The Last of Deus Ex

The Deus Ex series was lucky to become not only the founder of the cyberpunk stealth immersive genre, but also, largely thanks to the efforts of the team led by Warren Spector and Sheldon Pacotti, it gave birth to such equally famous projects as Cyberpunk 2077, Dishonored, Prey, Alpha Protocol and others. The latest games, just that, the last, because Embracer closed two projects in the universe this year, and the rights to the IP went under the hammer somewhere in the direction of Activision, about the “augs” and “pure” players were remembered not only by the unique visual style in black -golden tones, but also game levels with a large number of “vertical” puzzles, and free movement, where the only correct solution to quests is the one chosen by the player, will provide dozens of hours of fascinating exploration of the game world. These are, of course, not the revelations of the first Deus; nevertheless, the original is difficult to surpass, both in terms of mechanics and plot twists. But the authors of the sequel were able to expand the game mechanics without breaking the combinatorics of interaction along the way. In the last article I talked about the importance of natural architecture when creating levels, so in this one let's pay more attention to the little things and the very combinatorics of mechanics that are the hallmark of the series. At relatively small levels, the task of “making friends” with various, and often interlocking, game mechanics becomes akin to a puzzle, and debugging and boundary cases take designers months of actual work.

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The reason that prompted me to write an article about this game was the news of the closure of Eidos Montreal in January of this year, as well as the departure of two games in the Deus Ex universe and the continuation of Tomb Raider to the cold. If you think that closing a large studio, and the division at the time of closing consisted of about two hundred people, can be done quickly, then you are mistaken. It takes more than a year to close such a large and well-known studio, usually another six months before D-Day, everyone is given the opportunity to find another position and part on good terms with the presentation of a certificate of honor and entry into the employment… oh, contract. At the time of closure, 97 people were fired, I think these are the remaining non-combat personnel, such as accountants, office managers, sales people and juniors, who had to sit out a year in order to have a line on their resume. Well, or old people for whom it was important to wait for bonuses on options. So consider for yourself, half of which was the development team left noticeably before the onset of doom day. Well, RIP as they say, someone else will take your augmentations (c).

Dawn Engine

The engine traces its lineage back to its grandfather Glaciercreated by the Danish IO Interactive, then just students, back in 1994, which is used in all games of the Hitman series. In 2009, Glacier (v3.3) was transferred to Eidos-Montreal, and their further development proceeded in parallel. Glacier began to be developed for commercial licensing, the showroom of which was a reboot of the series about the bald killer, and Dawn Engine became the home of Adam Jensen. It should be noted that there was also a Square Enix division (Eidos Montreal Labs) located in Montreal, which was responsible for research and innovation for all the group’s studios. As I understand it, the guys were sitting, if not at adjacent tables, then at least in adjacent open spaces. By the time DE:MD was released, the engine had reached the second version, having surpassed its parent in technology, what was in the Dawn Engine and what was not, and what is not even now in Glacier 2:

• Umbra 2 – technology that caches level geometry and speeds up the clipping of invisible surfaces. The main consumers of this technology were building design tools and commercial simulations with a high level of detail, such as urban planning.

• PhysX 3.4 – the last release of the physics engine at that time

• NVidia APEX – one of the first games to use a new system for simulating soft surfaces, liquids and gases. And also one of the first games that used “fair” (volumetric) simulation of gases in rooms (only in the PC version)

• Scaleform- The entire user interface in the game is made in 3D, from the main menu to the credits. Under the hood lives Flash technology, as old as time, banished from the web, but still alive and well as a UI tool for games.

• Nav Power (http://www.babelflux.com/) – don’t look at the fact that the site is from the 90s, in fact it is still one of the most powerful and functional navigation and navmesh generation systems for games, what is now native in Unreal Engine is an order of magnitude worse in functionality. For example, I can cite the use of this technology in the games Guild Wars 2, The Division, Tomb Rider, Dragon Age, and my current project too.

Below I will provide a summary table of rarely shown characteristics of engines in a synthetic test when displaying a scene with many unique objects of ~2 million polygons. Screenshot from iSotropix Clarisse iFX, which allowed us to procedurally generate unique objects so that the engine could not optimize this matter.

Counter values gpu_idle – the more, the worse for the engine, this means that the programmers profiled and the GPU “rested”. On the other hand, this is a reserve for the future, because this time can be allocated to some other tasks.

Values vertex_shader_busy And pixel_shader_busy show how much frame time is spent on vertex and pixel shaders respectively, render programmers are responsible for optimizing these things, and values ​​above 30% are considered a reason to look at what is wrong with the graphics pipeline in the engine.

Meaning shader_wait_for_rop — the waiting time for writing data to the framebuffer strongly depends on the complexity of the shaders used, the anti-aliasing algorithms used and post-processing in general, which uses rendering to buffers.

