Deus Ex Aesthetics
A Deep Dive into the Aesthetics of Ion Storm's Sci-Fi Action-RPG
This piece contains spoilers from various plot elements of Deus Ex.
Deus Ex (Ion Storm Austin, released June 23, 2000) is often considered one of the greatest games of all time. Its story is centered around real world conspiracy theories in the year 2052, which informs an aesthetic characterized as near future cyberpunk. The setting combines and contrasts recognizable real-world architecture and set dressing with futuristic Sci-Fi technology. This contrast of the recognizable with the futuristic extends beyond Deus Ex’s setting to the music and character design as well.
Environmental Aesthetics Enhanced by Interactivity
Deus Ex is set in the near future and was designed to take place in familiar environments such as train stations, urban districts, corporate offices, military facilities, laboratories and other recognizable locations. According to lead designer Harvey Smith, this presented a great opportunity for immersion but an additional challenge for level design.
“Recognizable locations can be more compelling and immersive to players. . . but they also must be executed with greater precision and must feature greater interactivity.”
As such, the interactivity of the environments is integral to the impact of the aesthetic.
“Fail to provide sufficient interactivity and the player will constantly be reminded of how much more interesting and detailed the real world is in comparison.”1
This approach has stood the test of time for Smith. When discussing Deus Ex’s world building in a retrospective in 2018, Smith references industrial designer Raymond Loewy and describes it to be “the most familiar you can get away with while also making something feel different and worth exploring, new.”2 Smith has carried this approach forward to future projects like Dishonored and Dishonored 2.
One of the more striking things about Deus Ex’s environmental aesthetic is seeing potentially familiar locations recontextualized in the game’s conspiracy-driven story. A free clinic in New York City may not feel out of the ordinary, but the placement of armed UNATCO troops outside the clinic reminds you that there is a virus weaponized against a population who are becoming increasingly desperate for aid.
The Statue of Liberty is instantly recognizable for many, but the missing head provides an opportunity for world building as a point of curiosity to hook players into the context of the story. The backstory reveals more about the Deus Ex’s setting as the player learns about a terrorist attack prior to the game’s events and the history of the game’s factions.
Deus Ex’s urban environments feature few futuristic elements, but the ones that are present are carefully considered. A futuristic ATM design might be placed in a subway station that looks like it hasn't been maintained since the 1980’s. The architecture reflects how these locations might look in the year 2000, but this is contrasted by a futuristic military presence with high tech surveillance equipment and combat robots.
Rather than replacing the real-world urban districts of the game with futuristic architecture and scenery, Deus Ex leans into the complex and layered nature of real world urbanization. These locations existed before the era of the game, served different purposes, and continue to serve new purposes in the game’s setting. One of the best examples of this layering is the Paris Catacombs. According to an in-game newspaper, Deus Ex’s catacombs were originally part of a Roman excavation of gypsum and limestone, then became catacombs in 1786. Character Tracer Tong indicates that the bunkers located inside the catacombs are World War II bunkers. During the game, these bunkers are used by the Silhouette faction to evade martial law on the Paris streets. The catacombs served different purposes for different periods of history, and the modern and futuristic props and graffiti littering the tunnels do an excellent job of illustrating this history.
Deus Ex’s Parisian sequence also features a cathedral called the Cathedrale de Payens. The name appears to be a reference to Hugues de Payens, co-founder of the real-world Knights Templar. In the game’s lore, this cathedral housed most of the Knights Templar’s gold, which was used to finance the Illumanti, one of the main factions in the game. The cathedral began construction in 1218, which places it in France’s High Gothic era of cathedral style. However, Deus Ex’s in-game cathedral lacks many distinguishing characteristics of the style, such as large stained glass windows and lavish decoration. It does feature simplistic versions of the flying buttresses seen in real world cathedrals constructed in the same era, such as the Chartres Cathedral and Notre Dame. It is possible the cathedral lacks the other features due to the limited visual fidelity that was possible at the time. The elaborate ornamentation seen in these massive structures would have likely used considerable resources in Deus Ex’s engine.
Graphics and Rendering
Deus Ex runs on a modified version of the first Unreal Engine. Unreal Engine was a full 3D engine that had RGB lighting, collision detection, and visual effects such as volumetric fog. Ion Storm Austin decided to use Unreal Engine because of its accessible toolset and support provided by Epic Games, the engine’s creators. According to Lead Programmer and Assistant Director Chris Norden,
“[Unreal Engine’s] focus at time was super-usable tools, which had never really been done before. The Quake tools were OK, but they weren’t very user-friendly for non-engineers. We had a bunch of designers who were not engineers, so they needed to know how to use this stuff.”3
Norden’s team made various modifications to Unreal Engine to fit the needs of an RPG, adding a conversation system, inventory system, UI library, enhanced animations, and an enhanced physics and particle system.4
Unreal Engine featured its own editor, UnrealEd, which Norden and team modified into the Deus Ex Editor. They added features such as camera spline visualization, the ability to mark graphically where the camera is programmed to move in a scene.5
In-game models were created using New-Tek’s Lightwave. According to artist Clay Hoffman, the entire art team felt Lightwave was the best program for polygonal modeling at the time, noting “its simplicity, accuracy and speed” as well as its ease of use.6 The models were animated using skeletal animation inside of Lightwave, for which the artists would output the keyframes of each animation. In the engine, the animations were generated using vertex blending. The engine would treat the positions of the keyframes as offsets to a basic T-pose so the animations would blend properly.7
The Deus Ex team really wanted lip syncing for the game’s dialog, but they knew there was too much dialog for artists animate the lip sync by hand. Norden developed a fast Fourier transform, a system of basic audio analysis that matched the dialog audio to lip shapes in real-time. Norden asked the artists to animate eight face poses for different phonemes that would blend in real-time based on the audio. This gave the lip animations in Deus Ex their signature flapping look. The tech was so popular within Ion Storm that one of the people in charge at Ion Storm Dallas traveled to Austin and demanded Norden hand over the tech for their game, which resulted in a screaming match in the hallways as Norden refused.8
Music
“NYC Streets” by Alexander Brandon
Deus Ex’s music is crucially important to the game’s overall aesthetic. The tracks feature a combination of live instrument samples with synthesizers and electronic drums. The soundtrack was composed using MOD files, a combination of playback information and samples. MOD files are built by selecting samples in a MOD program and selecting where to place the note in a vertical scrolling interface. Deus Ex had a 1.5mb limit per sample per song. Deus Ex’s composers credit the various limitations of the MODs with giving the soundtrack its unique sound. According to composer Alexander Brandon via message exchange on Twitter:
“Limitations in MODs absolutely bred creativity. That’s what gave Unreal and Deus Ex their unique character . . . Having said that, refining these tracks was the tough spot. We could create really cool sounds but in a lot of cases, looping hitches and other factors would make the music sound a bit less powerful than a refined studio recorded, edited and mastered track.”
