People News Warren Spector joins OtherSide Entertainment full-time to lead System Shock 3 development

[zwanzig_zwoelf]

Good job, you have literally defined what a horrible PC game is.

Go play The Fall. Compared to this abomination, IW is alright.

How are these things related? Last I checked, The Fall isn't a sequel to the greatest PC game ever made (tm). It is a smaller project which actually does what it set out to do. (Explore a concept related to artificial intelligence.)

These things are related because The Fall has a Deus Ex name slapped on it, just like the relation between Thief series and Thiaf (how are these things related, huh?).
Also, The Fall was released on PC with a horrible port that still manages to make me cringe after they 'patched' it.

Let's draw a comparison to Invisible War. It's inferior to original Deus Ex, but still manages to keep some of the original mechanics intact. Sure, it's consolized as fuck, but let's move on to Human Revolution, which was designed with consoles in mind, but released in a much more polished state and offers more content than IW, and is generally praised as 'the revival' of the series, despite being a popamole shooter with some bits of DX lore and mechanics. Now we have 'The Fall', which takes away almost everything that makes Deus Ex what it is and turns the entire game into a Bioware-esque fuckfest where you're limited to boring and pre-defined stuff without even a small glimpse of so-called 'freedom' of the original game and (surprise-surprise!) IW.

 

[Zep Zepo]

Go look at one of the first Otherside UA interviews...He's a droopy eyed, half alseep, con artist reading from a company supplied cue card.

Zep--

Sure. Links?

Uh...I'm sure Infintron could link it (Since he "news-ed" and posted that shit)

I can't be bothered to hunt it down for you, sorry. (But trust me... he and it's... shit)

Zep--

 

[Burning Bridges]

I haven't seen that much Warren Spector hate in comments about SS3 on the Internet. I don't think it's so much because Invisible War is "forgotten" than it is that people aren't ready to damn him on account of one 13 year old game. Although I guess you could call that a forgetting of sorts.

I always say that I can forgive, but forget I can't.

 

[Infinitron]

lol J1M, he's talking about Deus Ex: The Fall, not The Fall.

DX: The Fall is barely even a game, it feels like what a beta of DX:HR around 2009-2010 might have been like. It's absurd to even bring it up.

 

[J1M]

lol J1M, he's talking about Deus Ex: The Fall, not The Fall.

DX: The Fall is barely even a game, it feels like what a beta of DX:HR around 2009-2010 might have been like. It's absurd to even bring it up.

So he expected me to play tablet games in order to discuss PC games? 2016 gentlemen, 2016.

 

[Ash]

Hopefully he still applies "Warren Spector's Commandments of Game Design".

1. Always Show the Goal - Players should see their next goal (or encounter an intriguing mystery) before they can achieve (or explain) it.
2. Problems not Puzzles - It's an obstacle course, not a jigsaw puzzle. Game situations should make logical sense and solutions should never depend on reading the designer's mind.
3. Multiple solutions - There should always be more than one way to get past a game obstacle. Always. Whether preplanned (weak!), or natural, growing out of the interaction of player abilities and simulation (better!) never say the words, “This is where the player does X” about a mission or situation within a mission.
4. No Forced Failure - Failure isn't fun. Getting knocked unconscious and waking up in a strange place or finding yourself standing over dead bodies while holding a smoking gun can be cool story elements, but situations the player has no chance to react to are bad. Use forced failure sparingly, to drive the story forward but don't overuse this technique!
5. It's the Characters, Stupid - Roleplaying is about interacting with other characters in a variety of ways (not just combat… not just conversation…). The choice of interaction style should always be the player's, not the designer's.
6. Players Do; NPCs Watch - It's no fun to watch an NPC do something cool. If it's a cool thing, let the player do it. If it's a boring or mundane thing, don't even let the player think about it - let an NPC do it.
7. Games Get Harder, Players Get Smarter - Make sure game difficulty escalates as players become more accustomed to the interface and more familiar with the game world. Make sure player rewards make players more powerful as the game goes on and becomes more difficult. Never throw players into a situation their skills and smarts make frustratingly difficult to overcome.
8. Pat Your Player on the Back - Random rewards drive players onward. Make sure you reward players regularly and frequently, but unpredictably. And make sure the rewards get more impressive as the game goes on and challenges become more difficult.
9. Think 3D - An effective 3D level cannot be laid out on graph paper. Paper maps may be a good starting point (though even that's under limited circumstances). A 3D game map must take into account things over the player's head and under the player's feet. If there's no need to look up and down - constantly - make a 2D game!
10. Think Interconnected - Maps in a 3D game world feature massive interconnectivity. Tunnels that go direct from Point A to Point B are bad; loops (horizontal and vertical) and areas with multiple entrance and exit points are good.

Hehe - I think this is great news though, I'm happy he's returning to what he was best at. After the long break he's had, I'm sure he'll be a great asset for Otherside.

Yeah, as long as this all still applies System Shock 3 will turn out great. Number 9 & 10 is what really gets on my nerves about a lot of CRPG devs that transitioned to 3D (Bioware, Obsidian): they approach level design as if still constrained to the second dimension.

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

Invisible War and Thief 3 are Warren's fault. He was studio director and decided to chase the console market by making it the lead SKU. That and forcing the two games into using the same engine even though it meant drastically slashing the size of environments led to the major problems with both titles.

From what I remember of T3 (this might be wrong though), the choice to consolize it was much more from Eidos than Spector, and there's only so much you can do as a developer when the publisher tells you something is a requirement.

Anyways, T3 was a pretty decent game. Sure, it wasn't near the level of the first 2 games (yes, mainly due to console concessions), but almost nothing is. IW was much worse.

 

[Infinitron]

From what I recall, after DX:IW bombed, Spector and the rest made a point of making Thief 3 as traditionalist as possible. Couldn't fix the crap engine though.

I remember thinking Thief 3 was fairly awful back in the day, but loading it up today it's hard to believe console gamers used to play games like that. You can actually get lost!

(I still wouldn't call it "pretty decent" though)

 

[Zeriel]

From what I recall, after DX:IW bombed, Spector and the rest made a point of making Thief 3 as traditionalist as possible. Couldn't fix the crap engine though.

I remember thinking Thief 3 was fairly awful back in thee day, but loading it up today it's hard to believe console gamers used to play games like that. You can actually get lost!

(I still wouldn't call it "pretty decent" though)

Well, Morrowind was a console game too. The further back you go, the harder console games tend to get, as a rule.

 

[~*´¨¯¨`*·~-.¸-AIN'T]

I remember thinking Thief 3 was fairly awful back in thee day, but loading it up today it's hard to believe console gamers used to play games like that. You can actually get lost!

(I still wouldn't call it "pretty decent" though)

It had some legitimately great levels (the Cradle, the pirate manor), and the core gameplay of sneaking around and altering the environment was still strong. There certainly were some shittier parts, and having to break up levels into multiple sections definitely hurt a lot, but I've replayed it multiple times and had fun with it every time. "Fairly awful" seems like a ridiculous reaction to the fact that it's clearly not as good as its predecessors, which, while true, doesn't make it a bad game.