Deus Ex and the Level Design That Trusted the Player

In 2000, a game shipped from a small Austin studio that promised a thing many games claim and few deliver: that you could solve problems your own way. Deus Ex, released for Windows by Ion Storm Austin and published by Eidos Interactive, was led by Warren Spector, with Harvey Smith as lead designer, and built on the Unreal engine. It was a role-playing game, a shooter, a stealth game and a conspiracy thriller at the same time, and it held those pieces together better than almost anyone expected.

The setting is 2052, a near-future world beset by a plague and by mistrust. You play JC Denton, a freshly augmented agent of a counter-terrorist organisation called UNATCO, and you begin with a mission on Liberty Island. Over the game you learn that the organisation you work for is not what it seems, and you travel through New York, Hong Kong, Paris and beyond, uncovering secret societies and a technology-driven struggle for control. The plot is a tapestry of conspiracy theories, and it enjoys them with an open-eyed relish.

The design is where it earns its reputation. The opening mission is a good example: a large area with a heavily guarded objective, and no single correct route. You can use the front entrance, sneak through the sewers, climb to a rooftop, hack a terminal or lock-pick a side door. Skill points you spend in areas such as lockpicking, computers or weapons open different approaches. Non-lethal options exist. Conversations branch. The game keeps track of what you have done, and reacts, sometimes in small ways and sometimes in large ones.

Opinion: the reactivity can be overstated. Many of the branches rejoin quickly, and the illusion breaks if you look closely. But the impression of a world with multiple valid answers is what people remember, and that impression is a design achievement in itself. The game trusts you to be inventive, and rewards you when you are.

It has its blemishes. The voice acting is now a well-known subject of affectionate mockery, the combat with early weapons is fiddly, and some of the later levels feel less carefully built than the early ones. The three endings, each tied to a different faction and a different idea of the future, are memorable, but a few people find them abrupt.

Reception at release was excellent, and it won a large number of awards. Its legacy runs through the sequel Invisible War in 2003 and the Human Revolution reboot by Eidos Montréal in 2011, as well as through a great many games that borrow its habit of leaving space for improvisation. It also gained a devoted community of modders, who have kept it in circulation with fixes and graphical updates.

It remains easy to buy on PC through the usual storefronts. If you go back to it now, expect an old game, but also expect something rare: a game that, decades later, still feels like it was made by people who wanted to be surprised by what the player did.