Elias Toufexis has performed a lot of roles over the years—here he is in a 2005 episode of the Canadian crime drama Da Vinci's Inquest—but one of his biggest has to be that of Adam Jensen, the lead character of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided. His roughed-edged voice is a hallmark of the series: "I never asked for this" is one of the most famous videogame utterances to come along in years.

Toufexis has worked on other big-name series since then, including Assassin's Creed, Splinter Cell, and Call of Duty, but he said in an interview with VG247 that Jensen is still the role he's mostly closely associated with. "You can go look at my Twitter, no matter what I tweet, inevitably somebody is saying, 'Did you ask for this? I bet you didn’t ask for this'," he said. "It’s the craziest thing, the fact that Jensen got pumped into this top tier of videogame characters was very surprising."

But even though Jensen is now more recognizable as the "face" of Deus Ex than original lead Paul Denton (who was also shown the door after just one game), Square Enix had originally intended the character to be a one-and-done, so the sequel would be an entirely separate game, about someone else entirely.

"They called me for the sequel, and it was a great thing to hear because initially—and I don’t know if anybody knows this, I think it’s OK to say this now—initially they were going to make the sequel without Jensen. They were just going to make another Deus Ex game," Toufexis said.

"And from what I remember when I was told, the marketing team said, 'No, you can’t do that. Jensen has just bumped into this,' like I said, this discussion of top videogame characters ever. 'You can’t just not make a game without him, when you have him ready to go.' And they agreed, and they continued the story of Human Revolution."

The full interview is a lot of fun, particularly if you're a Deus Ex fan, but unfortunately it also confirms that there's still no action on a sequel to Mankind Divided. Toufexis acknowledged that the game's story ended abruptly and didn't quite meet expectations, and while there's no explicit connection made to its relatively lackluster reception, plans to move directly into making a third game in the rebooted series never materialized.

"We were going to, as far as I know, finish up where we finished up in Mankind Divided, and continue into whatever the next game was going to be. And I don’t think that Mankind Divided shipped their goal in terms of sales that they wanted to hit. So it immediately back-burnered," he said. "But I know that they said, I knew we were going to go right into it. In my mind, I had said, ‘OK, we’re doing this one, and then we’re doing the next one.’ And then suddenly I stopped getting phone calls."

Despite that, he implied that there is a plan in place to wrap things up properly: "Everyone’s pissed off about it now, and that makes sense, but once we finish it, you’ll see why [Mankind Divided] ended where it ended," he said. "We just have to fucking get on it."

Jonathan-Jacques Belletête brought a very distinct visual style to Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided as the art director at developer Eidos Montreal. He won't be around for the final game in the trilogy (which I continue to resolutely believe it will be) however, because he is now working as creative director on a brand new project at Mordheim: City of the Damned studio Rogue Factor. 

"This year marks my 20th anniversary in the video game industry, and my passion and enthusiasm for creating compelling interactive entertainment experiences has only grown," Belletête said in a statement. "The new position at Rogue Factor is one that I am thrilled to take on, and the wealth of talent that’s so evident amongst the studio team has me excited at the creative possibilities ahead at Rogue Factor." 

Belletête gave no hint as to what he's getting up to at his new gig, although he said that he won't be involved in Rogue Factor's current project, Necromunda: Underhive Wars. It struck me at first glance like a bit of an odd fit, going from the glitter of Deus Ex to the grime of Warhammer, but Warhammer 40K's already powerful visual vibe could go to some unexpectedly interesting places under his direction. Or it might go someplace else entirely: Rogue Factor's only two games so far are Games Workshop licenses, but it might be gearing up to branch out into something original. 

Rogue Factor general manager Yves Bordeleau hinted at that in the announcement, saying that "it is genuinely exciting to have him onboard as we enter a new phase in the studio’s life, one which we are affectionally calling Rogue Factor 2.0." 

The announcement also serves as a reminder that Necromunda: Underhive Wars is still in development. There's been no real update on its status since last year, but Rogue Factor said in June that the game is expected to be out sometime this year. 

We're closing in on the end of 2018, and as more and more big releases drop, we're figuring out how best to spend our time playing games before our GOTY discussions formally begin. Looking back on the year, though, the PC Gamer team's attention has been split across a whole bunch of different releases, some current, some from previous years.

This weekend, then, we asked the team to audit their various clients and figure out the answer to the following: which game have you played the most in 2018 so far? Let us know your answers in the comments below.

Phil Savage: Assassin's Creed Origins, 69 hours (nice?)

Yes, Origins, not Odyssey. I have a nasty habit of letting the release of a sequel remind me that I never really played its predecessor. I'd put maybe four-or-five hours into Origins when it came out, and then left it on the backburner. Skip forward a year and everybody is getting very excited about Odyssey. I nearly skipped straight to it, but to be honest, Hellenistic-era Egypt just seemed like the more interesting setting. So that's how I've spent a bunch of the last month: hanging out with Cleopatra, riding around deserts, and murdering elephants for no obvious reason. Good times. After I'd wrapped up Origins, I started on Odyssey, but, honestly, I think I'm Assassin's-Creeded-out. Maybe when the next game arrives.

My second longest playtime in a game this year was Crusader Kings 2. Although that probably shouldn't count, as I didn't actually play it.

Samuel Roberts: Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, 47 hours

This one really crept up on me. I finished every sidequest in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and beat the mediocre DLC, too, and I still can't figure out why that collectively took 47 hours. I did spend a lot of time exploring every little bit of the Palisade Bank and poking through all the buildings, so maybe that's where the time went. It's pretty likely I played GTA Online for longer than this in 2018, but I can't be absolutely sure of that. I'm certain Assassin's Creed Odyssey will pass Deus Ex in a couple of weeks.

Even though you spend a little bit too much time stuck in the same beautiful Prague streets, Mankind Divided was a pretty satisfying immersive sim. I felt like its levels were broken down into digestible chunks, whereas Dishonored 2 is full of wide, open spaces where I always seem to get caught by enemies, even if it's a far superior game generally. I also didn't feel let down by the ending of Mankind Divided, or how incomplete the story is, and I think a lot of other people did. It's unquestionably a better game than Human Revolution to me, which was more pared down than I remembered upon replaying it in 2016.

