- I'm Warren Spector designer and director of Deus Ex. I set out to make the game of my dreams, a hybrid shooter, role-playing and stealth, and I did it. [upbeat electronic music] [guns firing] John Romero called me up and said, make the game of your dreams, no creative interference from anybody, biggest budget you've ever had and the biggest marketing budget you've ever had. And I thought about it for about three and a half seconds, and then said, I'm in. Who says no to that opportunity? So I signed on with Ion Storm I guess the rest is Deus Ex history. Deus Ex is a game where play style matters. How you play, determines your experience. So in other words, letting players decide how to play, finding their fun, playing the way they wanted to become the author of their own unique experience. The game that became Deus Ex actually started with a concept called shooter. It was conceived as the real world role playing game. I was sick to death of fantasy games, you know, guys in chain mail and women in fur bikinis and big swords and dragons and magic, I didn't want to make that kind of game anymore. I wanted to do something more realistic. I'm a big believer in that origin idea, that games should be about more than just killing monsters and wasting time. I think games are fundamentally about asking questions and allowing players to answer them through their play choices. There were three genres that at the time were frustrating me. One was shooters, one was stealth games, and one was role-playing. The shooters frustrated me because I died a lot. As a player of first person shooters, if I'm not good enough to shoot, my only option is to throw the controller across the room and stop playing. Stealth, the Thief team would not let me fight. And I was not good enough in certain places to sneak my way through a scenario. If I not good enough to sneak in a stealth game, my only option is to throw the controller across the room and stop playing. Role-playing, which was the third genre I wanted to mash up, it wasn't so much that I was frustrated with any individual game but about all the role-playing games that imitated, you know, the Dungeons and Dragons approach to your simulation. I had no idea if it was gonna work. The thing that happened was I was working with a Looking Glass team on Thief. They were so committed to stealth, as they should have been and there were places in the game where stealth was just too hard for me. I couldn't sneak, I would say, let me fight, let me fight. And their answer was no, if we let you fight, no one will sneak. I said to myself, that's not true. I know I can make a game where you can fight or sneak as you choose. [upbeat electronic music] There were so many times when people would come to me and say, "we can't do this." Just make a shooter. [chuckling] There were some folks there who said, "what percentage of players "are going to sneak in this game?" It's kind of a silly question, but I just said, "I don't know, 30%." And other people are going to play it like a shooter. And they said, "if only 30% of players are going to sneak, "why are you spending a dime and any time on stealth?" My response was, "that's the whole point of the game "and I won't change it." And I've always said, if I don't get to make the kinds of games I want to make, I'm going to stop making games. I'll go open a bookstore or something and lose my money that way. I did consider the possibility, if they compared us to pure shooters, pure stealth games and pure role-playing games, we would be in a world of trouble. But the whole point of the game was to test that and see if we could get past that assessment. And frankly, I was terrified. Our shooter mechanics and experience, 75% as good as as Half-Life. Our stealth, experience 75% as good as Thief. Our role-playing experience, 75% as good as whatever BioWare was doing. And if we get judged on the basis of any individual genre, we're doomed because we're just not going to be as good. But if players figure out that that combination lets them play however they want, if people get that, we're going to rule the world. [upbeat electronic music] The levels have to be simulated just deeply enough that players can try something and say, in the real world, I can say logically, if I do X, Y will happen. I think agency is appropriately constrained, is on the narrative side. The narrative is fundamentally completely linear but it provides important context. It says what you're going to do. And it says why you're going to do it but it doesn't say how that belongs to the player.

- Want this candy bar?

- You're cool.

