You know how when Deus Ex 3 first came out, it had boss fights that you couldn’t get around, you were just forced to fight and kill a guy? And everyone was mad? And later the devs patched in other options, basically one for every style of play you might be into?
Well I’ve decided they were right the first time
Deus Ex 1 is the big amazing immersive sim nobody can live up to, because it’s pretty uncompromisingly systemic. A lot of designers interpret “systemic” as “every problem has several different solutions depending on what kind of player you are”, but that’s not it. That’s just “design five locked door puzzles”.
Deus Ex forces you to specialise (to what degree is slightly up to you), you can’t be good at everything, and no one skillset gets you through every situation. There’s hackable keypads, pickable locks, breakable doors, robots, computers, findable codes and keys and stealthable guys, but at the end of the day, sometimes a big robot is in a narrow hallway and you have to blow it up. If every situation contains an accommodation for every skill – “there has to be a vent to go around the robot, a computer to remotely hack it, a killphrase to yell at it”, every single time, that’s not a sim, it’s a choice of numbered corridors where players commit early on to which number they’ll always pick.
Deus Ex is a sim because it’s “keypads exist, hacking exists, lockpicks exist, things are breakable, things are heavy, things are poisonous, things are electrified, etc etc” and then it deploys all those systems in contexts which don’t care that those systems exist. Which isn’t a style of level design that works well for games that aren’t sims, and the lack of it is why 3 doesn’t land as a sim. In 3, you’re never like “hmm, I like to do X, but that’s not an option here”. It’s always an option, because the game cares that your type of player exists more than it cares whether the place you’re in could exist. The boss fights were the only exception. They were the smart bit!
Most designers would play a Deus Ex level full of keypad locks and say, “Hmm, they’re not giving Lockpick Masters enough to do here. They need a better balance of keypads to conventional locks!” But that’s wrong, because it’s a sim. The building needs to not care where you’ve invested your XP. If it cares, the player is never up against anything. The best moments and player stories from immersive sims are things that most designers would have optimised out.
There’s a possibly-apocryphal story about Warren Spector insisting that everywhere in Deus Ex 1 be based on a blueprint of a real place, which is supposed to be a nightmare thing to do and whatever, but if true, I really think it’s a huge part of why it ends up working. It just makes sense. How do you design a space for a simulation? Maybe you barely design it at all.
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