47 hours seems like long enough, though. 

James Davenport: Fortnite, over 300 hours

Editor's note: James isn't sure how much he's played Fortnite this year. "Over 300 hours? Whatever it takes to fully complete three season battle passes and every challenge while hitting level 70 or so."

I have no idea how long I've played Fortnite this year, but it's what I've returned to over and over and over again. It's not like I'll decide to sit down and play Fortnite all night long, but a match here and there, at lunch or in the morning or another while I wait for my partner to finish getting ready all add up. It's also a game I cover pretty heavily for work, which means dipping into Playground mode often for decent screenshots. It's the seasonal arcs that keep me around. 

Fortnite is so far bereft of any real story, with cubes and rockets and space-time rifts somehow tying into the state of the world, but the constant change those in-game events carry with them make it one of the most fascinating games to check in with every week. New weapons like the double-barrel shotgun encourage 'W-key' aggression, weird new traps like the freezers force players to rethink movement and build fights, infinite glider redeployment makes for a much faster, mobile game—my most comfortable habits are gutted every time I play, and that's what battle royale should do. 

Philippa Warr: Megaquarium, 42 hours

Apparently I have 42 hours in Megaquarium. How on earth did that rack up so fast? I mean, sure, there was all that tank tinkering and the whole fiasco with needing to entirely repopulate my attraction after forgetting to hire people to feed the fish. Also the whole spending hours with the game paused so I could optimise the visitor routes and... Wait. I see how 42 hours happened. 

Megaquarium isn't actually the game I've spent the most time playing, though. It's just the game where I can put a definite number to 2018's playtime. Subnautica definitely eclipses it, I'm just not entirely sure how many of my total 123 hours came from 2018 and how many were from stints of base-building in the game's beta period. I think I clocked up about 50 hours while doing the review and then about 10 more hours in the weeks after that? I put it to one side after that because I'd burnt out a bit, although judging by other games on playlist this year—Megaquarium, No Man's Sky (which got an underwater update recently), Minecraft's Update Aquatic—it's fairly safe to say I'm not sick of the sea.

Evan Lahti: Rainbow Six Siege, 231 hours

Based on archive.org snapshots of my Steam profile, I had about 290 hours-played in Rainbow Six Siege at the end of 2017. After a lot of ranked play in the last month and the recent Halloween event, I'm at 521. [calculator tapping] That's 104.2 viewings of Eat, Pray, Love I could've enjoyed in 2018, damn.

Siege is really good. Characters' unique equipment (invisible poison caltrops, bear traps, one-way mirrors, a blowtorch, a ballistic shield that zaps people, drones that fire concussive blasts) empowers players to alter the map in creative ways, and I love how much it relies on adjacent skills like feinting, listening, and timing rather than merely your aim.

Tyler Wilde: Rocket League, 100-plus hours

Rocket League. Still. I'm at 531 total hours played, most of which came from two periods: right after it launched, and the past two years, when I discovered a group to play Snow Day with. There was a long break in between those periods, and I wasn't sure I'd ever go back because the average skill level has gotten so high (you will never catch me doing a flip reset, but you will find me flipping through the air a good 10 feet wide of the ball). Switching over to a puck is what re-hooked me. I love the small, dedicated community that's developed around Snow Day, as well as the emphasis on ground and wall play, where a great pass along the surface can be as exciting as an aerial off the wall. This year has probably accounted for over a hundred hours, and with Snow Day now ranked, I won't be slowing down. Now you know why I talk about Rocket League so much. I will never stop.

Wes Fenlon: Monster Hunter: World

It's been a monster hunter's life for me, the last few months. For much of the year I bounced from game to game, not playing much for more than a few hours at a time. But I've gone deep into Monster Hunter, finishing the campaign and as many special events as I can catch. Recently, after getting back from a two week vacation away from my PC, I've started fighting the game's tempered monsters, which are the big bad tougher versions of the beasts I've already slain. Gotta get those rare drops so I can take my armor and weapons to the next level! The amazing thing about Monster Hunter is how much time you can spend playing and enjoying the game with a weapon, before trying out another one that plays dramatically differently. In my 75 hours I've pretty much only used three weapon types: the charge blade, the dual blades, and the insect glaive. I think next I'm going to tackle sword and shield. Or maybe the longsword. Bring on Kulve Taroth. I'm ready!

The PC Gamer Club's picks

We asked folk from the PC Gamer Club to contribute this weekend in our member-exclusive Discord channel, and below you'll find some of their answers. There's a lot of love for Subnautica.

Rocksolid 32: "Subnautica #1 followed closely by Euro Truck Simulator 2/American Truck Simulator (do those count as one game?) and then Two Point Hospital."

Philip: "Subnautica. 84 hrs! (and completeted. My GOTY I think) After Subnautica, 74 hours in The Division and 65 in Yakuza 0 (I wanna go back and do some more in that one I think)."

Christmasface Jones: "For the year it has certainly been Quake Champions. 2018 has been a great year for the game with all the new maps, champions, and game modes."

Terdog: "That's easy for me: Forza Horizon 4, followed very closely by Elite Dangerous."

Nick_Manley1987: "Either COD: WW2 or Destiny 2. May be a toss up."

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 320. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. 

Since 2011, PC gaming has been blessed with an incredible second wave of high-concept, high-budget immersive sims. Starting with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the last few years have seen two Deus Ex games, two Dishonored games, a new Thief game, and Prey, which for all intents and purposes is a spiritual successor to System Shock. All of these games embrace the ideals that made Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock so striking in the ’90s—emergent play, player agency and complex level design—reforged with new aesthetics and exploring different ideas and themes. 

It’s been a wonderful ride, but that second wave is now coming to an end. Square Enix has shelved Deus Ex for the foreseeable future, and the less-than-stellar sales of both Dishonored 2 and Prey means the future of Bethesda’s immersive sims is currently uncertain. We shouldn’t be too sad—it’s remarkable that these games were made in the first place—but it does leave us with the question of what the future holds for the immersive sim. 

The short answer is that the future is hugely exciting. For the longer answer, we need to go right back to where the immersive sim began. 

