Vapourware System Shock 3 by OtherSide Entertainment - taken over by Tencent!

[Nifft Batuff]

Are they selling an hour chat with Warren Spector?

 

[Nano]

Someone should use this opportunity to ask him how he managed to fuck up so royally on this game.

 

[Tweed]

Someone should use this opportunity to ask him how he managed to fuck up so royally on this game.

And he should be called to the floor for Invisible War too.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

And you have to pay him to do that?

 

[Infinitron]

They've moved on to another game, remember? https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...is-making-d-d-game.137349/page-2#post-7236105

 

[kangaxx]

They've moved on to another game, remember? https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...is-making-d-d-game.137349/page-2#post-7236105

I had no idea. In fact I thought the entire studio had been sacked, so that is very surprising.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

And he should be called to the floor for Invisible War too.

pretty sure he's been on record for that one before, Warren spent most of his time appeasing Eidos money crunchers than actually working on the game.
Harvey Smith was essentially the lead on the project Warren didn't have much involvement in terms of design his work was more on the financials and management side because of how dire they were. The first game wasn't as successful as people think it was whilst it sold a lot it also cost a lot.

they intentionally wanted the Xbox version as the lead which we can all agree was really stupid, they should've just used Deus Ex 1's business model.
they rebuilt parts of Unreal 2 engine just to get it working on console which was pointless because it actually made the game look and play worse.
In that context wouldn't just staying on Unreal 1 engine been a better idea? I mean I still don't get why they thought it was a good idea to move to the bleeding edge instead of remaining on what they knew worked on limited hardware from my personal perspective it makes more sense to build off of Deus Ex 1's base but instead they rebuilt entirely. It really seems silly.

they kept fixing things from Deus Ex 1 that weren't broken - specifically the ammo, inventory and augmentations. This was a common thing Harvey was known for and Warren had called him out on it as he wanted to do something similar to Deus Ex 1's inventory and skills but Warren said no stop its fine as it is.

they listened to their friends and not their fans.

I doubt he'll tell you much beyond what I've mentioned here. You won't get a whole lot out of Warren on that subject.

 

[Bad Sector]

The first game wasn't as successful as people think it was whilst it sold a lot it also cost a lot. [...] they should've just used Deus Ex 1's business model

Doesn't the first part pretty much explain why they didn't use Deus Ex 1's business model? If they got burned financially they most likely wanted to try out something different than what burned them.

In that context wouldn't just staying on Unreal 1 engine been a better idea? I mean I still don't get why they thought it was a good idea to move to the bleeding edge

Back in the 90s and very early 2000s, everyone was a huge graphics whore. Honestly, people seem to have forgotten nowadays how much gaming magazines, gamers, etc pushed on graphics and how games lived and died depending on their graphics and tech alone. This slowed down in the very late 2000s and early 2010s but during the 90s and early 2000s, graphics whoring was at its peak.

(FWIW personally i never had an issue with how IW looked, the only issue i had with the game was the lengthy loading screens but time and better hardware solved that)

 

[Gargaune]

Harvey Smith was essentially the lead on the project Warren didn't have much involvement in terms of design his work was more on the financials and management side because of how dire they were. The first game wasn't as successful as people think it was whilst it sold a lot it also cost a lot.

What's your source on this? I recently cited Spector clocking DX1's budget at $5.5 million and Square Enix putting the sales at 1 million units by their acquisition of Eidos in 2009. I seem to recall Spector also at some point referred to DX as being commercially successful, and these numbers would bear that out even if they wouldn't describe Diablo 2 runaway levels of cash.

Doesn't the first part pretty much explain why they didn't use Deus Ex 1's business model? If they got burned financially they most likely wanted to try out something different than what burned them.

They didn't, DX did well. If Ion Storm was struggling before starting on Invisible War and Deadly Shadows, it'd more likely point to financial difficulties resulting from the Dallas branch or Eidos itself.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I recently cited Spector clocking DX1's budget at $5.5 million

That was my source on the budget as well. But supposedly they had unrealistic sales expectation that originally they hadn't hit which is why Eidos were so pissed at them.
I don't have source on this but I recall Warren stating that it was the only way to keep the doors open and the lights on to tell Eidos that they could expect a big return when the game was done.
Eidos then threw a tantrum when they discovered the game had undergone a delay which is why they threw out the White House, Moon Base and Stay with UNACTO portions.

Basically my point has always been that it was by all metrics a huge success to everyone except Eidos and that alone was the reason Invisible War was doomed to fail and Ion Storm was inevitably always going to close.
It looks as if though Warren has found himself stuck in another bad situation it'll be interesting to know why this time around.

it'd more likely point to financial difficulties resulting from the Dallas branch or Eidos itself.