Composer Michiel van den Bos echoes this sentiment in an interview from 2016.
“You can hear it’s kind of primitive, which actually is 100% of its charm I think. You hear the real sounds, but because you’re playing in lower sample rates . . . it sounds really distorted and different.”9
“UNATCO” by Michiel van den Bos
Composing in MODs lent itself to certain stylistic decisions, such as heavy repetition and arpeggiation (a musical technique where the notes of a chord are played individually, typically in rising or descending progression), but Brandon describes the Deus Ex soundtrack as eclectic first and foremost.
“We used live instrument samples. We used Korg, Roland, Yamaha, whatever synth patches we could, whether they were generated with waveforms or otherwise. Electronic drums and live samples too. We used anything and everything and we didn’t care about cohesion.”
van den Bos recalls sourcing a large portion of samples from orchestral soundtracks:
“Like 20% of the samples I used were from other MODs, and the other ones were . . . painstakingly sampled from soundtracks, trying to find that little one isolated string instrument or anything else.”10
The Synapse (Hong Kong Streets) by Alexander Brandon
Brandon credits the feel of the levels as the primary inspiration for the musical aesthetic.
“It was like a less grandiose Unreal really. It was moody, futuristic but not on the level of the concept art I saw in Shadowrun or Cyberpunk.”
This aligns with Harvey Smith’s comments from his design journal about setting the game in the near-future rather than “the far-flung future of so many [Science Fiction] games.”11
The resulting sound in Deus Ex’s music is a contrast of familiar live instrument samples against sounds often associated with futuristic elements— synthesizers, electronic drums, and other computer-generated sounds.
Character Design
Given the real world setting, Deus Ex’s cast of characters are human, but that humanity is contrasted by mechanical or nano-augmentations in many of the characters’ designs. Often the fashion choices align with popular styles from the time of the game’s development and release, keeping the designs familiar and grounded.
JC Denton
Protagonist JC Denton’s design frequently draws comparisons to Wesley Snipes’ Blade and Keanu Reeves’ Neo from The Matrix. This stylistic familiarity is contrasted by JC’s nano-augmentations in his glowing eyes. JC Denton’s name and design goes back to when the Deus Ex’s concept was in the early design phase under the title “Shooter.” Shooter’s design document described numerous physical augmentations, including “eye implants that glow faintly red if you catch him from the right angle (the way a cat’s eyes glow in the dark)”.12
The original plan was for JC Denton’s appearance to evolve with augmentations received throughout the game, including a “skull gun” that didn’t end up in the game except as a reference in an in-game email from fellow agent Gunther Hermann. Early designs describe JC as always wearing sunglasses, even at night. The developers wanted players to be able to select JC’s gender from male and female options as well as JC’s skin tone, but only the skin tone selection made it into the final game.
Bob Page
The ultimate antagonist of Deus Ex, Bob Page’s aspirations to transcend his humanity and merge with the AI Helios are represented aesthetically as augmentations that look like a fusion of veins and circuitry.
Anna Navarre
An early model of Anna Navarre saw her sporting a special gun augmentation on her left arm. The gun does not appear in the release version of the game, and she has a symmetrical body texture, which appears to be the case for all NPCs in the game.
Gunther Hermann
Gunther is heavily augmented with mechanical augmentations as opposed to JC’s more subtle nano-augmentations. Early concept art depicts him with fewer augmentations, but later designs are closer to the overwhelmingly augmented character model seen in game.
Alex Jacobson
Alex’s character design changed significantly from his early concept. He is originally shown with a pistol and cigar with combat gear, evoking a very different tone from the easy-going techie character found in the release game.
Walton Simons
Walton Simons’ design has always been a combination of business and tactical aesthetics. Even early concept art has a trenchcoat over business attire, similar to his final model. The overtly mechanical arms were toned down to the colored vein-style augmentations seen on his in-game model.
From the visual aesthetics to the music to the character design, the common theme in Deus Ex’s aesthetic is a contrast and combination of familiar, modern-day elements with futuristic technological elements. 20th century architecture is contrasted against high-tech surveillance and military equipment. Live orchestral instrumentation samples are combined with synthesizers and electronic drums. Human bodies in black trenchcoats are grafted with futuristic augmentations. This contrast and combination extends beyond the aesthetics and into Deus Ex’s themes as well. The plot features a villain who attempts to merge himself with an artificial intelligence, and the game gives the player the option to merge JC with the AI instead. The aesthetics are informed by the themes, and in turn, the aesthetics help the game realize those themes.
In the right hands, design constraints turn into freedom