Deus Ex: Invisible War Updated Preview
We get a sneak peek at the E3 demo of Ion Storm's promising first-person action RPG that's due out this fall.
It has fantastic graphics, cool characters, and a compelling conspiracy thriller story that you don't need to be a sci-fi fan to love. Deus Ex: Invisible War's potential seemed evident the first time we heard about the game, but putting together a project this ambitious hasn't been easy. Although the name's gone through a few changes along the way, Deus Ex: Invisible War is one game we've been watching closely over the last year--starting as a tech demo and eventually becoming fully playable. A recent trip to Ion Storm's office in Austin, Texas, afforded us a sneak peek at what the team has in store to show at E3 next week. And even though Ion Storm's studio director Warren Spector has been, until now, very secretive about the game's release date, we now know to expect it this October.
The Xbox version of Deus Ex: Invisible War will be readily playable at Eidos' booth at E3. It can take quite a bit of effort to put together an E3 demo--for efficiency's sake Ion Storm has taken the E3 deadline to be a milestone for tightening up the overall game. The three E3 levels will appear in the final game nearly unchanged. The real difference will be in the tutorial-like clues that will pop up to guide show goers through action-oriented missions, which are otherwise intended to take place after you're familiar with all the abilities of the game's two playable characters, the male and female versions of a nano-augmented operative named Alex D. While we're focusing here on the latest news on Invisible War, you can get more general details in our in-depth preview from February.
The level we saw the most of takes place at a corporate campus outside of Seattle. Throughout the game, you'll be able to choose from the different mission objectives presented by the four different factions in the game, and the Seattle level is no different. One way to finish the level involves killing a key scientist, and the other involves stealing a prototype railgun. Of course, in classic Deus Ex style, you can pass each challenge in the level in a variety of ways, by using stealth, special items, or special abilities to outsmart enemies and bypass the static defenses, or simply by trying to go in with guns blazing. Stealth isn't as easy in the outdoor spaces of this particular level simply because it's one of the rare levels set during the day. We watched as Ion Storm's lead programmer Chris Carollo took out guards and security bots with the game's astonishingly slender rocket launcher, which is one example of how technology has advanced over the years since the first game.
The E3 demo will also include a level from the Antarctic Versalife base, which was shut down at the same time JC Denton infiltrated the Versalife Hong Kong office in the first game, but there's now a revolutionary group that has set up in the area. This mission takes place at night, deep in the installation, and will be a better place to practice stealth by hiding in the game's dynamic shadows. The third level is set in Trier, Germany, where a terrorist organization is holding up a church. It's your job to get inside and retrieve critical data from a computer. We mostly saw the demo in action on the Xbox and only got a brief new glimpse of the PC version of the game, which will only be demoed off the E3 show floor. But the game is being simultaneously developed for both platforms, and the improvements we saw to the interface and general performance of the game apply to both versions.
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- Release: Dec 2, 2003 »
- ESRB: Mature
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