Full design document original Deus Ex appears online

The original design document of the classic game Deus Ex has appeared online. The papers describe from start to finish what was the original vision of the game’s designers. In addition, the pages contain handwritten annotations from lead designer Warren Spector.

As previously revealed, the game was called Shooter: Majestic Revelations at this early stage of development. The 64-page document mentions as one of the first things that the game should be on the market by Christmas 1998. The game finally came out a year and a half after that, which is no surprise. It was already known about the game that the development process was not without a struggle. Still, many things ended up in the game as intended.

What wasn’t in the final game, for example, is a final chapter set in a space station. A cooperative multiplayer mode was also planned, but this did not make it in the end either. It is also striking that the player initially had to be given the option to play the game in third person view, which was not in the final game. The document also covers in reasonable depth the entire game from start to finish.

Warren Spector’s handwriting is pretty hard to read. The person who posted the document on Reddit also said they are working on transcripts of the notes. Those aren’t finished yet.

In addition to this design doc, similar pieces have also been published about a third Deus Ex game, and about a fourth Thief game. Ultimately, these games were never released in the form described as Ion Storm envisioned. The third Deus Ex and the fourth Thief have been released in a different form and have been the work of Eidos Montreal, who took over from original developer Ion Storm.

The document had already been made public in pieces in the past. For example, in 2013, Eurogamer published an article that contained a total of six pages of the document. The author of that article, Joe Martin, was not allowed to publish everything at the time, but that has apparently changed now. At the request of the Reddit user, Martin released the full version.

Deus Ex came out in the year 2000 and was a mixture of first person shooter and role playing game. The designers emphatically wanted to give the player as much freedom as possible to solve problems in their own way. At almost every point in the game, players can choose to achieve their goal by sneaking, shooting, negotiating, hacking, or a combination of the two. To this day, many gamers still look back positively on the now sixteen-year-old game. The franchise still lives on today and recently spawned its latest title, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.