Dario on 10/5/2008 at 10:19

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Hi, all. Just laying down some thoughts, before I turn in for the night.

You know, after about 7 play-throughs throughout the last decade, Deus Ex has become really easy (for me, at least), even on the Realistic difficulty setting. But what I really, really love in a game is a challenge that makes you have to TRY to approach situations realistically, and not just run into things guns blazing all the time. (it's nice to have the OPTION, but I also like being *forced* to think of alternatives, just so things aren't already so drearily easy. I'm tired of feeling like some kind of god-machine in every game, while all the enemies are just cannon fodder)

I tried playing Crysis on Delta difficulty (or whatever the hardest setting is called) and it was great. I had to sneak everywhere, use my suit's invis, pop my head around corners, and be fairly careful. It added a while new dimension to the game feeling REAL, and not just just like the usual mass-genocide simulator.

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So anyway, what I began doing a while back (during those times of day when I was too burnt from working on stuff to actually work on stuff) was start working on the first DX map (Liberty Island), in order to make it harder, more populated (I think my 8800 card can handle a few extra bots, no?), and breathe some life into it, without actually changing game mechanics.

Just to mess around, what I did was add a bunch of robots bots patrolling the statue, on multiple levels (not a stupid amount of bots, but enough to remove the sense of the place feeling like a ghost-town up there). I also cloned some enemies, put some of them on long patrol routes that cut through empty corners of the map, and cloned a few trash cans, just to see if it would like a pile of cloned trash cans, or a more lived-in area. (if you just leave everything as-is, it seems like Liberty Island was just built, and has never been walked on.)

- Anyway, so, if something like this hasn't already been done, I just wanted to know if anyone would be interested in doing a short project like this. The idea would be to take the existing maps, and just make them quite a bit more difficult, more populated (though I'd say leave the ammo count the same, so you aren't tripping over ammo), and more decorated (you know, just clone extra piles of trash all over the place. We could call it "Deus Ex: The Trashpiracy" - in the intro movie, when Bob Page says "let the bodies pile up in the streets", Walton Simons could say, "What about the trash?" [music cuts... long silence] "I don't know about the trash.")

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So, does this strike a fancy with anyone? It's really easy. You just have to know a couple basic things about Unreal Ed, and figure out know how to rig things like patrol routes for the bots, etc. (it's quite simple, but I couldn't get the NSF robots to patrol consistently. Sometimes it would work, and sometimes they would just hold still, for reasons that I didn't have time to dig into)

(http://www.deefrag.com/projects.htm) I don't have time to hit the maps hardcore, but I could certainly host the project, launch a simple site for it (probably a look similar to (http://www.gunreal.com/) this one - basically just watch a trailer, download, and get the crap out), and boot up an SVN or FTP server if needed, to keep everyone's files synced.

It would be ideal if we could get a small group of unoccupied Dromedeers, or people who are otherwise already familiar with this level-editing stuff... but anyone who can comfortable kick around the more basic features of UnrealEd would do just fine as well.

A potential title for the project could be "Deus Ex: Lockdown" (emphasizing the focus on difficulty). I was also thinking that after the first 1.0 release, we could possibly throw together a larger team, and do a 2.0 release, just for fun, updating the visuals a little - things like lighting (add some bright, directional spotlights here and there), composition... maybe fill in some of the more flat surfaces, and add some color/contrast to the more gray, washed-out textures. (I'm not talking throwing 1024x1024 textures everywhere, that don't fit in with everything else... just simple things, to make DX a little more like something id would have made, back in the day - in other words, maintain small textures and basic geometry, just in a way that that doesn't suck terribly)