As I understand Eidos itself was having financial difficulties. https://sec.report/Document/0001021231-01-500058/
This is the figures they put out for the year Deus Ex was developed. I mean they were still profitable but looking at that they weren't growing as fast as they probably would have liked to. It looks like their operating costs were bloating a lot though. Looking at 2001's figures https://sec.report/Document/0001021231-01-500080/ it looks like that year went really bad for them.

 

[The Dutch Ghost]

Back in the 90s and very early 2000s, everyone was a huge graphics whore. Honestly, people seem to have forgotten nowadays how much gaming magazines, gamers, etc pushed on graphics and how games lived and died depending on their graphics and tech alone. This slowed down in the very late 2000s and early 2010s but during the 90s and early 2000s, graphics whoring was at its peak.

(FWIW personally i never had an issue with how IW looked, the only issue i had with the game was the lengthy loading screens but time and better hardware solved that)

Damn, that I forgot about that.
But it was indeed the case, I remember for example how much better arcade cabinet games looked compared to home computer and console games in the early 90s.
It was during the second half of the 90s that PCs and console games started to look as good or even superior.

And yeah, the magazines kept going on and on about graphics.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I found some additional info:

Deus Ex achieved sales of 138,840 copies and revenues of $5 million in the United States by the end of 2000, according to PC Data.

In the UK it had 100,000> copies sold though was surpassed by the PS2 versions sales in Europe. I specifically remember that Deus Ex didn't achieve the profits it needed to appease Eidos until after the PS2 version was released they basically had no other choice they had to do console ports. Specifically it was a remark Warren made in an interview but I cannot remember what one it was.

When you look at Invisible War you can kinda see why they went down that path foolishly.

 

[m_s0]

Someone should use this opportunity to ask him how he managed to fuck up so royally on this game.

And he should be called to the floor for Invisible War too.

I think that one's more on Harvey Smith's ongoing divorce at that time (if I didn't get him mixed up with someone else I read/saw an interview with ages ago - it was his game, though, so it seems to fit to me). Spector was hands-off at that point.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Harvey Smith's ongoing divorce at that time (if I didn't get him mixed up with someone else I read/saw an interview with ages ago - it was his game, though, so it seems to fit to me)

Correct

“This was a very difficult project for me…Personally, I was going through a separation that would eventually end in divorce…We fucked up the technology management of it…we had bad team chemistry. We wrote the wrong renderer, we wrote the wrong kind of AI…And then we shipped too early…

 

[Gargaune]

Basically my point has always been that it was by all metrics a huge success to everyone except Eidos and that alone was the reason Invisible War was doomed to fail and Ion Storm was inevitably always going to close.

I found some additional info:

Deus Ex achieved sales of 138,840 copies and revenues of $5 million in the United States by the end of 2000, according to PC Data.

In the UK it had 100,000> copies sold though was surpassed by the PS2 versions sales in Europe. I specifically remember that Deus Ex didn't achieve the profits it needed to appease Eidos until after the PS2 version was released they basically had no other choice they had to do console ports. Specifically it was a remark Warren made in an interview but I cannot remember what one it was.

When you look at Invisible War you can kinda see why they went down that path foolishly.

I see, that's all very interesting. It does make me wonder what Spector could've possibly promised Eidos, though - if those UK numbers are 2000 as well, then you're looking at ~300.000 copies worldwide in the first year, which is actually the number I was imagining to begin with. The only mention of Deus Ex in that second SEC report you linked is:

The performance of Deus Ex from Ion Storm and the Group's first PlayStation 2 title, TimeSplitters, have been encouraging, with both winning critical acclaim during the year. The Company believes both titles have the potential to develop into compelling franchises for the future.

Another curious item, again assuming the US and UK figures are from the same timeframe, is that the former only outsold the latter by ~30% in volume, though this might be reflective of Eidos being stronger in their home territory. Coupled with DX's later strong performance on PS2 in Europe and the general industry trend of console focus at the time, this would indeed account for IW's shift to the Xbox as a primary target, and the problems that followed.

Anyway, you got a link on those numbers? I'd like to update my .txt.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Anyway, you got a link on those numbers? I'd like to update my .txt.

Deus Ex achieved sales of 138,840 copies and revenues of $5 million in the United States by the end of 2000, according to PC Data.[85

It received a "Silver" award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) in February 2002, indicating lifetime sales of at least 100,000 units in the United Kingdom.

In the German-speaking market, PC Player reported sales over 70,000 units for Deus Ex by early 2001.

A PlayStation 2 port of the game, retitled Deus Ex: The Conspiracy outside of Europe, was released on March 26, 2002. [88] The ELSPA later raised it to "Gold" status,[89] for 200,000 sales.

