Full original design documents for Deus Ex, DX3 and Thief 4 (not the reboot) released

You can post pdfs my dude

Oh dear god

I didn't think it could possibly be worse than THI4F but it somehow managed it.

So they basically wanted to make Thief 4 into Deus Ex?

Reminder that consoles killed the evolution of PC gaming.

Invisible War and Deadly Shadows were fucking terrible.

Time to reinstall

The Deus Ex 3 doc actually sounds breddy gud. If only Square Jewnix didn't get the IP.

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You know there are almost no games that LET you take prisoners. Your only option is to kill them, even if you'd rather be merciful and leave them unconscious or keep them as a prisoner/slave. Basically if you engage someone in 99.9% of videogames someone has to die.

Pretty much the only games I know of where you can actually 'take prisoners' are RimWorld and modded Skyrim.

I'd say there's MGS V too, though technically you convert them to work for you rather than imprison them in a cell

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Right, forgot about that. Never played but heard you could capture people. I figure in an RPG, one of the biggest parts of roleplaying is how you deal with enemies. In a DnD game I was playing we defeated some bandits but one was only knocked unconscious. So my character who was a town guard tied her up and dragged her along until we got back to town. While in the end it didn't change much because she wouldn't squeal, letting the player decide whether or not to kill every enemy is a big part of letting them role play.

>the combat should feel good and the player should always feel like he has influence over the strategic situation. At times the player will need to move quietly, hide or use stealth tools.
First pic and I don't know if I can take anymore

Keep going. It gets better.

Mount&Blade as well.

I think the concept for this version of Thief but I've never played the originals so who knows. Other than that you niggers need to accept change or GTFO fuck off
H8TERS
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S

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Jesus fucking christ

The morons who put that together need to never be allowed near anything creative ever again

Even the reboot is better than what that would've been.

Wouldn't some of these people be working on System Shock 3 and the reboot?

Why not just call it a movie? If you are going to make it this linear, you may as well just admit it is not a game anymore.

Oh fuck I braced for five minutes but I wasn't ready. What the fuck were they thinking?? They were actually going to do this? Ion Storm?

Isn't this a mechanic from Dishonored 2?

Wow, this almost makes Thi4f look bearable.

Sounds more like Soul Reaver.

Jesus Christ, I'm only on the "High Level Game Goal" and already I can barely keep reading this.
This would have been even worse than the reboot

Funny thing, while Fire Emblem Fates was fucking garbage you could capture enemy units. Also the SD Gundam G Generation games let you do that too, after blowing up the enemy's warship.

This is probably the only time where an unmade sequel to a legendary franchise seems several times worse than the cashgrab reboot.
What is this nonsense?
Thief was too "slow"? The game is now "action-stealth"? Why is there now a focus on combat? Why does it take place in modern times? Worldwide conspiracies and crazy cults?
This reads as if they were trying to make another Deus Ex but had no clue what made it good.

I guess Deus Ex and Thief really were flukes.

You really needed conformation for that?

*confirmation

I'm suffering just to get through these images. I'm terrified of looking at the full document.

i wouldnt mind that.

That "shifting between the real world and wraith world and deciding whether to fight human guards or Cthulhu monstrosities" mechanic actually seems like a neat idea, TBH, just not for a Thief game.

Nah, Dishonored could never have something so good.

Oh god, where is this gonna end up?

wow
gg, 11/10

Get out.

Ion Storm was a shit studio and DS was a near unplayable consolized trainwreck, why is anyone surprised?

that the TLC may not be as benign as it seem􀋓 discovered mysterious connections linking his brother's disappearance, the drug runners and the TLC.
out stopping them) are both puppets of the "real world" secret society known as Majestic 12. These puppet
organizations are part of a massive conspiracy to undermine the,government of the United States (and, next,
the world). The Ivlajestic 12 plot involves massive manipulation of the media, the creation and distribution
of a deadly new drug, a second Mexican-American War, the imposition of martial law and the deaths of
many top-ranking government officials. If the plot succeeds, Majestic 12 will be in control of a US
government (and its arsenal of nukes) free of the pesky limitations imposed by the Constitution. With the io _ 􀎗 f US in the fold, the rest of the world will have no choice but to join the new world government M-ajestic-:t2- sought for the hundred years since its creation
agents," all of whom were once au􀉭mented agents ofTLC. These agents, along with several others
controlled by him, mus􀉮netJ:[email protected]/* */ heavily guarded underground complexes m:o.uncLth@-WGI:ld..(the-Arett -5-l-􀉯&:G)..fa&ilitY H1-N@.:y;aa.?the NORAD complex at Cheyenne Mountain outside Colorado Springs, and the
Yamantau complex in the Beloretsk region of the southern Urals). There, they will dump the Adam code into the supercomputers at each location. With this done, Adam will upload the data to an orbiting space station and, from there, using the control of communication facilities he was granted by Majestic 12 upon his creation, he can take control of orbiting defensive satellites, with their nukes and lasers. More important, he can issue an u1tim􀉰tum to the people of Earth - submit to his will or, well, there's no alternative, really. He controls the nukes, the lasers, the media … By the end of Act 3, JC must stop the carrier agents, if possible and get to the orbiting space station so yell- Lvo– can stop Adam before he puts the final stages of his plan into effyct.
It is pretty damn hilarious that they managed to predict that NORAD would move to the Cheyenne Mountains, which happened around a year ago.