Immersive origins

“I’ve been in the industry long enough that you see these trends come and go, certain genres become hot for a few years and then they tend to fade and something else pops up,” explains Paul Neurath, founder of OtherSide Entertainment and creative director of Underworld Ascendant. “I think any of these genres has potential to be quite popular and quite successful. Certainly, fantasy RPGs have been around since the start of gaming and I think will be around for quite a lot longer.” 

OtherSide was forged out of the shards of Looking Glass Studios—the company that pioneered the very first immersive sims. Alongside Neurath, its employees include Tim Stellmarch, the lead designer on Thief, and Warren Spector. The studio is working on two games—System Shock 3 and Underworld Ascendant, the sequel to what was arguably the very first immersive sim. Yet despite appearances, OtherSide is not about rekindling the past. Rather, it is looking to continue Looking Glass’s ‘unfinished’ work. “We loved making those kinds of games, but then when Looking Glass ended prematurely, it cut off our ability to take those forward,” Neurath says.

Neurath has wanted to dive back into immersive sims, but the opportunity never arose. “One of the things that Warren and I have talked about is, we’re very much into taking creative risks,” he says. “It’s always been our MO, we’re not scared to do things that haven’t been proven out of the market yet. But one of the things we’ve learned is that you have to be selective about that. If you take risks across the board you’ll probably stumble and fall.” 

Reacquiring the rights to Underworld and System Shock has enabled OtherSide to continue the work it started at Looking Glass. “By taking System Shock and Underworld forward, we’re starting with a known world, and characters and fiction which people like, and then it frees us to get more creative and push forward harder on the gameplay elements because we know we’ve got the anchor of the two franchises.” 

With Ascendant, the idea is to take the ideas featured in Ultima Underworld and its sequel, and explore them in a new level of depth afforded by technological advances and the team’s experience in working on these kinds of games. “When Ultima Underworld came out in 1992, the PC technology was so primitive. A smartphone could run circles around a PC from 1992,” Neurath says. “We drew [the graphics] in the centre of the screen and put the UI all around it to hide the fact that we couldn’t do fullscreen. And even then, you know, on a good day, we would maybe run in the high-teen framerate.”

Improving improvisation

OtherSide wants to take the power of modern PCs and apply it to Ascendant at a systemic level. The result of this is what the team dubs the “Improvisation Engine”, a system whereby every object in the game is simulated according to a series of universal rules, handing the player the potential to solve in-game puzzles and problems in unique ways.

Some of these potential solutions will be obvious and familiar to the player. Underworld Ascendant features the traditional fantasy trio of swordfighting, magic and stealth, and calls back to some the team’s earlier work, such as its highly Thief-like bow that shoots elemental arrows. But players can equally forego these systems and come up with solutions not intended by the developers. Neurath cites one example of a player who tried out the game at PAX East: “They went through the entire training mission and solved every single challenge and fought every single monster only by throwing apples,” he says. 

Having what is essentially a resurrected Looking Glass exploring these ideas once again is a remarkable thing in and of itself. But unlike in the ’90s, Neurath and company are no longer the only developers thinking about games in this way. Another studio looking to plumb the fullest depths of the immersive sim is Interdimensional Games, the studio behind Consortium and the upcoming Consortium: The Tower. The team has boldly declared the latter to be the “ultimate” immersive sim.

The Tower puts players in the role of Bishop Six, an agent of the futuristic global police force known as the Consortium. The Tower kicks off where the last game left off, with the player parachuting onto a sprawling skyscraper complex overtaken by a terrorist organisation. Your goal is to rescue a group of hostages by landing on the tower, assessing the situation and determining the best solutions to the problems at hand. 

“The fundamental mandate of our whole company is about creating games that have a moral compass,” says Gregory McMartin, founder of Interdimensional Games. “So pushing the boundaries of interactive storytelling, while at the same time creating experiences that are very well balanced morally, and they take things seriously.” In Consortium: The Tower, this idea manifests itself in the form of consequences. Every action you take in the Tower will trigger a reaction that will alter the game state.

As with most immersive sims, The Tower lets you sneak or shoot your way through most situations. But The Tower also allows you to talk to anyone in the game. “You can actually open a dialogue with the first generic bad guy you encounter in the Tower, and you’ll start to get the sense of the context of these people,” says McMartin. “Why they are there, what they’re doing there, what their goals are, who their leader is, where their leader is, etc.” 

Opening a dialogue with what McMartin refers to as the “potential combatants” can lead you to new missions, and result in bringing people over to the Consortium’s side. But where things get interesting is that this can also happen the other way around. As a pseudo-police force, indiscriminate killing is against the Consortium’s mandate, and if you’re a person who shoots firsts and asks questions later, you might be labelled as a rogue agent. 

According to McMartin, this can happen within minutes of starting the game. But it won’t mean the end of your playthrough. If you go rogue, you’ll be contacted by a third faction known as the Voice, which offers to help you escape the Consortium. “So you can flip sides, and then, at that point forward the entire game will be from the vantage point of being out of the Consortium altogether.” McMartin is clearly deeply in love with immersive sims. He speaks volubly and with enthusiasm about his idea. The project has been going for 11 years, three of which were spent on worldbuilding. Interdimensional is in no rush to get the game finished either, having put itself in a position where it can take its time to create the game it wants to make. “This is the game, the dream game that I eventually wanted to get to, right?”

It’s possible that McMartin’s plans will lead to the ultimate immersive sim. I don’t doubt his ambition. But I think—and McMartin agrees with this—that if The Consortium succeeds as he intends, it will be a one-off, an incredible, and in all likelihood unrepeatable anomaly. Hence, I also don’t think it’s where the future of the genre lies. 

Indeed, referring to the immersive sim as a genre at all is probably a mistake. What it amounts to is a collection of ideas—established by Looking Glass alumni like Neurath, Doug Church and Warren Spector—that can be attributed to many types of games. I consider Thief to be an immersive sim, but really it’s a stealth game with a Looking Glass design philosophy. On the flipside, I don’t consider games like Far Cry or Metal Gear Solid V to be immersive sims, but they both embody many of the ideas that immersive sims aspire to. Neurath himself says of last year’s Breath of the Wild, “It seems apparent to us that some of the designers on that game played some of our games, because there are elements there that are very Looking Glass.”

