Deus Ex: Invisible War Interview, Part One

RPGVault has dished up part one of a new Deus Ex: Invisible War interview with Project Director Harvey Smith, Studio Director Warren Spector, Programmer Matt Baer, Lead Designer Ricardo Bare, Lead Writer Sheldon Pacotti, Writer Sarah Paetsch, and Designer Steve Powers. Here’s a little something to get you started:

Q: What are the main lessons you learned in making Deus Ex and also in making a console version that have help you most in the creation of Invisible War?

A: Well, Deus Ex was conceived as a PC game with no intention of heading to a console. But we decided to do a PS2 version of the game, and it was obvious that this was going to be no small task. For one thing, PCs generally have much more memory than consoles. So, we had to optimize our systems and content to fit in a very small memory footprint. Then, we had performance problems. We had to do a lot of custom coding in order to really tap into the power of the console. And finally, the interface was a huge issue. Consoles really force you to think about your interface and make it as streamlined as possible, otherwise your game suffers dramatically. We pretty much had to throw out the PC interface and come up with something entirely new.

So, when we started working on Invisible War, we targeted the console from day one. This time it wasn’t an afterthought. Every decision we made along the way considered that we would be running on a console. And I think you’ll notice the difference.