Kat A. Beckett

I also feel like Deus Ex had a lot of stuff that most people saw as random bullshit chores, but were really seem at least partially there to balance other skillsets, exactly because of it being based on real world ideas for buildings instead of map design tropes.

in Deus Ex, there's more ways to prevent dead-ends, the one that comes to mind as most-complained-about but actually pretty brilliant, is the 'you get to choose between two implants from each drop' implant system. it's possible to have built your character and your skills terribly, it's possible you've used all your rockets, etc etc. But if they can design paths that each of those implants can use? Well, the player just has to wander until they find the implant. The paths don't need to be obviously connected -- the implants could be very different. But it lets design happen where you don't need to be as afraid to soft-lock a player with limited choices -- you just make it clear they originally made the wrong one, and that ideally finding the right one will be time consuming (negative) but puzzle solving (rewarding)

I have no idea how intentional that was. But I was delighted the two levels I found it playing a hyperspecialized build that turned out to be very bad for most of the midgame a few years ago

yeah they definitely got themselves into a corner with the design by going into the process with an initial, overriding goal of "every playstyle must be viable" and then not considering whether that made sense or was a good idea.

when you can get past every challenge in the game by, i dunno, seduction? airdropping memes? it becomes obviously forced

i'm still mad that happened because it gave us a weird couple of years where western game dev became absolutely allergic to including anything that might be described as a "boss fight"

thank god for Dark Souls

game design is weird, because if it's too well-designed and too balanced, it ends up sterile and boring. you need parts that are badly-designed because that's actually good, but you need to know what exact parts to do this with so it doesn't turn out bad for real, and it's all just really complicated and interesting! i've never played either of these games, but it's the kind of thing i think about a lot, since it's always amazing when a game feels like an actual place you can walk around in.

Interesting. I think it's a great point to separate the imsim factor from the "every build is viable" factor, and that's helpful. But when it's a game that lets you have very different builds, the game kinda has to accommodate them. I'm not saying it has to make them equally easy/difficult -- just that someone with no weapons silently putting everyone to sleep needs to be able to somehow pull through a boss fight with whatever is given to them in that space.

And they do do that! They give you weapons and ammo and environmental hazards to get by! So this isn't my point of criticism of the game.

But in the end, even though the game recognises non-lethal runs and you can non-lethal beat the bosses, you ultimately get a cutscene after each boss fight of the boss full of bullet holes and dying. And when you ultimately have exactly two ways to defeat a boss, pretending like you always choose option A even when you chose option B feels very un Deus Ex.

PS: Even though the gameplay of the bosses technically works from an imsim POV (cutscenes aside), the DLC boss who you could sneak up behind and kill (or not) just like a regular pleb enemy felt so much more fun in comparison

I kind of want to agree with this take in the abstract - sometimes there is just a big dude in your way, sometimes - but just thinking about the boss arenas, it's not like it makes a whole lot of sense for all of them to just Be There. Contrast this to the original Deus Ex "bosses" (Gunther, Anna, Simons) where you'd run into them just kind of...on the way somewhere or in an awkward place, like a hallway or something.

(As a side note, Simons's little shack in Area 51 is a personal favorite just because you can absolutely annihilate it and him inside it if you know he's there whether or not he's popped out and that just works)

I agree with the thesis that these style of games have come to lean too much on giving every possible option viability at all times but disagree that DXHR got something right with the original boss designs.

They lend themselves towards what you're saying, but the problem is that they do not lend themselves to a game already designed with all options being viable. Since DXHR never asks the player to be flexible with other options, the player comes to expect that they never have to do so and the bosses stand out in a bad way. Which I'd say makes the boss designs the wrong pick for DXHR's design, or DXHR's design a bad pick for the bosses (take your pick).

In a hypothetical DXHR that had levels outside of bosses that didn't always provide every option I think you'd be right. Though I'd also say that having every boss in the game require the same basic toolkit (every single one is combat-focused) isn't a good design for either the hypothetical DXHR or the one we actually got.

I remember Steve Lee talking about the philosophy of Arkane's level design saying (among other things) that they wanted players to engage with the encounters they had. Not bypass them by sneaking through a vent or something. They just tried to make sure the player had enough tools to deal with it and could express themselves in how they wanted to solve the problem.

It was very much an approach of "Players build a tool kit" and "Level Designers build interesting problems" Yes there is a right tool for certain jobs; but maybe their isn't or maybe you don't have it and you improvise. This really lets the player come up with 'their solution' instead of the solution (or passing a head clicking skill test or something).

I think this is why Mooncrash is such a good Immersive Sim. It keeps showing you the same/similar problems and then makes you change your tool kit, by swapping characters. That re-contextualizing of the problems is what makes it a great immersive sim.

In the Deus Ex level I'm trying to design right now (really fighting the editor on this one, just need more hours) I find the most useful inspiration is real world locations that are asymmetrical. While symmetry is kinda boring from a level design perspective, lots of buildings get repurposed and end up wonky and asymmetrical. I'm also really gaining an appreciation for how different stealth game design is from just your average first person shooter. I still have an eye for all the skills and abilities that the player could have and I want them to be useful; but everything is situational. And that also means not everything is useful in every situation.

