No, not Human Revolution, the original Warren Spector version that never got made. There were in fact 6 options being brainstormed, including an augmented spec ops soldier who realises he’s the bad guy, and another involving rescuing a girl from a cult, which sounds very familiar.
The info’s come to light here, where journo Joe Martin points to a huge repository of video game art, documentation and code at the The Dolph Briscoe Center of American History. It’s a nightmare to navigate though, leaving me unsure if I can’t find it or you have to pull physical paper copies so I’ve emailed the centre to find out more.
The info from Martin though includes this:
It’s two of an apparent 6 options that were being considered for a third Deus Ex to follow up Invisible War. The two plots, Martin points out, have interesting correlations to subsequent work by other developers. For example the “And Then They Pull You Back In’ option follows a soldier who tries to get away from his former life when he realises it’s all a bit shady. It follows a flashback structure not dissimilar to ex-Deus Ex designer Harvey Smith’s Area 51.
The other option called ‘Infiltrate the Cult’ follows a militia soldier whose sister joins a cult. The sister is then used as a means to infiltrate the group, and doing so exposes you to both militia and cult arguments before forcing you to choose between rescuing or joining the sister. The rescue setup strongly mirrors one of the original ideas for Bioshock, and Ken Levine did work with some of the Deus Ex team in the past.
Interestingly, for the original Deus Ex there was also a woman character designed at one point who never made it in the final game:
The archive sounds like a facinating loOK at some classic video game history and as I mentioned I’ve emailed them to find out more.
Comments
8 responses to “Here’s The Original Plot For Deus Ex 3”
What an absolutely awesome idea for a protagonist. To realise as the story progresses that you’re actually the bad guy, and perhaps your main rival is the real good guy. It would be a great way to flip on its head what is currently going on with video game protagonists in open world games; that murdering swathes of people is okay. I’m looking at you Aiden Pearce.
There’s been a few games that have tried it but I don’t think any have been that successful. You could probably argue that the best example of it working is Shadow of the Colossus.
Spec Ops: The Line was good for this.
Yeah it was. Actually most of the examples of it working well are cases where rather than turning out to be the ‘bad’ guy, the actual situations are morally grey or deliberately ambiguous.
Not trying to be a dick, but this is old news.
Well, of course this isn’t news to Daedalus.
I never asked for this
Actually laughed. Out loud.