"Gamespy has written a nice piece on a tour of the IonStorm Austin office (which is responsible for Deus Ex), which you can find here. It's an interesting read, giving some details on the people making what could become the game of the year.

Thanks Blue for this tidbit of news."

Thanks!

One of the things that I loved about Half-Life (and more recently Soldier of Fortune) were the high quality and unexpectedness of the scripted events, will DX have many scripted events and if so what is being done to keep them from being predictable?

Depends on scripted events. We do not have them in the Half-life sense of the term. We all loved that (action) game, but we wanted more freedom, more emergence. Plus, we have interactive conversations. Our NPC's run to certain places, do certain things, but it's mostly a matter of AI. If you pull a gun in a crowded bar and fire it once, typically club security will bark warnings at you ("Watch yourself!") and all the civilians will flee in panic. If you don't fire a second time, the civilians will come back and dance or whatever. Club security will chill out some. If you fire twice, or shoot someone, it provokes a more extreme reaction. We wanted AI and simulation more than we wanted scripted scenes. (The degree to which we succeeded will have to be judged by others.)

I was lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Deus Ex during last year's E3 and recently in November but I must say it is really shaping up! Great work guys!

The game will include 13 different missions, each of varying size and length. Don't think of these "missions" as levels, as each can be subdivided into as many as a dozen separate maps. In essence these missions are just related bits of story with similar plots, subplots, and goals. Warren speculates that it will take the average gamer anywhere between 30-40 hours to complete the entire game, with more time available for those of you who like to explore every nook and cranny. Besides Liberty Island which we already talked about a bit, you can also expect to wander through Battery Park in NYC, the streets of Hong Kong, Paris, and the mysterious Area 51. What was the inspiration for some of these locales? Well, in some cases, they hit rather close to home. Lead Designer Harvey Smith let us in on a little secret while we were checking out the game. "Some of the streets in Paris were taken from photos of Warren and his wife's vacation to Paris," he told us. Now I just wonder if we'll see the Spector family sitting in a sidewalk cafe enjoying buttery pastries and coffee.

Warren's eye-opening demonstration continues for some time, and it soon becomes apparent that Deus Ex is shaping up to be (dare we say it?) something of a classic (especially in this day and age, when PC ZONE Classics are few and far between). And, after having seen some more very cool, ultra realistic, role-playing unfold in front of our eyes, we can only conclude that there's no way in the world the developers can f**k it up.

Read the rest here! Thanks to Proteus for the info.

"I know we're on the right track when I hear the QA guys talking, and one says something like, 'It was cool when I snuck up on the guard and knocked him out, then hacked the security panel to shut down the turret and walked right up and lockpicked the door', while another guy says, 'You did what? I just blew the guard away with my sniper rifle, used a grenade to take out the turret and unlocked the door with the key I got from the bum on the back dock', while another says 'Heck, I just went around the back, climbed up to the second floor, came in through a window, and never even saw any of the stuff you guys are talking about!'"

Check out the rest of the interview here!

"I also got the chance to work with the guys at Blue Sky Productions on Ultima Underworld. That was where I first met Doug Church, lead programmer and project director on Underworld, Underworld 2, and System Shock."

"Collaborating with Doug on those titles was probably the high point of my time at ORIGIN. He's a special and underappreciated guy in this business."

Get the rest of the interview here.