Counter shader_waits_for_texture shows how optimized the texture pipeline is in the engine (caching, loading, texture memory management), and the need for additional texture fetches.

This is all synthetic, but very indicative to evaluate the technological development of a particular engine. The values ​​were obtained using the Pix profiler in 2019, when I had test access to Unigine, but then there was no data for a full-fledged article. For Dawn Engine/Glacier, the Cargo mod with moddb was used, which allows you to load arbitrary levels for DE/Hitman, respectively. Unreal/Cry Engine/Unity were used for comparison.

But these are all rather technical questions, just to show that the game was made using cutting-edge engine technology at the 2015 level, and given that Physx 3.4 was released only in 2017, then behind it.

Visual style

Patrick Fortier (Lead Gameplay) and Philippe Desrosiers (Lead Animator) were responsible for the overall design of the game and were the first to bring time-tested ideas from Myst IV into the game, in the form of repeating stylized architectural elements.

And if in Myst such elements were lacy beams and rounded shapes of buildings and environmental objects. Then in Deus Ex such objects became black or golden polygons in architecture, in Prague, in the city of Golems and other locations.

More black and gold polygons

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The second characteristic feature of the visual style of the game is the dominant buildings; at most intersections there are memorable structures or buildings. Some of them are functional and can be used for jumping, for example, others simply help with navigation.

And further

Attention to detail

Small game locations allowed level designers to fill them with unique installation objects, and a powerful engine made it possible to show them completely as they were intended by the developers. But they only did this a year later in the released Directors Cut for PC, where they added support for 4k resolution and added a new level of object detail without wasting time on soapy textures. This level of detail is not always seen even in recently released games.

This attention to detail is also noticeable in relation to NPCs, citizens diligently stare at their phones, read newspapers or sit over a cup of coffee, and even make non-plot remarks towards the player, commenting on his actions, until you go beyond the scripts. But stealing laid out items in front of the store owner, poking him in the face with a pistol or throwing objects, all this ends in the standard fall and scream.

The only ones who react differently to the player's hostile actions are the police, but even they tend to forget after a couple of minutes all the crimes they have committed, calmly walking among the bodies of their fallen comrades.

And further

And that too is attention to detail.

At one time, when Human Revolution and later MD came out, I enjoyed both parts. Despite the protracted development period of the first part of the reboot, and if you play the two parts one after another as one game, it does a good job of combining the freestyle style of the original Deus Ex with the established gameplay of console first-person shooters at that time. Unfortunately, 2012's Dishonored raised the bar for vertical exploration sky high and showed a much better understanding of how to implement the concept of free-roaming first-person play. But in Dishonored there was a different level of attention to detail, not as concentrated as the division between pure and aug. Throughout the game, frozen stories are encountered at every turn – like police officers checking documents at the metro entrance

Or a restaurant that serves only the “clean”

Attention to detail is not limited only to NPCs and their behavior, so in the rooms you can close the curtains, and if a guard is standing nearby, he will go to check who did it.

Relatively living world

But what the developers really didn’t skimp on was side quests and the environment’s reactions to the player’s actions. All side quests are hand-crafted, and no two are alike. Not all of them are interesting, I often noticed that individual quests were made with different endings, non-linear paths of completion and puzzles inside, it is clear that at least a strong middle student, and even passionate about the game, tried. And next to it is absolutely straightforward – get from point A to point B, as if collected on your knee by yesterday's June. Another thing that struck me then was the attention to optional player actions: so, if you kill a store owner or an NPC in a bank, then the next time you visit the store, the store will be cordoned off, and there will be boxes with personal items in the NPC's office. If we organize a masacre in Prague, then during our next visits (and we will return to the city two more times), the number of police will be greater, and they will dig in more often, and they will also replace pistols with rifles. In modern games, they don’t really bother with detailing details of this level, because for immersion they provide insufficient return on focus tests, and they require money and time for development as a parallel branch of the plot. But on the other hand, if you don’t break the world around you, then it looks very, very decent.

Restart costs

The most incomprehensible mechanic in HR for me was the ridiculous energy replenished by chocolates, it looks like it turned out as usual, the simple mechanics were left for the end of the project, and then they couldn’t make it work with what they had designed and left it as it was, no matter what. The fact that only the first section of energy was restored for free after depletion effectively forced the player to hoard candy bars and never fully use their augmentations except in very special cases. But the point of the game is precisely to use these same augmentations, and it turns out that one unfinished simple mechanic broke all the others that depend on it. But in the trailer they show exactly the continuous use of abilities, without any breaks, but it turned out that in order to do as in the video, you need to eat a couple of candy bars during the battle.

