So now that the new trailer is out for Deus Ex 3, I thought I'd put out some ideas and thoughts on what the 3rd game in the series can learn from the previous two.



Keep Your Options Open

I've mentioned before that the Deus Ex games had a perfect mix of giving the player a clear goal but also giving them absolute freedom to explore the world and come up with their solution at their own pace. The first level in Deus Ex encapsulates this perfectly: at the start of the level you are given a main objective, with a few supplemental goals. There's never any doubt what you have to do, find the shipment of the plague cure ambrosia and arrest the terrorist leader. How you go about it could mean charging in, guns blazing. You could stealthily gain access to a side door and enter the Status of Liberty that way. You could use electronics skills to hack the security grid and get the cameras and droids to work for you. My preferred method was a mix of all of the above, making strategies on the fly. Deus Ex 3 won't need a huge open world like GTA IV (although an early Warren Spector design for the first game had the whole thing set in a small corner of NYC), it just needs open levels with clear goals and the freedom to make your own game up.



Don't be afraid to look at recent games for inspiration

It's more than fair to say that gameplay mechanics have developed a lot since the first two Deus Ex games: cover mechanics, shooting and character interactions have all come on leaps and bounds in this generation of consoles. I'm a big fan of the Mass Effect series so far, partially because it's become a good shooter, but also because it's streamlined a lot of RPG elements in the game. The player's decisions and interactions are the role playing elements, not the mass of stats and clogged up inventory. If Deus Ex went down a similar path, I would not object. Your'e not going to find a bigger Deus Ex fan than myself, but I'm no purist; I don't want to descend into one of those Fallout fans who hate Fallout 3 simply because it isn't exactly the same as the first 2 Fallout games. I have no preference if Deus Ex 3 was an FPS or third-person shooter, those mechanics I'm equally happy with. If there's one thing that the game can do better it's voice acting. Christ, some of the voices in the Hong Kong and Paris levels were abysmal. But hey, keep the literary references; I went and read G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday after reading excerpts from it in Deus Ex.



PC Exclusive?

I'm mainly a PC gamer so allow me to be frank: a third party developer releasing a game purely on the PC isn't going to see a big return for it's investment. Even Valve releases games cross platform, and outside MMORPGs, RTS games and hardcore RPG games very few AAA games are released only on the PC. That being said, cross platform development isn't the bogeyman that PC gamers bemoaned at the start of the century. Despite this console generation's age, the technological gulf between PC games and console games is still not as big as it once was. Considering that a lot of big name games have a cross platform release with the X-Box 360 and PC (Metro 2033, Mass Effect 2 are two recent ones), then there's no reason why a hold back a new Deus Ex game, then way the limitations of the original X-box held back a lot of the design of Deus Ex 2. Most of the games I've bought recently have all been multi-platform titles; Mass Effect 2, Bioshock 2, Modern Warfare 2, Borderlands, Dragon Age: Origins.... mind you, if the game was a PC exclusive utilising Steam to all it's benefits then I wouldn't complain....



Stay Cyberpunk!

Cyberpunk is my favourite sci-fi genre; if you couldn't tell from my cblog header, I'm a massive Blade Runner fan. It's mix of high tech with film noir stylings is completely captivating to me and cyberpunk as a whole seems to have borrowed from this aesthetic wholesale. Despite being a supposedly passe genre of literature, I've still gotten a lot out of the genre as I've been catching up on the works of William Gibson and Neal Stephens over the last 10 years. The problem with cyberpunk is that it's near future ideas have quickly been overtaken by our real life technological advancements. Ten years ago, with the Internet suddenly booming, did anyone predict we could have mobile devices that were more powerful than our desktop computers. William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel Neuromancer still had date being moved around on tape drives. These days we see more and more incredible tech advances that puts to shame the science fiction of yesteryear. Yet, the aesthetics of cyberpunk still interest me, maybe because a lot of the genre's standards are timeless stuff; mysteries, detective work, bleak outlooks, film-noir atmosphere, urban sprawl, everyday use of fantastic technology, the chance to see what tomorrow holds.... if Deus Ex 3 can hold onto these elements then it will be something special to me.



Further Reading

Cyberpunk at Wikipedia
Deus Ex Human Revolution Q&A
Jim Rossingol on cities
Gallery of cards from the cyberpunk boardgame Netrunner