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FiringSquad: Speaking of emergent gameplay, you mentioned at NVIDIA Editors' Day that players and testers had come up with some very unique ways of beating the challenges presented in Invisible War. Got a favorite surprise?

Harvey:: There are so many...generic examples like players building Rube Goldberg physics puzzles to blow open doors with chain reactions, or game characters accidentally breaking security windows in a firefight, setting off alarms and waking up nearby sleeping security systems (like turrets).

One of my favorites: Players figured out that they could throw down a spiderbomb grenade (which spawns an allied spiderbot AI), then use their bot domination biomod to take over their own spiderbot. These players then run around as the spiderbot (in an 'AI possession' mode that is part of the bot domination biomod) and do all kinds of interesting things: Attacking and leading away guards, parking the bot near locked doors so they can detonate the bot later and blow open the door, etc.

Also, at one point it's possible to have a major fight with one of the critical characters, who appears flanked by allied security bots. One of the testers saw this happening and instantly dropped a scrambler grenade, switching the factions of all the bots. The bots immediately tore up the major character. We never planned this, but it was a really creative, on-the-fly use of our tools. (Of course we left it in the game...)

Designer Monte Martinez and AI coder David Kalina

Lead programmer Chris Carollo

FiringSquad: What reasons did you have for removing skills from Invisible War?

Harvey:: Well, to be more accurate, we merged the augmentation and skill systems into the biomods system. Then we added the track of black market biomods. The old Deus Ex functionality that we wanted is still there, plus there's now some new stuff related to ethics and how 'dark' your character can be as he (or she) moves through the world. The reason we did this: We wanted the game features (like computer hacking, which was previously a skill), to be as robust, powerful and interesting as possible. At the same time, we wanted the player's interface for using those features to be as elegant and consistent as possible (not just in the video game 'interface' sense of the word). In some cases, the old Deus Ex systems overlapped, which made them 'weaker' from a game design standpoint. For instance, in Deus Ex, should I upgrade the Swimming skill or the Aqualung augmentation? It's hard to know what the difference between those two will be...they overlap a lot. All the choices in Deus Ex--Invisible War (which has more character choices to be made, I believe) involve clearer, more powerful decisions. Now the decisions are more orthogonal, more brutal.