As someone who rarely gets to enter the rarefied airs of the C-suite, my conception of what corporate executives do is roughly this: they issue forth critical misunderstandings of basic things that the people in the trenches then have to operate around and overcome in order to keep their jobs. See further—that time retail honchos told RPG devs no one wants to buy games like Baldur’s Gate anymore.
I’m reminded of that blunder by a recent Deus Ex: Invisible War retrospective in Edge magazine. Invisible War, infamously, was a little constricted compared to the first game, thanks to limited capacities of the original Xbox. Turns out you can, at least partially, thank Eidos for some of that fervent drive to get the game on console.
“You go to console and you have a lot fewer systems for memory,” said Smith. “You need to develop for the baseline console. You can’t assume people are going to be able to upgrade, or be on the bleeding edge.” Which is how we ended up with Invisible War’s infamously confined levels, which seemed claustrophobic compared to the sheer amount of open space in Deus Ex’s Liberty Island, Hell’s Kitchen, or Paris.
Players felt, not unfairly, that Invisible War literally had less space for fun exploration or coming up with innovative, imsim-y solutions to the game’s challenges. A famous part of DX1, where you enter the New York sewers and find an entire Majestic 12 base hidden in there, couldn’t have worked on Xbox. Or at least, it couldn’t have worked without about eight separate load screens.
I actually still think IW did pretty okay with its level design within its console confines (an early quest to assassinate a resident of a Seattle hotel is a particular standout in my memory, with all manner of ways to reach your target), but it was much smaller, there’s no arguing that.
“There were legit complaints,” remembers Smith. “As we adapted Invisible War to console with the map sizes, the UI and everything, we walked into this kind of buggy, inelegantly-made-for-console game. It angered our most hardcore followers.” The rest, as they say, is history. Oh, and it’s why I wouldn’t say no to an Invisible War remaster/remake that cut out a loading screen or 10.
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