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What does Deus Ex: Human Revolution tell us, could go where game design?

Launching this Friday, Deus Ex: Human Revolution could also be the most interesting mainstream video game for a decade. As with the original Deus Ex, released way back in 2000, it offers a fascinating conspiracy theories out cyberpunk story and a structure that the players huge amounts of space to explore their own impulses to gameplay. Through the augmentation system, the main character Adam Jensen can be gradually remodeled in a Stealth bomber or a heavily armed juggernaut, interspersed with dozens of variants.

Although hundreds of games since Deux Ex tried to offer that choice, have some really allows the player 's choice to make a real impact on the story, and the impact of each mission. Human revolution means. And release as Triple A, it gets pretty lonely.

It remains an unsolved problem at the heart of game design: how much freedom the players really want? Have developed corridor shooters like Call of Duty, because there is a huge audience out there for very controlled, linear cinematic experience. But at the same time, titles like Grand Theft Auto and Fallout from the players some autonomy in the game world have prospered. Would Black Ops have been a better game if the player was able to walk out and take side missions in Vietnam, or Cuba? Or do we need it, think like a completely different form of entertainment?

Betting in this respect, studios often like their hedge. For example, in The Elder Scrolls V: The Old Republic, there is a 30-40 hours main quest, but then the side missions and 200 hours of non-essential activities. Grand Theft Auto and Dead Red Redemption work in a similar manner. The designers are for freedom only by shifting from the main plot. You are effectively creating two related, but separate essentially gaming experiences.

You have the choice of working within a narrative is complex, since each player decisions are often prepared with action sequences. I met the producer of Far Cry 2 a few months before 's to start and they were burned wrecks - they' game \ d spent months designing the plot and the associated cut-scenes and paths of causation, so that the player couldn 't stumble inaccuracies or discrepancies by attempting missions in the' wrong sequence '. They weren 't entirely successful, of course, and the nightmare of this effort may explain why Far Cry 3 provides a much more targeted animal.

Make sure the player doesn 't you see history in the wrong order, the slightest problem, however. For a truly open world game to work, each element of systemic functioning in this environment and emergent. You can 't have spawn points for enemies, because what if the player sneaks up on them from the wrong angle? This happened dozens of times in the first two Doom title, the have give the player a certain amount of space to explore, and it was like shooting demons in a barrel.

So enemies have to be given systemic AI, in order that they can act within the world in a believable manner. For a while, this meant constructing finite state machines capable of reacting to a modest series of inputs: I am under attack, I have seen the player, etc. Now developers are working with more complex systems such as AI planners and hierarchical task networks so that computer characters have more advanced behaviours and can be more proactive. The likes of Killzone 3, Crysis 2 and Halo Reach all have enemies capable of working in teams, flanking the player and avoiding incoming fire. What AI characters can't do, of course, is work out where the player is in the story and communicate with them accordingly. AI characters don't do narrative improvisation. At least not yet.

Beyond all these technicalities is the fundamental concern that players don't like to get lost. In the early days of 'arcade adventure games' like Knight Lore and Dungeon Master, players were actively encouraged to map out the games themselves on graph paper, but no modern developer would ever get that idea past the marketing team (the closest we've come recently, is your ability to mark the game map in Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks). Shigeru Miyamoto championed the whole hub world concept to get round this, allowing players to cast off in any direction they fancied with the security of knowing they were only one step removed from a familiar locale. This set-up became a cornerstone of the platform adventure genre in the wake of Super Mario 64, but it severely limits the linear explore-ability of the world; all you're effectively doing is taking a single step in multiple directions.

What worries most players lack the freedom of stuff. If you 't be happy until every possibility has explored - that' in a haunted house with dozens of doors, each leading to hallways won dozens more doors, the completist \ s not gaming, that 's conducting a police search. Work for this type of design, players must know that there are limits, and that they won 't need to save again and be more locations. Ocarina of Time is the right place, delivering multiple locations that need to be visited again with new products, but rather, there aren 't too many so afraid that the players that backtrack on countless areas.

Deus Ex was, because it \ the player 's concept of freedom subtly reprogrammed. It obscures the structure of the game behind apparent conspiracy, multiple characters and a world traveler design and manipulate the player in the perception of nature as a narrative component augmentation. In other words, the player 's progress, the wonderful transformation of character, became a plot point. They were the story. Or at least your thought you were, and in game design as in life, perception is reality.

Really is what makes human revolution, we are working a rich world and then invites us to feel as if we 're part of what a generous host a successful cocktail party. But with futuristic weapons. Furthermore, as JC Denton in Deus Ex 1, the story isn 't something that' s going on out there in the internal cut-scenes and non-player character interactions, it 's going on: in the character Adam Jensen. As a human-turned-cyborg, the adaptation to survive he must play symbolized 's post-humanist dilemma. He is The human revolution.

Still, the game has been criticised a little for its steadfast reliance on hoary old conventions like boss battles. To get past these, studios will need to start thinking about games in a new way; as totally emergent systems. In some ways, this has been happening for years. Way back in 1980 we had the seminal role-playing game, Rogue, based around procedurally generated dungeons - it kickstarted a whole genre of randomised RPGs which has most recently led to the likes of Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer and Dwarf Fortress. In 1985, Datasoft released Alternate Reality: The City, an RPG set on an Earth invaded by Aliens; players simply had to learn how to survive, getting jobs and learning new skills. More recently, there has been the procedurally generated online co-op game Love, filled with autonomous AI tribes, and of course, Minecraft, a game based around building stuff with blocks.

It 'sa strange paradox, though. Become as mainstream games are sophisticated, they also have less structurally ambitious. This is mainly involved in the huge budget in Triple-A production and the conservatism of the market: If 20 million people are happy, the same Call of Duty every year, where 's the impetus to radical new ideas about Players to buy freedom to invest and play structure? In this context, Human Revolution is an amazingly courageous project.

If it is a success, maybe there will be an increased desire to give players more of a say in game stories. I'd be fascinated to see procedurally generated first-person shooters, set in worlds filled with AI characters complex enough to decide on their own factions within the environment. Whether or not a 'plot' could evolve within this set up is questionable, but of course, as Dungeons and Dragons taught us many years ago, story is a malleable commodity, and engaged players have the imagination to make up shortfalls. But what D&D also showed, with its enormous rule books, is that all good games function like good democracies: players want freedom, but they also want structure (a government) and rules (a police force). Anarchy is not a game design, it's a dangerous sand box for minority thinkers.

Certainly, what \ s 's is missing at the moment is the player' imaginative investment. At gamescom I chaired a panel on the future of RPGs, at the beginning of it, I asked the participants to share their favorite adventure titles ever name. Ray Muzyka of Bioware co-founder spoke eloquently and nostalgically about the 1981 'Dungeons' game, magic, managed to offer an exciting and engrossing 'story' with limited graphics. He realized that what modern RPGs do replace the fantasy with gorgeous visuals and an epic, complicated mythologies.

Is that the only way? The future of freedom depends on developers to find a way to use fantasy player without the amazing visuals we 've to love. This can happen well when combined procedural graphics and complex AI, perhaps a publisher like EA or Ubisoft, or a developer like Bethesda or valves will look beyond the success Minecraft and see this as the core of a new mainstream gaming paradigm. How many players I 've enjoyed corridor shooters and scripted action-adventure, but I' m ready for what 's always the next one. These games are benevolent oligarchies. Maybe one day we will soon be 'll game design is a perfect democracy.