Crouching down

So what happens when you apply immersive sim ideals to other styles of games? This is what Jordan Thomas—founder of Question, and veteran of both Ion Storm and Irrational—aims to find out with his multiplayer co-op horror The Blackout Club. “You’ll notice riffs and samples from immersive sim history throughout”, says Thomas. “The easiest way to sum that up is that when you crouch, good things happen. I’ve always thought that the heroes of immersive sims face down their trials by looking evil squarely in the crotch, and there’s certainly no small measure of that going on in the design.” 

The Blackout Club casts players as a group of teens trying to unravel the mystery behind a force that’s manipulating the inhabitants of their hometown. Each night they embark upon procedurally generated missions, evading and confronting horrors, and delving ever deeper beneath the familiar streets of town into the strange and labyrinthine tunnels that run deep under their homes. 

In many ways The Blackout Club sets itself apart from immersive sim design. It’s multiplayer (although it can be played solo), and it employs randomisation to a far greater degree than most classical immersive sims. Your neighbourhood is a set place that you can learn the nooks and crannies of (“If there’s one thing immersive sims all share and we consider, if not holy then of divine importance to us, then it is setting as theme,” Thomas says). But your objectives are randomly generated, and aspects of the neighbourhood will move about each time you play, such as where vehicles are parked.

At the same time, however, there are elements that are clearly inspired by the Looking Glass heritage, such as an emphasis on stealth, and using tools to distract, manipulate or overcome your enemies. The teens can prank call inhabitants under the spell of the malevolent force that controls them, forcing them to stop in place, or trick them into opening a door or taking out another enemy. But unlike traditional immersive sims, where the player is a single, all powerful entity, players will have to work together to stay alive. 

“In a lot of immersive sims in the past, people have their weapon hand and their magic hand, and by combining the properties of each of those, they were able to create novel effects or expressions. In this case, a lot of those sort of instruments in the orchestra are individual people,” says Thomas. In other words, one player is the weapon hand, while another is the magic hand. 

Rather than treat the immersive sim as a holistic design philosophy, a formula to make a perfect game, Question is taking the principles that are relevant to its idea and infusing them within that new structure. “We feel that the immersive sim was really a little snobby about the primacy of narrative for a long time,” Thomas points out. “We believe you can have a convincing setting that has much to say, but that it’s not bolting you into the Clockwork Orange chair and force-feeding you the story content.”

Narrative first

But there are other games also borrowing from immersive sim ideals but emerging from the opposite direction, where story content is prized above all. The Occupation is being developed by White Paper Games, creator of the narrative puzzler Ether One. It’s set in an alternate ’80s Britain that’s sliding towards authoritarianism, and sees you play a journalist investigating a bombing at a corporation that deals with immigration. 

Like Ether One, The Occupation is a narrative-focussed adventure, but it has a much more simulated core than its predecessor. “Our biggest challenge was to get our narrative drive through a systemsdriven world,” says Pete Bottomley, creative director on The Occupation. “We try to build a believable fiction, a believable location, and peoples’ lives are all part of this contained environment, and then we set up the interacting systems within that to help try and tell the story.”

One of the most interesting aspects of The Occupation is that its world runs autonomously of the player. The game takes place over a four-hour period, and after that the game ends. Even if the player sits and does nothing, things will still be happening within the game itself, and there will be an ending. “There is a way it’s going to go. But can you change it?” Bottomley asks. 

How you change that ending is through investigation, by sneaking into offices and other areas of the complex, collecting documents and reading their contents. As you do this, you’ll build up questions that you can ask other characters, and the more you dig around, the juicier those questions will be. But you can only do so much in those four hours, so you’ll have to prioritise where you go, who you speak to, and which questions you ask. For example, in the middle of the game there’s a meeting you’re scheduled to attend. You could simply go to that meeting at the allotted time and ask your standard questions, or you could dig around for evidence that you can use to catch your interviewees out. But there’s also a third way, which is that you don’t go to the meeting at all. All of those options will push the narrative in different directions. Whereas most narrative adventures revolve around set objects and scripted events, The Occupation is intended to be a constantly moving thing. 

Another key aspect of The Occupation’s evolution is the presence of onscreen characters—a rare sight in such narrative games due to how difficult they are to create with small teams. This, in turn, means that new systems, like sneaking, become a viable prospect. Indeed, stealth and getting caught in The Occupation is fascinating. Rather than being attacked as you would in Thief, the security guards of The Occupation will simply take you into a room, give you a telling off, and then increase the security in that area. But all of this will cost you time. “You can miss out on a timed event that was gonna happen. So say 15 minutes has passed, that thing that was going to happen in five minutes has already happened and you’ve missed it, so you have to find an alternative route. Which I think lends itself to the immersive sim genre,” Bottomley explains.

But does White Paper Games think of The Occupation as an immersive sim? “We don’t know, yet,” says Bottomley. “We have systems-driven gameplay and a focus on the worldbuilding … and using systems and the world to get to your objectives. But again, we don’t necessarily have RPG upgrade elements. So does that make it an immersive sim? Is that okay?” 

It’s an exciting answer, and one that summarises where immersive sims are right now. We’re seeing developers pushing towards the same ideas from different angles. From veterans with unfinished business, to creators making their dream game, to developers like White Paper Games, who almost accidentally slid into the space from something entirely removed from the heritage of Looking Glass and Ion Storm. 

“The term immersive sim as a kitchen sink, all inclusive genre of design is no longer particularly meaningful, because a lot of other designers and developers have found a way to incorporate simulation,” Jordan Thomas concludes. “So unless you’re a die-hard first-person fetishist, or a kind of committed snob, it may be that those walls are worth tearing down now.” 

This month, I played and enjoyed Prey's Mooncrash DLC, where one of the game's objectives is to stash enough food and drink to escape in a supply crate headed for Earth. As I collected the items I needed, I was reminded that the developers put real effort into the types of food and drink found in the Prey universe. The packaging is beautiful. There's fun flavour text for each item. And damn, the food sounds fancy.

What would happen if you had to live on the supplies in places-gone-wrong like Talos I? Below, I rank five of gaming's most notable dystopias, using no criteria other than which consumables I personally find tasty, versus what's likely to make me projectile vomit. I also touch upon the drinks options in some of these worlds, because first-person games love to get you virtual drunk so they can make the screen blurry. 