- One of the things about my approach to design and development is I get really frustrated playing other people's games because I'm just yelling, how could they do that? What a stupid thing to do, oh my God! That inspires me to take a variety of genres and mash them together. There are a variety of ways to give players agency. Some of them are more real than others. Yes, you apply constraints but you empower players in real ways, some of the questions we were able to ask was, what happens when you take a guy who believes the world is black and white and throw him into a world that's all shades of gray. What would the world be like if every conspiracy theory that people today believe to be true is in fact true. And what we didn't realize was how real world relevant that would be. We made assumptions about terrorism and its place in the world and let players explore what terrorism is all about. It's a total coincidence. If you look at the skyline in the game, the World Trade Center isn't there, isn't there in a game about terrorism. That's a little scary and, people saw the real world ramifications of what the game was about. AI, what happens when the singularity happens and AI starts to become sentient, we're on the verge of that today. People can play the game and think about stuff, as opposed to just how'd you kill that boss monster. It was part of what I wanted to do. I was lucky enough to build a team that saw the power of that, took those ideas and made them better than I ever could have imagined. There's a lot of smoke and mirrors in Deus Ex and while there isn't a lot of scripting, there's still some fakery going on, you know, there's a stealth path and a shooter path. And to a lesser extent, a role-playing path, you know, through the game. But the cool thing was, we built just enough of a simulation that players could go beyond those kind of pre-planned paths. They could really solve problems in their own way. What that resulted in is, what we call secondary effects, right? In most games, you kill something. You move on to the next thing you have to kill, you kill that, you move on to the next thing. In Deux Ex, and games like it, and immersive simulations, secondary effects are critical. You kill something and if you kill something silently, you can then keep moving silently. But if you kill something with a gun, it makes noise. And the noise attracts more bad guys. If you've got a locked door and an explosive barrel, and a man in black, who we've set up to explode when you kill them, you can't get through that door because it's too tough or you don't have the key. You take one shot basically, kill that man in black, he blows up, which blows up the explosive barrel. And the combination of those two things blows the door off its hinges. So get through that door in a way that wasn't pre-planned but was a result of the systems working together in a way that solved the problem in a logical but not predictable way. Now you've made a lot of noise, which attracts more bad guys. So there's a secondary effect and a tertiary effect. That kind of thing allows players to solve problems in ways that we didn't anticipate. The classic example is LAM ladders, light attack munitions. They're basically hand grenades that work in three ways but they didn't affect the player. And what happened was we had modeled them, the simulation, hear the air quotes around that word, that they were modeled as 3D objects with collision and players stuck them to a wall and jumped up on one, and then they'd put another one higher up on the wall and jump up on it and jump up on the next one, and the next one, creating what you'd call a LAM ladder. In my games, within the sandbox, I don't care what order you do things in, I don't care how you do them, it's up to you. That seems like the pleasures of creativity and the pleasures of authorship and the pleasures of unique experience and the pleasures of doing something that hasn't been possible ever in human history. Movies can't do it. Books can't do it. Paintings can't do it. No medium has been able to turn every body into an author except tabletop role playing and immersive simulation games. And that's why I keep making them. There's nothing else that is interesting to me, testing an immersive simulation. I mean, holy cow testing is very hard when players are empowered at the level that we try to empower them in immersive simulations, we can't always predict what they're going to do. There is no one path through the game. There's linear narrative and we can test that that makes sense but we can't predict how players are going to play. What I try to do, it's so bad for the testers. I tell them, play at the extremes. You are going to play through this game without killing anything at all. You're going to play the game, never being seen by anyone. You are going to play the game, talking to everybody. I don't know if I'm right but I always figured that if the extremes work, anything in the middle is going to work too, most players play in the middle. It's only the really hardcore folks who play all combat or all stealth. [upbeat electronic music] The most exciting thing about games today is that there's room for everything. it used to be that you had to work for real studio and have a real publisher and put stuff in boxes and get it on shelves and advertise in magazines, all that stuff. And you had to create your own game engine for every game. The barrier to entry was really high. And now the barriers to entry are incredibly low. If you have an idea, you can make it. There's a game engine that will help you. There are so many business models and ways to reach an audience that you can do anything. People are doing anything, there's room for single player narrative games, there's room for immersive sims, there's room for completely linear, I think you should just go make a movie camps. There's room for multiplayer sandbox games and battle royales, four player co-op game there's room for everything. And it's not that everything makes the same amount of money but it's possible to make money with anything which means it's possible to make another one, which is in terms of success criteria, selling enough copies to make your next one is maybe the most important. That is possible, regardless of genre, regardless of game style, regardless of team size, budget, it just doesn't matter. So everything is viable now. Everything in the world. I genuinely believe that every game can and should do something new. Something that no one in the world has ever seen or done before in a game. That can be a new system, a new game mode. It can be anything, in Deux Ex it's something actually a little different that might surprise people, it's a unique combination of genres. When you put old things together, sometimes you end up with something new. In most games, the developer knows everything players are capable of doing. And we did not. We learned from players how to play our own game. Every game should do one thing that no one in the world has ever seen or done before. And you have evidence that a small group of people maybe even led by one creative, crazy genius can show us something about games that no one knows. And everybody, every game has the opportunity to do that. You know, even if you're making a, My Little Pony game, find the one new thing and get that into your game.