Postmortem: Ion Storm's Deus Ex

Contents

Ion Storm's Deus Ex

What Went Right

What Went Wrong

The Bottom Line

What I'm Not Sure About

Given the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to identify some things
as having gone "right" and other things as having gone "wrong." However, some of the most interesting things to consider are the ones that aren't so easily pinned down. Here are some questions that are
still very much open in my mind. (If any of you have answers, feel free to share them!):


The Bottom Line

Part of the challenge of game development is making the tough decisions along the way, leading to many difficult junctures when you have to determine that something that can't be done right in the game shouldn't be done at all. Notice the complete lack of references to multiplayer action in this Postmortem. We wanted to provide multiplayer support but didn't have the time to do the job we knew we needed to do, and so it got cut.

Now, generalize from that point: It's all well and good to have design goals and an ideal game pictured in your head when you start, but you have to be open to change and realistic about what can and can't be done in a reasonable time frame, for a reasonable amount of money, with the personnel and technology available to you. And if you don't have time to do something right, cut it and do everything that's left so well that no one notices the stuff that isn't there.

I'm not saying we did that perfectly on Deus Ex. We certainly didn't ship a perfect game. But if we hadn't gone into development with the attitude that we'd do things right or not at all, we would have fallen far shorter of perfection than we did. How close we did get is something all of you can decide for yourselves. All I know is we're going to get closer next time.

Game Data

Deus Ex

Publisher: Eidos Interactive

Number of Full-Time Developers: Approx. 20: 1 of me, 3 programmers, 6 designers, 7 artists, 1 writer, 1 associate producer, 1 tech

Number of Contractors: Approx. 6: 2 writers, 4 testers

Development Time: 6 months of preproduction and 28 months of production

Release Date: June 23, 2000

Target Platform: Windows 95/98/NT/2000 plus third-party Macintosh and Linux ports

Critical Development Hardware: Ranged from dual Pentium Pro 200s with 8GB hard drives, to Athlon 800s with 9GB fast SCSI, and everything in between. More than 100 video cards were cycled through during development.

Software Used: Visual Studio, Lightwave, Lotus Notes

Notable Technologies: Unreal engine and associated tools such as UnrealEd and ConEdit (our proprietary conversation editor)


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Ion Storm's Deus Ex