1. Talos I (Prey)

Consumable food available: Big Bang Candy, Captain Spree's Fish Sticks, crispy frites, Dr. Howard's Superfruit, jellied eels, Methuselah apple, Ossetra caviar, RanDom Dim Sum, Russian blinis, Shaker lemon pie, Siskak Unagi Rollz, Skyking pomegranate, Spiralite cookies, sun-dried tomato jerky, Sunburst banana pudding, veggie blend 

I feel like the food on Talos I says a lot about TranStar, the space station's owners: they have some serious cash, and if you're going to work in space for a private company that's this flush, then hot damn you should eat well. There's even a few decent veggie-friendly options in there, too, and the concept art above shows at some point they planned some crispy tofu bites too. 

Impressive amounts of detail on even simple objects has become something of an Arkane hallmark—the packaging on these products (designed by artist Fred Augus) is beautiful, and effort was even put into bringing the food to life with flavour text. Here's how RanDom Dim Sum is described: "A bowl of randomly selected dim sum by TranStar Kitchens. Every bowl is different." I wish more of my food had the element of surprise.

The drinks options are strong, too, with beer, gin, wine and bourbon. Maybe I'd accidentally unleash a typhon infestation too if I was drunk off my ass. At least they have green tea and coffee for the inevitable hangover.

2. Columbia (BioShock Infinite)

Consumable food available: Apples, bananas, bread, beans, candy bars, cake, cereal, cheese, corn, cotton candy, hot dogs, jar of pickles, oranges, peanuts, pears, pineapples, popcorn, potatoes, potato chips, sandwiches, sardines, spinach, tomato soup, watermelon, white oats

I wouldn't live in Columbia for a few reasons—mostly the beliefs of the citizens and leaders, but also the fear of wandering out of my house in a sleepy daze and accidentally falling to my death. The range of food you can pick up around the flying city is reasonably close to my existing (terrible) diet, however. I mean, I'd better pack my acid reflux tablets before moving there, but hey, I'd eat watermelon and pineapple for breakfast, cake for brunch, sandwiches for lunch then hot dogs and beans for dinner. Admittedly it's not great for veggie options based on this selection, but on the snacks front, Columbia is formidable. 

I'm not sure where they get the sardines from, though. It must be a bit awkward to plan fishing expeditions when you're living above the clouds. Maybe the Luteces just open a portal to another universe's ocean, into which you can sling a fishing net, or perhaps a portal opens into a supermarket, where they load up on hot dogs and pickle jars before the store's baffled manager catches on to what's going on. 

3. Rapture (BioShock)

Consumable food available: Creme-filled bars, pep bars, potato chips, potted meat, sardines

BioShock's Rapture just had creme-filled cakes, pep bars and potato chips, but by BioShock 2, it also had the extra two items above. Another factor that makes BioShock 2 the secret best BioShock game (maybe). Perhaps Sofia Lamb, Rapture's post-Ryan leader, just wanted a little more culinary variety in the underwater city? Or, maybe they just found a supply of potted meat and sardines in Andrew Ryan's office after he was beaten to death with a golf club. In Burial At Sea, at least, Rapture shares most of the same food with Columbia. Perhaps Suchong and Fink were trading snacks across universes.

It's worth saying, that where Rapture disappoints slightly with food consumables, it makes up for it in booze—no surprise given that the player just arrived after a NYE party. Alcohol is probably the only escape from the insufferable intellectuals who live in Rapture. Sometimes you just want to drink in a dystopia where the people have no self worth, you know? 

You've got vodka, gin, absinthe, moonshine, beer, whiskey, brandy and two types of merlot across both games. Hot damn, that sounds like a night out. Let's party like it's 1959!

4. 2027-2072 (Deus Ex)

Consumable food available: soy food, Cyberboost pro energy packs, bread, candy bar

Pretty simple but practical foodstuffs. The item description for soy in Deus Ex: Invisible War makes the utilitarian nature of food 60 years from now extremely clear. "The complete snack! Engineered to provide maximum nutrition—not a single molecule wasted on added flavor or texture." Doesn't sound like the foodie future of my dreams, but hey, at least there's an option everyone can eat (if not enjoy). 

Rewind a little, and the food consumables aren't much better in Human Revolution or Mankind Divided. Adam Jensen is a big fan of cereal and even has boxes of the stuff in his apartment (it's very pure), but you can't eat it in-game, which is a tiny shame. I could just imagine him sitting behind cover, using his cloaking augment while he tops up on Crunchy Pirate cereal. 

Jensen's hoarding of cereal also produces a nice little Easter Egg early on in the game—see the video above. And check out these great fictional designs by artist Manuel Vallelunga from his blog. I particularly love the term 'suspiciously delicious!':

5. Dunwall and Karnaca (Dishonored)

Consumable food available: Apricot Tartlet, Bluejawed hagfish eggs, bread, Gristol apple, Gristol cider, Morley apple, rat skewer, Tycian pears, Serkonan blood sausage, Serkonan grapes, brined hagfish, potted Dabokva whale meat, Pratchett jellied eels, Bastillian fig, Bastillian peach, lettuce, potato, dark bread, dried bough lizard, Saggunto flatbread

A mixed affair, really. In theory I'd eat an apricot tartlet in a second, but I'm less sold on the blood sausage and the hagfish eggs. And don't get me started on the rat skewers. I thought these things carried the plague? By the second game, however, you've got dried lizard and flatbread to choose from—stronger choices, to me, depending on how hungry I was. Like on Talos I, you've got jellied eels available, too, which is surely an Easter Egg to connect the game's universes. 

I'm still not sure I could eat anything here, though. It's not that the food sounds bad in Dunwall—I just don't think I could enjoy eating knowing that I might be surrounded by rats or bloatflies at any time. I won't even eat crisps on the train in real life if someone's sneezed near me. Sorry, Dunwall. Sort out the infestation problem, and I might find the idea of munching down on some potted Dabokva whale meat a little more appetising (although probably not). 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided was good, but for a variety of reasons it wasn't exactly a big hit. That led to rumors in early 2017 that Eidos Montreal, which had previously positioned the Deus Ex series as its flagship, had basically shelved it in favor of other things. There hasn't been much said about it since, but studio head David Anfossi recently told PCGamesN that while Shadow of the Tomb Raider is currently the big thing on the Eidos plate, "Deus Ex is not dead." 

