// PC GAMER — GAMING
A multi-month delay for Deus Ex turned into a huge payoff for one of its best characters, says designer Harvey Smith
Smith's story about the late stages of Deus Ex development takes some time to get to the point, but it's a fun ride.
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Nobody likes game delays. Sure, a delay is temporary and suck is forever, as Gabe Newell once said, but it still chafes. But sometimes a little extra development time can go a very long way. In a new interview with the NoClip podcast, immersive sim maestro Harvey Smith shared one such story about Deus Ex, explaining how it leveraged some extra post-production time to give a much bigger role to one of the game's most famous NPCs—and make it a much better game in the process.
Smith's tale actually followed a remark by Ben Horne, his co-founder at the new Black Pony Immersive studio, who said, "You can elevate a good immersive sim into a great immersive sim in a very short amount of time, a matter of months, if you just protect a post-production time."
Publishers generally don't want to hear that, Smith added—although he obviously agrees with the sentiment—and so 20-some years ago, when Ion Storm Austin asked Eidos for more time to tighten up Deus Ex, "We geared up for this giant fight." Instead, Eidos just said yes.
"They were so distracted by what was happening in Dallas with Daikatana and such that they were like, 'Sure, sure, sure. Take five more months, take six more, whatever you need.' And we were like, 'Oh, cool. Okay'."
What was happening in Dallas, as Smith put it, was essentially chaos, which you can dig into via our history of Ion Storm. But, as Smith has previously related, it was a useful distraction for Ion Storm Austin, which did indeed get the extra time it wanted to really nail down Deus Ex.
A focus of that extra dev time was one of the game's foremost NPCs, "this German guy with a skull gun" named Gunther Hermann—who, for the record, very much wanted a skull gun but as far as I know never actually got one despite filing the required paperwork. "He's kind of a big presence in a couple of missions, you go on a mission with him, and then he just vanishes," Smith said. "He has no closure. He's not even in the game.
"So, I literally said, I can drop him into Paris, a big fight in the cathedral, which is an empty building right now, and I can hide some triggers on the roof with data links, and if you're crawling around on the roof because you have 'super jump' or whatever, I'll have him say, 'I'm watching you, Denton, like an insect crawl around on the roof. I am watching you through the satellite, which I am linked to right now, Denton.' You know, so we do this kind of thing, and players go, 'Well fuck, somebody's watching me from a satellite.' It's like smoke and mirrors, and then you get in there and you fight it out with him.
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