Warren Spector on Deus Ex: Human Revolution
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Q: You mentioned playing through Human Revolution and obviously since you were intimately involved with Deus Ex a while back, what are your thoughts on Human Revolution and how they've handled it?
Warren Spector: You know I've tried to stay out of that discussion since the game came out. I mean every person I have met at this show had asked me that. And so I'm "just forget it, I'm just going to start talking about it." It was one of the few games I finished, and I know the guys on the team and I know how dedicated they were and how respectful of the original they were; their hearts were in the right place and they did a wonderful job.
And I'm not just saying that. It really captured the spirit of Deus Ex; I mean the moment I booted the game up it sounded like Deus Ex, and they understood the importance of how the game sounded. It had a lot of the sort of gray of the original game where nothing is right and wrong - I really like that a lot. It made me feel like I was making decisions that revealed more about me than it did about my character, which I loved. The interesting thing was - and we don't have time to get into this right now, even if even if I were ready to get into it - my wife will tell you, I screamed at the television as I played this game. I loved the game, at the end of the day, but I screamed constantly because there were two, three, four things they did where I just said "Nooooo, why did you this? Noooo!" and, and it wasn't that it was right or wrong, it was different than what I [expected].
When I got the end of the game and realized that, overall, the experience had been a Deus Ex experience, I sort of sat back and reflected and said, "Ok, they made different design decisions to achieve the same end goals that I had." And some day, either I'm going to write an article about that, or somebody who is getting their master's degree at MIT or someplace, is going to write a master's thesis about the systemic differences, the game system differences between Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And it's so cool to see philosophical ideas, game-designed philosophy, explored by two different groups to achieve the same goals in completely different ways, in ways that drove me crazy. So it was really cool. I really enjoyed that. Just on an intellectual level, I thought it was fascinating that they did some stuff that just drove me nuts.