Not flukes, they were just PC games. Console-first design was the cancer.

It's not predictions, it's magic.

In Commandos 1(haven't played the rests) on some missions the enemies can imprison one of your squadmates and you have to free him with the rest of your squad.

Judge Dredd for SNES has you arresting perps instead of killing them for bonus points.

You know, I'd actually like to see a Thief-like game set in the modern world for a different backdrop.
Having the Keepers in a world where public vigilance and cellphones exist trying to keep their existence a secret would be quite a chalenge, not to mention the many new security measures Garret could find and have to work against.
But I probably wouldn't call it "Thief" though.

That bit about the dagger seems an interesting idea and reminds me of Soul Reaver 2 where you are forced into the spiritual realm when you die and must do battle against demons to regain your material form.

The problem is that, for a pure stealth game, you'd need to balance that thing very carefully.
Being able to shift back and forth at will seems all nice but it completely breaks stealth since you don't have to sneak at all.

If instead the amount of demons on the other side depends on how many people are killed, how long you spend in it and how many times you use the dagger abilities, that's an interesting way to do it. Abuse it's powers for easy mode and you won't have them when you need it.

I actually like some of the ideas they had for DX3 concept that's a direct prequel to DXIW, sort of a cool dystopic singularity-gone-wrong feel like Serial Experiments Lain, nuXCOM 2, Syndicate, and Reign of Steel. The ideas between both that DX3 concept and the prequel one about factions, missions, following a set of characters, and building relationships also seems like it could've lead in an awesome Alpha Protocol direction. But holey moley, the "lessons" they "learned" about what was "wrong" about DXIW!!!!
>Blockbuster potential and lessons learned from DX: Invisible War
>Deus Ex: Insurrection has the potential to become a blockbuster hit because

There's also SWAT 3/4, where you can stick up people with guns, and if they're sufficiently cowed, they'll stand still as long as you or a teammate is covering them, or even throw away their weapons and lie down, allowing you to cuff them.

Plus you can bind and gag knocked out enemies.

Holy shit they wanted to streamline the game even more.

It's hard to believe that was written by actual developers and not executives or shareholders or something.

It's 2016, what's the difference?

This was from 2004

Wow.
Deus Ex 1 was made with the same philosophy that killed modern RPG's. I have no idea how they managed to make it work

Pretty interesting to see the original story, though. Usually when I see beta design docs, I think, "Holy shit, why did this get scrapped?!" But the original plot makes me glad they changed almost everything. The pacing looked like it would have been very short, you turn your back on UNATCO very quickly.

The design docs looked pretty solid other than that. I'd like to see make :^) a game with its spirit of "infinite possibilities in a simulation" re-imagined with modern tech.

The point was, many good games were just flukes by business men who had no clue what they were doing. The only difference now is that indie devs also have hipsters and autists who have no clue what they're doing.

This Thief 4 design doc though

Jesus fuck.

Keep in mind these were earlier design documents and the whole game was rebalanced around skill points very close to launch. Their attitude towards problem solving vs. puzzle solving is really admirable, and I think they define what they man by "simulation" pretty well.

I'd like to see more games take this approach. No more "puzzles", just make an impossible looking scenario and let the player use the mechanics to decide how he'd make it possible.

Closest we have to it since then seems to Breath of the Wild, I like the "sandbox" approach they're taking to physics system and accidentally have multiple-solution puzzles.

There so much grammatically wrong with this post. Sorry, I've been breathing campfire smoke for the past 9 hours I'm really dizzy.

That's the thing, up until DXIW, every single game these people did clear from the 1980s to the early 2000s hovered somewhere between good and awesome, with Deus Ex/Thief's entire lineage (UU1/2, SS1/2, DX1) being solid gold.

The only unique factors I can think of are consoles as primary target, and (especially in the later design docs) references to "new teams". But man, some of the incredibly tone-deaf things in there about public reception and feedback really make me wonder…

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This tbh, you can see it best in ME3 vs ME1.

ME3
ME1

i dodged that bullet

Mass Effect had spells?

Go play the demo if you haven't already, nuSystem Shock is a lost cause.

psionic abilities or some such, if I remember correctly.

where is this sperm alien from

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I'm painfully aware

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Terrible.

Seriously though I can't find the source on this, little help?

Pretty sure that's a character from Kimi ni Todoke

The documents talk about progress on the games' development and show some stats, do you think some of them got to alpha or some sort of playable state? Think we'll ever be able to play them?

Considering Deus Ex invisible war poopy

its best that they stopped there

Were you burning like the brightest start?
you gonna burn alright