Deus Ex creator Warren Spector is retiring from game development
videogameschronicle.com
videogameschronicle.com
Like Molyneux's last games all being centered around trash exploitative mobile game mechanics.
Spector being the progenitor of 2 entire very rich single player genres with Thief and DeusEx it just feels completely the wrong person to be working on some coop online game that got support ended after 2 months. It's just not what a talent like him should be working on and the business mechanics don't align with his strengths.
Would have made a lot more sense to be doing a budget IMSIM, there is an audience there on PC for for these sort of games at a visual fidelity level a small team can accomplish rather than trying to make something more mainstream with a reliance on online.
I'm sure his bank account disagrees. All games are, ultimately, commercial ventures with the express purpose of making money. It's why they are so hard to classify as "art". There are a select few auteur driven passion projects that can transcend this now and again, but they are generally extreme outliers among even their creator's careers, let alone the industry as a whole.
https://www.moddb.com/groups/2023-mod-of-the-year-awards/fea...
Not sure when exactly, I assume since physical media became less important, but it's been recommended for at least V and VI, not just VII to skip the x.0 releases, wait for some updates.
EDIT: I'll add Daisuke Ishiwatari and Fumito Ueda. It's hard to think of someone in the West, though. A lot of them got run out. Amy Hennig's an infamous case.
I find the notion of auteur "game developers" somewhat puzzling. I say that as someone who played, and still play, these games when they came out. Most of these guys haven't made great games in a long, long while. Obsidian's only decent game in a long while is Pentiment, and that for all intents was a passion project.
In particular I'd say right now it's really hard to look at any given game that has commerical potential and spot the winners across any size category. There is a glut of supply that tends to exentuate the hit driven nature of making games as gamers latch onto the next viral success whilst at the same time making it hard to have multiple hits. Back in the day competition was less and money could buy a scope and technology advantage. Both of which are ideas that no longer really apply.
Like look at Hidetaka Miyazaki's work on Demon's Souls and then go and tell me that the leader doesn't matter.
> "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.
I feel as the industry ages out the "fresh new excitement cutting edge" environment you thrived in is now mainstream. It's procedural and boring so you feel forced to churn out another "cutting edge" mainstream thing. You burn out trying to blend in with the furniture.
Perhaps if you keep finding new cutting edge things to do you can stay on top but most people are ensnared by their zeitgeist.
And some other people cant reproduce the former success, which makes it much more likely the reasons for success were well beyond their control.
Great gameplay ideas came from programmers, artists, designers, marketing people, testers, and many others. All those ideas were then brought together into one unified product.
Hard to get the mid ground, they rarely recoup the costs.
Don't get me wrong, a game like Fable was pretty good, but it was nowhere near what he was effectively selling back when it was known as Project Ego.
That Molyneux chose to make a mindless clicker as his first game with 22cans really can't be blamed on anything or anyone other than Peter himself.
Deus Ex is Ultima X, it picked up and relit the torch that Ultima IX dropped in a puddle.
there were many sites, not just one city
What a legacy.
Some games just impact me in a way that others don't, and I rarely go back to games for that reason. Another example is that I've probably spent longer thinking about Thomas Was Alone than I actually spent playing it, it's a very short game that had a tremendous impact on me.
Deus Ex was the right game at just the right time, and somehow the sequels never recaptured that magic. For me, a large part of that was precisely the promise the game had, even if upon technical breakdown it didn't really deliver on those promises. The idea that you were affecting and interacting with the world. The idea that you had a full gamut of options of how to achieve a mission. These were promises that weren't well kept, but they kept the imagination alive.
I feel like it's actually a sign of a good game. A masterpiece that relies on my imagination just hits different.
Or, you’re always learning new things and encountering new elements, be it plot, interactions, or simply exploring. The replayability ends up feeling quite arcade-y too, trying for a particular outcome.
The conspiracy theories. :-)
Yes, looking back at the game in hindsight - having since played games like Morrowind - Deus Ex seems relatively linear in comparison, but at the time it felt completely different to any FPS I had played before.
It doesn't work anymore in modern mods I've played through; they've patched it.
I would argue it has way more depth and complexity than the majority of modern games. There were so many systems that interacted in interesting ways, and so much player freedom that the devs actually accounted for. Just endless stories of "I tried this bizarre thing that I thought nobody would think of, and the devs actually wrote unique dialogue for this situation".
It's also a bit of a mess and cobbled together, but in a beautiful way.
There are exceptions that prove the rule, but I do think there’s something about the quality of a person’s output that changes as they age. Maybe it’s brain elasticity. Maybe it’s that life changes as we age and things like kids or aging parents or health take precedence.
Regardless, I wish we had a better structure to more gracefully allow the greats to move into teaching or mentorship rather than expecting them to continually release the next great thing. Sports is a good model due to the physicality, if a little on the ruthless end of the spectrum. Most great athletes peak at 26-32 and the ones that continue can still do amazing things but they move into a different role; captains, coaches, commentators, whatever.
Maybe that should apply to games, coding, etc.
I wonder if he’s an exception that proves the rule like you mention, or if his experiences in his youth working on tabletop games contributed to his design sensibilities in the 90s.
I also enjoyed lots The excavation of Hob's Barrow and also finished Broken Sword 5. Monkey Island series are great.
The CV from Spector is great, btw.
It's a weird world to see that sort of rich patronage model returning. It also doesn't seem sustainable for that many games we want to play to come from just random multi-millionaires and billionaires desiring that videogames are their favorite "philanthropy".
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3341000/Thick_As_Thieves/...
> "There's a tendency among the press to attribute the creation of a game to a single person," says Warren Spector, creator of Thief and Deus Ex.
I hope he figures out how to make it once it finally becomes possible, and comes back!
Will Wright said this at the closing his 2005 Spore GDC talk:
>A lot of the games I've worked on, I've always had obstacles -- usually trying to convince other people it's a good idea, or it'd be sellable, or whatever. When I look back on this idea, the biggest obstacle I truly had was making myself believe that we could build the game. My own imagination was the biggest bottleneck. Once I truly believed that this game was buildable, it proved to be actually quite easy to con- I mean, to persuade the rest of my staff and the executives and everything that we could do it.
>So I'd encourage all of you: if you've got some totally weird idea that is just so far outside the box that you think there's no way that would work -- go back occasionally and revisit those ideas. Because you just never know where they might lead.
>-Will Wright, The Future of Content, GDC 2005, 1:00:57
HR is the best videogame ever, story, art, music. All golden and aging like wine.
I bet that thanks to AI, he is more likely to come back and make more great games.
To Downvoters: After thinking about this in the age of AI, I now think that game developers have no choice but to use AI in developing their games for this reason:
The big game studios that use AI will beat the indie studios to market quicker.
Do you really think they won't use AI to meet the deadline quicker and avoid any delays? I bet they will. As long as competition exists, there will always be someone else using AI to compete.
But of course it is damned if they use AI (no delay). Damned if they don't use AI (and risk delays).