<COMMENT>Nicked from my blog in yet another fit of egomania. - Jonas</COMMENT>
<P><B><JC><DC=57,163,202>How to mess up a classic franchise with a pretty good game
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<P>Deus Ex 2 disappointed a lot of people (included, to some extent, myself) even though it was quite a decent game in and of itself.
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<P>The main problem was that Deus Ex is, in its very core, a PC game. And in my use of the term "PC", I do not distinguish between a Windows PC or a Macintosh PC as the game was released for both operating systems with the exact same interface. The PC origins of the game can be seen in almost every level of its design. It is no secret that the PC platform allows for a far more complicated control scheme than any console does (be it a Playstation, an X-box, or a Nintendo system), and that this in turn encourages a more complicated game design. The graphical user interface (GUI) of Deus Ex reflects this in every possible way, from its several layers of clearly Windows-inspired in-game menus to the fact that it has so many different functions crammed into it - change ammo / toggle laser sight / toggle scope view / lean left or right / crouch / jump / toggle walk or run / activate object in world / toggle up to 9 nanoaugmentations / open inventory or any of the other 7 menus / holster weapon / drop item / etc. - that it would be impossible to control without all the buttons of a keyboard and/or several mouse-operated menus.
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<P>With the paragraph above, I hope to have conveyed that the very nature of the game depends on a complicated control-scheme. The sequel to Deus Ex, Deus Ex: Invisible War or IW for short, made this painfully apparent when the developers chose to create the game for PC and the X-box console simultaneously. From a business point of view, this was a great idea: The X-box uses DirectX to run its games, just like a Windows PC (given that Microsoft is the creator of both platforms) which makes it easy to develop for both at once, and the console gamers outnumber the PC gamers by far in the United States.
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<P>But in order to fit the controls for the game on the rather limited amount of buttons present on an X-box controller, ION Storm Austin had to considerably trim down the number of functions in the game. This suited them fine, because they believed it would serve to "streamline" the game, making it more accessible to the mainstream gamers. Unfortunately, among the fans of the original game, this streamlining was mostly perceived as a severe "dumbing-down" of the game. Features from the first game which were not present in the sequel includes different types of ammunition for each weapon, a diablo-style inventory where larger items take up more space than small items, the entire skill system including the way your aim would become more accurate when you were stationary and took your time to aim as opposed to when you were running around or jumping up and down, a conversation log which let you read over dialogue you had already been through in case you missed something important, an in-built text editor to let you write down your own notes, and a few more things I don't recall off the top of my head.