"Deus Ex, of course, it's the brand of the studio. We are all attached to this franchise, but we cannot do everything, you know?" he said. "So we have Shadow of the Tomb Raider, we have this co-development with Crystal [Dynamics] on The Avengers, and we have a third game in development, so it's enough at the moment for us." 

That third game is rumored to be based on Guardians of the Galaxy, although it remains unannounced despite the initial report of the project being well over a year old now. 

The news is somewhat less happy for fans of Thief, which didn't get the same "not dead" seal of approval that Anfossi offered Deus Ex. He repeated the point that Eidos Montreal is already focused on three other projects, but concluded, "For Thief, there is no plan." Although given how the last game worked out (it's a reboot that eschews the original trilogy in all but name), Thief fans may not think that's such bad news at all. 

It doesn't take a lot of prodding to get the PC Gamer team to share their ongoing gripes with games—there's always a couple of recurring, bothersome things to complain about. Unskippable cutscenes, having to restart a game after changing the graphics settings, being forced to read copious amounts of in-game text just to keep things moving: these things will probably exist in games forever.

In today's PCG Q&A, then: What are games doing in 2018 that you thought they would have stopped by now? This week's first answer is from MOX, a member of the PC Gamer Club who shares this in our Discord channel: "With regret, games are still putting New Game above continue. I can't remember which game it was, but it knows what it did."

Share your thoughts in the comments—we always love reading them. 

Tim Clark: I've got a list

• Asking you to select a difficulty level and/or character class before you've played anything.
• Burying reams of information in letters and books that you feel obligated to read but resent every second doing so. 
• Adding stealth and/or vehicle sections to games that they have no business whatsoever being in. 
• Releasing items that don't appear to have been playtested. 
• Overcharging for hats.
• Crashing.

Samuel Roberts: Assassin's Creed's platforming and any story bits where you walk slowly while an NPC barks plot at you

Assassin's Creed's self-playing platforming is a bugbear of mine. I haven't played loads of Origins, but I recall it being a similar deal to the previous games—one button to 'parkour', and another button to climb down. I think every jump should require a button press and some directional precision in these games, and I swear that's how it always used to be before Assassin's Creed got big. Imagine Mario had a 'parkour' button and all you had to do was hold it down while he jumped through the entire level himself. Platforming didn't need streamlining. 

I'm also no fan of story sections in games where you're forced to walk rather than run as someone explains some plot to you. I'd much rather this sort of thing was in a cutscene I could skip. 

And finally: missions where you have to follow an NPC without being seen. They're always bad. 

Chris Livingston: Games needing to restart after I change my settings

I'm always surprised (not to mention annoyed) when I have to restart a game after changing my settings. And because some games let you change anything and everything without requiring a restart, that makes it so much more irritating when a different game needs a restart before the new settings can be applied. How have some games and engines figured this out, and others haven't? (Note: I don't want a real answer, I want to remain mad about it.)Monkeying around with settings is usually about trying to find that compromise where a game looks as good as possible but doesn't completely tank your frame rate, and that can require the careful nudging of sliders followed by close scrutiny of the results. And I hate this process. I don't like dinking around in menus for long minutes and slowly giving up on my hopes of running everything on Ultra. There's no heartbreak like realizing you have to change texture quality from Very High to simply High so a game won't run like claymation. But it's made a million times worse when before-and-after comparisons are delayed because I have to bounce out of the game after each tweak and come back once it's relaunched. It's just adding salt to my wounds.

Joe Donnelly: Invincibility frames

I can't stand invincibility frames, and nothing breaks my concentration more than inexplicable invincibility in battle. I love Dark Souls' combat, but the joy of landing a well-timed parry, riposte or backstab on a baddie is, for me, undone when another foe is unable to deal damage in my state of invulnerability. In a game that almost always punishes missteps, these instances make my triumphs feel cheap—so much so, that I'd rather be killed and not let off. It's my fault if I decide to parry and riposte my way through the Deacons of the Deep boss fight and get swarmed every bloody time. Don't forgive my ill-informed tactics. 

Invincibility frames just about make sense post-respawn, but I don't care for them in the heat of the moment.  

Tom Senior: The new Tomb Raider is doing many of them

Unskippable cutscenes. Insta-fail trial and error platforming sections. Slow walk-and-talks. Basically a lot of the go-to storytelling devices that are still driving games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 2018. I hate it when games stop and try to be a film for a while, because films are much better at being films than games are. It was novel being stuck in a cage and ranted at by Vaas in Far Cry 3 in 2012, but in almost all cases it's extremely tedious and I wish games would move on. 

I can't believe we're still seeing games interrupt themselves mid-fun to knock your character down with a rifle butt and sit you down in front of some bad guys (hello Far Cry 5). These sequences are so hackneyed at this point I don't know how they make it to production.

Austin Wood: Cutscenes that use the default character model and don't incorporate my awesome shoes

More and more games show your character's actual equipment during cutscenes, which is great, but that also means there are still games that don't and instead use your default character model, which is definitely not great. Nothing ruins immersion like an instantaneous off-screen outfit change, and quite frankly, if I take the time to pick out my best pair of Quick Shoes of More Healthness, I want to strut those puppies wherever I go. It's even worse with weapons. What happened to my mighty greatsword, huh? Is it in my other pants, which you also took away?

Imagine spending 30-plus minutes painstakingly sculpting every last feature of your next RPG character only to hit accept and load in looking like a random extra from Grand Theft Auto. That's how I feel every time my carefully coordinated outfit gets camera shy and magically disappears. I don't remember asking for a stunt double, and I don't want or need one, thank you very much. 

Jarred Walton: Unskippable intro screens

I have always hated the unskippable videos and screens that load before you get to the game. Go ahead and make me watch them the first time if you must, but please quit with the delayed gratification on the hundredth time I run Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. "Oh, I didn't realize AMD helped with this game, that it's published by Square Enix, developed by Eidos Montreal, ported to PC by Nixxes, uses the Dawn Engine, and is part of the Deus Ex Universe. Also, I'm glad to see the warning about the autosave feature, again, because I might have forgotten!" Total time to launch the game and reach the main menu, on a high-end PC: 48 seconds.