Wikipedia article for Deus Ex. All of it is in there under Sales

 

[Gargaune]

Wikipedia article for Deus Ex. All of it is in there under Sales

Hah. Didn't think to look there, of all places. Okay, so if we were to draw a line on everything we know so far:
- $5.5 million to develop between '97 and 2000, plus $2 million for the 2002 PS2 port;
- solid seller at the time with probably ~300,000 PC copies sold worldwide within a year of release, but not enough to patch Eidos's ailing finances;
- just over 1 million copies sold by the time of Square Enix's acquisition of Eidos in 2009, likely including the PS2 port.

 

[RoSoDude]

And he should be called to the floor for Invisible War too.

pretty sure he's been on record for that one before, Warren spent most of his time appeasing Eidos money crunchers than actually working on the game.
Harvey Smith was essentially the lead on the project Warren didn't have much involvement in terms of design his work was more on the financials and management side because of how dire they were. The first game wasn't as successful as people think it was whilst it sold a lot it also cost a lot.

they intentionally wanted the Xbox version as the lead which we can all agree was really stupid, they should've just used Deus Ex 1's business model.
they rebuilt parts of Unreal 2 engine just to get it working on console which was pointless because it actually made the game look and play worse.
In that context wouldn't just staying on Unreal 1 engine been a better idea? I mean I still don't get why they thought it was a good idea to move to the bleeding edge instead of remaining on what they knew worked on limited hardware from my personal perspective it makes more sense to build off of Deus Ex 1's base but instead they rebuilt entirely. It really seems silly.

they kept fixing things from Deus Ex 1 that weren't broken - specifically the ammo, inventory and augmentations. This was a common thing Harvey was known for and Warren had called him out on it as he wanted to do something similar to Deus Ex 1's inventory and skills but Warren said no stop its fine as it is.

they listened to their friends and not their fans.

I doubt he'll tell you much beyond what I've mentioned here. You won't get a whole lot out of Warren on that subject.

Everything you said about Invisible War is correct, but you're wholly misinformed about Harvey's role on Deus Ex; that's not how Warren tells the story at all. He talks about originally having binary skill and augmentation systems that Harvey made more granular (which is the opposite of how Harvey remembers it, apparently). Originally, it was an all-or-nothing "do you have this skill/aug, can you pick open the lock, can you hack the computer" approach with the intention of removing all dice rolls and clearly communicating the utility of a given upgrade to the player, but the feedback they got from friends at Valve and Looking Glass revealed that it was very boring as a result of cutting out the granularity that random skill rolls can provide. Harvey proposed reintroducing granularity through multiple tiers of skills and energy costs for augmentations, which would vary the time and resource cost associated with lockpicking, hacking, cloaking, defusing mines etc. and actually made the game's inventory and skills much more complex.



Warren elaborates more on the issue in the Gamasutra postmortem on Deus Ex which was written the same year the game shipped (so I'm inclined to believe Warren's memory of this over Harvey's):

GAME SYSTEMS DIDN'T WORK AS INTENDED

A third area that influenced the changing nature of the game's design was when the game systems didn't work as we intended them to. High-level concepts imply gameplay but don't -- and can't -- define it. We quickly found that descriptions of game systems are no substitute for prototypes and actual implementation. We prototyped every game system, as documented, relatively early on. We built some test missions, not quite early-on-enough but still early.

These test systems and missions revealed gaping holes in our thinking or things that we thought would be true that turned out not to be true at all. For instance, our augmentation and skill systems proved dry and rather dull, once implemented, despite looking really good on paper. Those systems were designed around the totally valid idea that the computer would resolve actions without any secret (or even non-so-secret) die rolls required. Players would always know, with absolute certainty, based on their character development choices, whether they could accomplish something or not. The trick would be whether they wanted to do something or not, based on an assessment of the likely outcome and the likely consequences (for example, blowing down a door and setting off alarms versus the risk of picking a lock and being caught while doing it). In addition, I thought the tension of standing outside a locked door, not knowing if a guard was going to show up while you picked the lock would provide sufficient excitement. I thought knowing you could leap across a chasm because you had the Jump augmentation at Tech Level 3, opening up new paths through maps that were inaccessible to players without that augmentation, would be good enough to keep players interested.

When Gabe Newell from Valve came down and played our prototype missions, he correctly identified the utter lack of tension in our skill and augmentation use, as written up in the design doc and ably implemented by the coders. The worst was confirmed when Marc LeBlanc, Doug Church, Rob Fermier, and other friends from Looking Glass Studios and Irrational Games played the proto-missions and came to the same conclusions. Actually using skills and augmentations revealed things that merely thinking about them could never have revealed.