This is exactly the reason why I enjoy DXHR's late-game twist, where Illuminati bigwig Hugh Darrow sends out a signal to drive all augmented people mad and turn them into the equivalent of bum-rushing zombies. You only deal with these "zombies" in the final level, a massive oceanic engineering facility run by Darrow and populated with workers who've had one or both of their arms replaced with mechanical augmentations that don't even pretend to resemble human arms. They're all purely functional manipulator claws or soldering irons, further reducing these people to the tools their masters consider them to be. There's also the fact that they have to pay out-of-pocket to upgrade and maintain their augmentations in order to keep their jobs, and then Darrow ruins their lives even further at the push of a button because he wants to make a stupid point

And then you come along, and you have to get past them. These are innocent people who have been robbed of their choices, and now they have no choice but to attack you. You can kill them (you monster), knock them out (laborious), or just evade them (not always possible). It's a completely novel encounter that you haven't needed or been able to adapt to, so you're forced to rethink your tactics on the fly. It's one of the most Deus Ex things DXHR has to offer, so of course it was maligned by reviews at the time

Having only played the original Deus Ex, my take is a bit limited. But a thing that I think works in the old one that I don't think I saw much in HR and onward is that there are like 10 systems, and when you limit an encounter, you don't limit it to 1 system, you limit it to 4.

To take the same example of there's a mech in the hallway. You can't hack, multitool or lockpick your way around it. But you might sneak, run or tough it out to get around it, you can fight it with small guns, big guns, grenades (explosive or EMP), melee.

And these sort of bottle necks happen often enough through the game that it disincentivizes being fully focused on one thing and you're likely to have picked up an applicable skill, so you're probably not softlocked at any point. Yeah, liberty island is "every approach is viable" because it's the first mission, you have to present all the options so that players can poke around and figure out what appeals to them. But later on it's usually "sorry, there's very little to hack here, have you considered lifting heavy boxes instead?".

Except swimming. All my homies hate swimming.

The simulationism argument would work a bit better if those bosses weren't implemented such that the way you actually fight them, if you're not already fully combat-specialized or lugging a giant laser through the level as a "skip boss fight" button that occupies half your inventory, was stuff like hanging out in the closet they can't path into or aim a grenade at and shooting them in the head for 10 minutes straight.

While the original DX could throw situations at you you weren't ideally equipped for they were just as you described - a big robot of the kind you've dealt with elsewhere in the world, only you can't deal with them the easy way now; a normal map with the usual array of options for navigating it (in fact typically a map you've already passed through) but now there's an unusually tough and aggressive illuminati cyborg chasing you through it. The crucial immersive element here is not that it just randomly screws you sometimes (which it does) but that it establishes how the game-world works early on and then everything that follows is a new interaction of those established elements - the same kind of thing people find compelling about city sims or Dwarf Fortress or any of these other janky, intricate little worlds-in-a-bottle. This is a very different kind of creature than HR's dedicated Fight Arenas and their special boss AI that follows an entirely different, sillier set of rules than everyone else; the former is speaking the vocabulary the whole game's built on in an unexpected order and the latter's closer to one of those plot doors you must unlock by solving the Towers of Hanoi

I agree on the level design commentary. Making sure there is always a vent, a control panel, password post-it, stealth takedown racing line, etc. makes your choices not matter and the world lacks verisimilitude. Making sure all the options are relevant is good, blindly investing points into something you later find you cannot use isn't fun either, but there has to be a time your tools don't work for you to appreciate them.

The bosses were still lame, though :P If "everying works" is your design philosphy then it is weird to drop it for the boss fights, but honestly I don't remember people being mad they couldn't lockpick master their way through them or whatever. They were upset it turned into a bad MGS boss where you were forced to explode someone's face with a gun.

One thing I found funny about Human Revolution is that, because of the discourse around “””forced combat””” I decided I wanted to actually play as, and I quote, “Action Jensen”.

I intentionally tried to build around bulldozing through the levels, but I found this INCREDIBLY difficult. Even with full defensive augments you still can’t take too many hits, and when the alarms start blaring you get very quickly overwhelmed. If anything, the game really punishes you for not being a stealthy boy.

Some of us were mad because there was an achievement for "get through the entire game without killing anyone" ... and for some reason, that was defined as "anyone except the three bosses that you have no choice but to kill." 😕

The weird misogyny ranting that is played over Boss #2, who herself is silent the entire time, didn't endear the encounter, either.

The DXHR design decision I always come back to is the first proper 'social boss battle', with Haas. In so far as I could tell, these sequences randomly selected one of a number of possible dialogue path, and you had to try to guess enough correct options on the path to beat them.

They gave Haas a profile that explicitly said he was 'looking for absolution' and labelled one of the buttons in his battle 'Absolve'. Unfortunately, this option was only correct in some of his dialogue paths - sometimes, it would cause you to fail the encounter completely.

A lot of players saw that profile, assumed it meant that the way to play the encounter was to press 'Absolve', and then - when they ended up being told off by Haas and locked out of progressing the plot that way - assumed this meant that winning social boss battles was entirely RNG-based.

They took one of their game's USPs and trained players to play it the opposite of how they wanted them to play it - to assume that they didn't have to pay attention to what the character was saying or think about how they should reply. All thanks to having a poorly-thought-through label on part of their interface.

(Now that I mention it, didn't LA Noire do something similar with their own dialogue system? I recall reading that they actually changed the button labels in a rerelease because it was so unclear what they actually did.)