What's interesting is that the community put together a 'hack' that replaces the unskippable videos with empty vids. Except for the autosave warning, which we still need to see. With the hack in place, the game loads to the main menu in 18 seconds. Considering DXMD also makes you restart when you change texture quality, and I've run benchmarks for the game hundreds of times since its release, the hack has saved me 2.5 hours of repeatedly sitting through the same intro videos.

DXMD is definitely not the only game to do this, it's simply one of the worst offenders that I regularly have to deal with. I would love it if games put all the promotional videos under a menu option and only showed them on the first launch. Sadly, I doubt that's going to happen.

I've spent the past five years of my life living in countries where my skin color marked me as a target of fear and hostility. People ran screaming from an elevator upon seeing that I occupied it, on two separate occasions, in my apartment building in South Korea. I've been turned away from restaurants, watched people run across traffic-filled streets to avoid being on the same sidewalk as me, and noticed mothers pulling their children closer in response to my simple presence...just like the wary woman eying suave Interpol agent and Deus Ex protagonist Adam Jensen in the picture above this paragraph.

I say all of this at the start of an article for a site about videogames, reluctantly, because it may explain why I see incredible nuance in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Despite being the game to use the infamous marketing campaign of 'mechanical apartheid', in practice, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided treats human prejudice with a sense of the personal typically understood only by those who have lived it.

After an action-packed tutorial, you spend the next fifteen minutes of the game's opening watching a montage showcasing the state of Mankind Divided's world, listening in on a conversation between the Illuminati, and inhabiting an in-engine cutscene where you meet a friend on a train station platform—a seemingly odd approach for an immersive sim. This is, after all, a genre that relies on an absurd degree of player control. Why take this control away for such a significant period of time, just as the player is adapting to the systems and core exploration loop of the game? 

This sequence offers a fascinating insight into the design philosophies underlying the entire game. The key to what I believe to be one of the most human portraits of prejudice in all games. You aren't just observing the melodrama of harassment, happening to a sympathetic series of faceless third parties. You have to play it. 

In the world of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a recent catastrophic incident caused everyone with an augmentation to malfunction, and turn violently on the people around them. Security measures worldwide increased dramatically as a result, and the added attention isn't always earned. Regardless of economic or social status; regardless if a person has an implant for practical, aesthetic, prosthetic, or work-related purposes; anyone's augmentation is now viewed as a universal, potential threat. Increasing numbers of innocent augmented people are getting stuffed into ghettos and slums, as the world considers how it wishes to treat these new liabilities.

As if things weren't already bad enough for the augmented in the world of Deus Ex, who have to take regular doses of a drug known as Neuropozyne to avoid their bodies rejecting their implants, being augmented now marks one as a target of everything from harassment to extortion.

Crucially, Adam Jensen's status as the player character does not exempt him from this new state of being. Even as a white, gravel-voiced, nigh-unstoppable, sleekly cybernetic badass who is in fact an agent of the government, he's still marked. You're still marked. The form this takes, on a systemic level, is fascinating.

In games and game culture, the interruption of flow is treated as the greatest consequence players can face. 'Game Over' screens are an example of such an interruption, and can set back your progress to boot. Loading screen delays are detested. Cutscenes pause the action, or can just be seen as boring, causing many players to demand ways to skip them. Taking damage in a game which allows you to regenerate health forces you to take cover, temporarily putting you out of the fight. Mankind Divided directly uses this line of thought to reinforce its theme.

Referencing its title, the game world is split between the 'naturals' and 'augs'. When pointing you towards a mission objective, your HUD will direct you to use the aug section of the subway, causing you to pass through narrow entrances clogged with passengers being screened, mandatory document checkpoints and fences of chain and barbed wire as you go. You're Adam Jensen, though. You can disobey this suggestion, and use any part of the train you want! You can stroll through the far more convenient and clean portion of the subway reserved for 'naturals', and use touchscreens to board their reserved cars. 

Upon reaching your destination, however, you will be confronted by an officer of the law—and held up while they check your paperwork until they feel you've been suitably chastised. It's uncomfortable. It goes on for far longer than it feels like it should. It's a tangible punishment communicated through a lack of interaction. A powerful enough deterrent, perhaps...to ensure that you stay in your line. Whatever you may believe about the central conflict of the game, and whether or not this is deserved.

This doesn't happen often enough to become a capital-m Message, and it isn't necessarily a story-rooted encounter either (like a confrontation with a checkpoint guard which forces you to pursue a quest to get new, supplemental paperwork, or pay an enormous bribe every time you pass through). People generally try to leave the guy with blade arms (read: you) alone as you walk the streets. It does occur just often enough, however, to grate.

You can stumble into these situations by accident. Running to the next mission location, you can zone out, end up in the wrong train car, and spend the time after a loading screen dealing with a public official with an inflated sense of power. This is just one example of how Deus Ex unobtrusively finds a way to both respect your power as a player, while simultaneously making sure you remember your place in its world. No matter how powerful you make Adam Jensen, at the end of the day, you're just another aug facing a parade of unfriendly faces.

Facing the reality of lost time...

...lost patience...

...lost humanity.

Going back to the mother pulling her child closer mentioned at the beginning of this piece: media using a designated 'other' to represent minority groups and struggles is nothing new. X-Men has its mutants, Dragon Age has its treatment of elves, Skyrim's khajit serve as a Romani analogue, and so on. At its release, Mankind Divided got a lot of flak for its choice to brand augmented people, regardless of social and economic barriers, as this 'other'. I won't suggest that this criticism is completely unfounded. It's reasonable and expected to call out the specific way in which something attempts to approach an allegory for prejudice, especially in politically-charged times that are themselves referenced within the work ("Black Lives Matter" is shifted to "Aug Lives Matter" within the context of the game). 

There are times within the game that the metaphor is fairly obvious, and characters function as mouthpieces for viewpoints moreso than authentic people. I do believe, however, that Mankind Divided contains a strain of genuine, subtle nuance. Little touches that can't be slapped into a flashy marketing campaign, and can pass by players fully absorbed in a haze of cyberpunk shenanigans and RPG looting. Despite the dystopian sci-fi trappings, when I play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I see a familiar world—but in this life, I'm not Adam Jensen.

