Warren Spector on Deus Ex: console influences, Quake plans, and a 2052 setting

A 1997 interview with Warren Spector records his move to Ion Storm and the project that became Deus Ex. He described it as "A first-person roleplaying game," adding, "First-person perspective is where it's at. I'm not much interested in doing anything else." Spector said he was taking cues from console designers: "I'm kind of taking my lead from Miyamoto and the console guys these days.

That's what I'm obsessing about—SquareSoft games." His aims included "Simpler conversation stuff, lots of deep characterization, lots of non-combat interaction stuff," plus "Fairly deep world simulation, posing problems not puzzles." On setting he wanted "Real world plus about 50 years." At the time he planned to build on id Software's Quake 2 engine, praising a "stable codebase" and saying, "All we have to do is take Quake, put a conversation system in it, expand the physics system, have some cooler object interaction, and we're done." That turned out to be optimistic.

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