We took the criticism, and with it in mind, lead designer Harvey Smith revised the skill and augmentation systems pretty thoroughly, proposing an elegant system of consumable resources and time passage, all tied to skill level. This increased the tension level, provided new rewards, and allowed players to think and make informed decisions. Harvey also proposed a revision to the augmentation system, introducing an energy cost for their use (something I had foolishly rejected earlier on). Again, this gave us the opportunity to hand out items that would replenish energy -- in other words, we instantly had more things to hand out to players as rewards. It also introduced a level of tactical thinking to augmentation use that makes the system work. None of this would have happened without prototype missions and some harsh (but fair) criticism they allowed.

In the another part of Harvey's discussion with Warren he talks about losing the plot with these ideals and cutting out the depth in Invisible War as you stated. Listening to some of the same kind of feedback from designer friends that saved Deus Ex, they became convinced that redundancies in the RPG systems, ammo types, inventory clutter etc. were flaws in Deus Ex rather than understanding that the overlapping upgrade/equipment design was an essential part of what made the first game so compelling and freeform.

It's a shame Invisible War was so gutted on a design level due to deliberate intentions and mistakes in their use of the technology. Compare with Arx Fatalis, whose Xbox port has nearly all the same functionality and fidelity as the PC game with almost nothing compromised for the hardware or gamepad input. There's really no excuse, as a Deus Ex sequel that retained the original's strengths while also coming out on console could have easily reached the same or greater commercial success than Invisible War attained without alienating the core audience.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

For the PS2 version of Deus Ex they used the unreal 1 engine, scaled down for the console. I played it a bit recently and it is not so bad, if you don't mind to play a FP game with a gamepad. In my opinion it is better than IW for the XBOX.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

He talks about originally having binary skill and augmentation systems that Harvey made more granular (which is the opposite of how Harvey remembers it, apparently).

Yeah I think in my sleep depraved head I inverted what Harvey said with what Warren had said, originally I was of the impression Warren had to tell him to stop iterations but actually seems more like Harvey was the one pushing for further complexity there. Thanks for clarification though its always appreciated.

I think more than anything what people would ask Warren has less to do with Deus Ex and more to do with what ever the hell is up with System Shock 3 because frankly this whole mess is far more fascinating lol.

 

[Katana1000S]

This is a System Shock 3 thread.

We all loved Dues Ex original, it was a game in a million, it seems to me anything Warren has got involved in since is a steaming pile of shit and faeces, turd or whatever?

There must be other threads on here to diss that asshole Warren Spectre, a guy who thought he was above his station but then demolished his whole legacy of early games in a seemingly self sabotage kamikaze hari kari experiment.

If that shit covered roach ever gets near a game studio again, it will be nothing more than a cash grab and should be investigated by the FBI.

There will be no System Shock 3 folks, and if there ever is in far flung future, it will be a cash grab like Underworld Ascendant will be by people who might have had decent skills a long time ago on 1 or 3 games at Looking Glass, but got complacent and got fond of sucking their own cocks circle jerk fashion and patting each other on the back rather than get on with a game we all wanted, pure and utter mediocre, travesty of shit game play that only the most simple minded of people like my friend Efe would enjoy.

We are not going to see a good System Shock 3 game from the likes of Warren, he's in this for a cash grab.

 

[Efe]

Underworld ascendant wasn't that bad.
I recommend it to everyone looking to learn about warren's recent work

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Underworld ascendant wasn't that bad.
I recommend it to everyone looking to learn about warren's recent work

So great it made OSE Austin shit themselves when they finally saw the condition it was in.

OSE = ION STORM speedrun

 

[Gargaune]

This is a System Shock 3 thread.

I'm sorry, did we derail your vibrant discussion on System Shock 3?

Are they selling an hour chat with Warren Spector?

Underworld ascendant wasn't that bad.
I recommend it to everyone looking to learn about warren's recent work

Was Spector really involved in Ascendant? I was under the impression he's been on hiatus since Epic [sic] Mickey. Not that I'm suggesting his mere presence would somehow "save" SS3, just wasn't aware whether he's had a role in UA.

 

[Eli_Havelock]

Was Spector really involved in Ascendant? I was under the impression he's been on hiatus since Epic [sic] Mickey. Not that I'm suggesting his mere presence would somehow "save" SS3, just wasn't aware whether he's had a role in UA.

Spector was the Creative Whatever for UA in charge of something that was trying to turn emergent gameplay into level scores posted on social media. So great of a visionary that the first producer Chris Siegel thought he was working on something completely different than that or the KS bait. That is, when the latter bothered to show up for anything involved with the game, as he often sounded like he didn't have any idea what was going on because he wasn't involved despite being credited and called producer. Good timing on finding Rich Gallup to steer the assets being made into something a bit playable, even if unintentionally.

But yeah, OSE Austin felt the repeat of ION STORM - as if John Romero fucked up BOTH Dallas and Austin.