Even at the start, this looked terribly controversial, and against the backdrop of the skill and energy system in Dishonored, where using an ability temporarily reduced part of the energy bar, which then began to be restored, it looked, to put it mildly, unfinished. Repeatedly using the ability before it was fully restored would deplete the remaining energy, requiring Corvo to drink a blue bottle to replenish it. This created a good balance between the cost of long-term use of abilities and the freedom to use them to overcome individual obstacles without unnecessary costs, so it is not surprising that Mankind Divided adopted this system almost entirely. But you can generally read, turn on endless energy and play as a superhero, as was probably originally intended.

Variation versus plot

Level creation in games of this genre is almost always structured through various options for completion and completion or non-completion, and each of them imposes certain obstacles, puzzles and enemies. The player should always be able to get to any part of the level, with any set of available skills, no matter how or what tools he chooses to do this. On the one hand, this gives a large number of connected locations, each of which can be customized in runtime depending on the player’s chosen style of play, bringing elements of a roguelike and procedural generation into the game. But in reality, creating such behavior base levels is a difficult task even for senior managers and leads with successful projects behind them. In addition, each alternative path of passage should, on good terms, change the state of the entire system after completion. But this is used very rarely, again because for all alternative playthroughs it is necessary to register changes in the plot, but each player will see only one of the 10 registered ones and will not replay the game for these changes.

And if you don’t prescribe changes in the plot, then the game gets the stigma of a rail shooter without variability, which, you see, doesn’t really suit an immersive sim. So it turns out that the presence of a plot prevents the game from being too variable, and attempts to expand the plot with alternative ways of completing tasks lead to its bloating and large time and engineering costs for implementation, which a very small group of players can appreciate.

The system of skills of the main character is also tied to the variability of completing levels, I would like to say the opposite, but no. If you look at how the locations are placed on the levels, you will see that there are always only three ways to get into the buildings: power, stealth and abilities (breakable walls mainly). But there are much more penetration-oriented abilities, and there are no or almost no places for them to be used; gas traps or electrotraps do not count. If a glass window or door is not broken by a script, you will not damage it with anything, neither a bullet, nor a grenade, nor a nanoblade

However, the realization of this comes closer to the middle of the game, when, having played enough with the abilities, you begin to pay attention to little things, like artificial traffic jams in narrow places or invisible walls that do not allow you to jump onto a roof or balcony. This, however, does not stop MD from following the idea of ​​the original: the main choice you face is which route you are going to take, not whether you can afford it. At the same time, the developers actively encourage vertical gameplay; locations for exploration are located on rooftops throughout Prague. Moreover, vertical gameplay is not limited only to the streets; in high rooms there will almost always be suspended ceilings or structures for movement.

Alternative routes also always emphasize attention to detail: somewhere a passage hidden behind a refrigerator, somewhere a hatch in the ceiling, but almost always as you progress you can look into a slightly open mailbox, a viewing window or open a grate.

Freedom, stealth and consequences

Freedom of choice ends where transparent walls begin. I admit that at first I was disappointed with the level design in Mankind Divided during my first playthrough; I wanted to go through stealth with a minimum of sabotage. The small hub of Prague has a surprising number of hidden places that were fun to explore, but they all ended up being small, insignificant, and didn't add anything significant to the story other than parts for building items. At the same time, many story areas, such as a bank, casino or theater, are available immediately, without any restrictions. Seriously, the game adapts to the player's choice as much as possible, for example it turned out that you can eliminate plot-important characters (not all of them, of course), and it was an unexpected experience. At the beginning of the plot, after overhearing a conversation between a mafia boss and his lieutenant, you can kill this same boss; it’s actually surprising that the game allowed this to happen.

And when he had to return there later in the story, he remained dead, and all the necessary information was on his computer. As it turned out later, I deprived myself of a couple of interesting side quests. This is a small example, but I liked how organically this reaction to the player's actions was built into the game. I’ve also recently gotten used to the fact that games clearly show what I can and cannot do. And even though this is the most significant game character, he exists in the game long before the plot requires his appearance, and he does something there, walks without the protection of bulletproof glass, so beloved by most AAA games, and now think about how many players They didn’t get to him at all. On Steam, the percentage of completion of the quest line with this character is less than 30%.

Prague was also strongly associated with City 17 from the second half, a kind of very depressive area, the golden age of humanity is over: garbage, police and augie homeless people are the main way the game conveys this. The guys were clearly looking at him both in appearance and in atmosphere. And you know, it’s catchy; at least for me, the atmosphere of a dying city has become one of the hooks of game design.

Sometimes it seemed to me that even the graffiti was similar

Deus ex: Prague edition

Even though the game does not use the full potential of the game engine, at the time of release it looked beautiful and technologically advanced. And the presence of an interesting, visually and atmospherically memorable world with its own lore, which is supported by stories and the game environment, is addictive. The game encourages players to explore and be curious about information and items. And the high density of game events in locations of such a small size and the main ability of the developers to make this small world interesting puts the game on a par with larger and more ambitious projects.