very talented people there, and I kind of feel as though I didn't mentor them as well as I could have and should have. If I had to do it differently I'd probably pay less attention to the publisher side of stuff and more attention to the games.
But we took a lot of chances in Deadly Shadows and Invisible War, and we did a lot of really, really risky things. And I think too many. Not enough of them paid off. The overall result was games that I'm still proud of, and games that I still enjoy playing and I'm proud to have been involved in the development of, but I don't think they lived up to expectations.

More information.

??? Is this an effort to restore karmetic balance by offsetting the stimulating intellectual conversations of the other thread?

it was a meagre attempt at humour that probably only i found funny as a friend of mine brought up tom robbins last week so the only book of his i read 'still life with woodpecker' was floating in my mind from the ~5 years ago i read it. i found it the only response to Acleacius comment that fit for me. i enjoyed the article even better than the last and while warren spector isn't even in my top 5 developer humanoids i still have a huge interest in his lofty goals and once again thank the maestro Dhruin for digging this one up.

How can you be proud of your game when just about everyone, including those asskissers from gaming websites said DX:IW was vastly inferior to its predecessor?

while the expression may go the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, i find this really devalues efforts people make in life. we can all agree that invisible war was as a whole not as good as the original, but really what were the odds that it could be anyway. i guess it boils down to the two 'philosophies' people tend to associate with 'life is a race'(which involves scoring, checklists, performance ratings, etc.) versus the 'life is a journey'(the abstract:relating to a charcter, artistic content, in depth dialogue, etc).

to me the story of the first game was weaker than the second and that is to this day why i like the 2nd better. to me the realistic terrorism threats, coupled with religious fanaticism, corporate schemery, etc. was far more enthralling than a story that was more occult dealing with a mixture of a bill gates evil twin, the illimuniti (knights of the templar, masons, etc.), and aliens and company from the screens of the x-files(which i did enjoy for the first 5 seasons). i also thought you had much more meaningful choices to make along with some superb dialogue and the option (actually worthwhile in this game) to play both sexes. yes it was riddled with countless more problems but how can someone not be proud of thousands of hours spent and in the end a great story has been told. with most games storylines being worse than a lot of 'b' movies i really don't see how someone could not justify playing this game even it they have to 'struggle' with it.

I liked the story in Invisible War a lot. To me, it was one of the only redeemable parts of the game. As disappointing as the second game was, I wouldn't mind seeing somebody take a shot at a third game, although I doubt that's ever going to happen. It seems to me like every single RPG developer out there is exploring the idea of blurry morality and "shades of grey" but to me, the Deus Ex series is one of the only ones that has ever successfully done this. Deus Ex, Invisible War, and Planescape: Torment are the only games that have ever gotten me thinking philisophically.

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Originally Posted by User Name (Post 23051)

How can you be proud of your game when just about everyone, including those asskissers from gaming websites said DX:IW was vastly inferior to its predecessor?

Actually, the asskissers still did the asskissing when Invisible War came out. ign gave it a 90% and Greg Kasavin at Gamespot gave it an 80%, only 2% below the original game. Invisible War was one of those games like Jade Empire and Black and White that pretty much the entire media overrated.

I really enjoyed the original DX, tried the IW demo and went YUK!! I didn't buy it!!

Story in IW was good quality, I think we all can agree with that one. Hwoever it wasn't as thrilling as the plot in first deus ex. The first part was greater in every area of gamedesign. I couldn't enjoy the plot in jw because gameplay was so frustraiting and lacked depth! It wasn't a great rpg and it wasn't a great action game.

I loved Thief Deadly Shadows (aside from the dumb guards captured perfectly by CAD), but Infinite War … I feel this is one of those stories I retell again and again … so I'll quote from my old blog entry …

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Bringing Closure to Two Years of Hate

Two years already? … two years. On December 2nd, 2003 Deus Ex: Invisible War was released - and I was there on the day of release to get it. Sure, there was a demo a couple of weeks prior, but I had already decided I didn't want to spoil the beginning … see, I was such a big Deus Ex fan that I *knew* it would be great.

Only it wasn't. In fact, not only was it a mediocre game, and a *huge* disappointment to fans of the original, it was also a complete pig in terms of performance. Not only that, it showed too many hallmarks of being designed 'console first' including some settings that explicitly said 'for XBox, if used on PC change this to X' but hadn't been changed.

I hated this game, oh how I hated it … from playing this sad excuse for a Deus Ex game - which crawled and stuttered on my brand new laptop with a 3.2GHz processor and a 128MB nVidia 5220 card, as well as my slightly older desktop - came my first gaming resolution: if there is a demo, play it! I had gotten complacent based on successfully skipping available demos for Jedi Academy and others.

But that was two years ago, and I have a new computer. I decided that it was time to confront this old ghost once again. First I took a look at GameRankings and for some reason the average score for this game is >80%. That I don't get … but anyway …

I was also surprised that it was on 2 CD's … have I become so used to 4 CD installs that 2 CD's seems svelte? It installed quickly, and I patched it up to 1.2 … which too a surprisingly long time.

But what surprised me most were the graphics and performance - the graphics didn't look that great, and the game breezed as if I was playing an old game. Sure, I have an nVidia 7800GT with 256MB, but still … So I cranked the setting little by little, until everything was maxed out - and it still didn't look all that great. I'm not expecting Half-Life 2 or F.E.A.R. here, this game didn't stand up to my maxed out No One Lives Forever 2!

Finally, the gameplay. It isn't as bad as I remembered - I still don't think it is 80% material, but I not longer hate it for wasting my $50 and representing an insult to the legacy of Deus Ex. So I can let go of the hate, but remember the lessons - a great game doesn't mean a great sequel, and always, ALWAYS play demos when they are available.

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Originally Posted by txa1265 (Post 23112)

Admittedly Thief 3, wasn't as bad as I feared. But let's face it: For everyone who had played the first two parts it had to be very disappointing from an objective point of view. You know, somehow I expect that the enemies in the third part of a game have a better AI than those in the previous two parts, especially in a game in which AI is pretty much the core of the game.
There were also some very dubious other decissions, like the removel of the rope arrow. Why do you remove one of the most innovative features that gaming had ever seen. I made soooooo damn much with these arrows in the first two parts.

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The overall result was games that I'm still proud of, and games that I still enjoy playing and I'm proud to have been involved in the development of, but I don't think they lived up to expectations.

Right. It's probably one of the things that I'll never forgive him, but nice that he realized it himself. It's what happens if you do not listen to the fans… Message boards were crawling of things that Ionstorm should not do or change - they did it anyway. I just hope he learned his lesson.