I'm a young black kid on a train in a foreign country, keeping my head down, because I see a monster reflected in the eyes of the people around me.

A monster I think Adam Jensen knows all too well.

Literature’s had a pretty good run, much of it without any fancy graphics and animations and particle effects to bolster the words. Games love text too. Text is cheap. You can paint a picture of galactic chaos or epic history in about the same time it takes to type ‘and then something cool happened’, without having to spend the next week designing armour and creating 3D characters to act it out. Yet despite centuries of practice, most games still haven’t worked out how to present all this (which let’s face it, is often there more for the writers’ satisfaction than our actual enjoyment) in a punchy, satisfying way. What works? What doesn’t? Let’s take a quick look at some of the ways games have handled books, letters, codexes and more. 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Even when you don’t affect a world that much, it’s nice when it pretends. News stories are one of the best and cheapest ways to both highlight your achievements, and reframe them in interesting ways, from acts of heroism to outright terrorism. Human Revolution wrapped them in one of the sleekest packages for this—the Picus Daily Standard. At once a chance to see what was taking place out of your sphere, and see the effect of your adventures on the world. While even a few years later, the futuristic look feels distinctly retro compared to iPad news apps, to say nothing of whatever direct-brain interfaces we’ll likely have by the time of Deus Ex’s dark not-too-distant-future, Picus keeps it pretty, keeps it punchy, and above all, keeps it brief. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Ah, but when it comes to eBooks, things aren’t so smooth. Look at this. Even the original Kindle would wince at these datapad layouts, complete with non-slidable panels, slow refresh rate, poor quality fonts and typography, and non-consistent use of glows. Sure, it’s readable, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to, even before factoring in that in the wasteful future of Deus Ex you apparently need a new device for every Wikipedia entry. The crappy quality of this design only stands out more amongst Mankind Divided’s otherwise superbly rendered future, where everything you encounter seems to have emerged fully formed from the brain of a maverick product genius. This, meanwhile, feels like a first attempt at customising Twine. 

Fallout 4

In the not-too-distant future, who needs books? We’ll have computers! Specifically, ghastly green teletype machines that would be tolerable for simple acts like opening doors, but could be much more of a nightmare if the cast of Five Nights At Freddy’s occasionally popped up for a jump-scare. The horrible font. The clackering of the text. The endless pages that try their best  to tell stories of post-apocalyptic horror, despite being locked in an interface that would make even a hardened wasteland explorer decide that whatever happened probably doesn’t matter that much. Even accounting for the 50s vibe of the rest of the game, these are hideous technological throwbacks that knife their own storytelling in the back. The closest they come to being appropriate to the setting is that in using them, the living definitely envy the dead. 

Skyrim / Ultima

What’s an RPG shelf without a few strangely short books that probably don’t need hundreds of pages and a stiff leather jacket? While RPGs have always been wise enough to realise that most players will accept this deviation from reality, it’s still interesting to look at the differences between these two great franchises. Skyrim for instance clearly assumes that all of Tamriel’s readers are half-blind—or possibly playing on a television screen—leading to very slow-paced tales on glorified flashcards. Ultima meanwhile wanted you to squint. But at least Ultima had the advantage that unless a book was specifically screaming ‘crucial plot element’, it was most likely to be flavour, sparing you tediously flicking through shelves in the hope of finding a boost to one of your skills. At least both franchises keep their tongues firmly in their cheeks, whether it’s The Elder Scrolls’ obsession with the Lusty Argonian Mage, or Ultima’s fine line of joke books, occasional explosive booby-trap pranks, and the revelation that wise Lord British, founder of Britannia’s favourite story is “Hubert the Lion”. Can’t sleep without it, apparently... 

Mass Effect

A controversial one here, perhaps, but Mass Effect is one of the games where the built-in Codex arguably makes the world less enjoyable. The game does a fantastic job of introducing everything that’s actually important without relying on it as a crutch, with the dry writing and endless unlockable pages of SF guff coming across as homework rather than a gripping read. Do we really need to know, for example, the origins of every last whiffle-bolt supplier on the Citadel? No. It’s just not that important. Save it for the design bible and tie-in books.

While there are a few interesting flourishes, including Codex entries based on what the universe thinks rather than necessarily the actual truth, the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy it is not. And ironically, it shows the difference itself, in the form of Mass Effect 2’s fantastic Shadow Broker DLC and the unlockable files within, which actually do give you a chance to peer at your party’s dirty little secrets. Jack’s secret love of poetry. Miranda’s online dating life. Tali’s repeated installation of a suit tool called ‘Nerve Stim Pro’. Oh, the blackmail opportunities...

Dishonored 2

Dishonored is a great example of how just a little thing can really annoy. Its text isn’t difficult to read, the font is pretty well chosen, if not exactly conveying the sense of a written document in the same way as many other games with this level of texture and detail, but does it really have to sway back and forth while you’re reading? There’s a time for ambient animation to breathe life into a scene, and a time to make the player feel slightly sea-sick. No. Scratch that. True for the first, not so much for the second. Swish… swish… it’s an effect applied to all the menus and other data screens and really contributes to making reading the lore an unpleasant experience. A shame, because that lore is actually interesting. Dunwall and Karnaca are two of gaming’s best cities, and their depth and backstory is fascinating. If you can stand to actually read it.

The Longest Journey and Life Is Strange

I'm bundling these together because they do the same basic concept—the primary text in the game is our main character’s diary. This serves several purposes, including offering a potted version of the story if you dip away for a while and forget things, but most importantly giving us a direct look inside their head. It’s a technique that only works if you actually like the main character, but fortunately that’s not a problem for either series and its charismatic leading ladies. In particular, it’s a way of bridging the gap between our perception of the game, as an untouchable god-figure, and theirs, as someone for whom all these moral decisions are actual life-changing events. Simply seeing the game from that perspective is enough to make everything carry that much more weight, and it doesn’t hurt that they’re fun reads too.

The Witcher 3

What separates The Witcher from most in-game codexes is its sense of character, with everything being described from the perspective of in-game poet, lover and occasional sidekick Dandelion. The nature of the game also rewarded taking the time to dip into the Codex, given that for a travelling monster-slayer, knowledge is power, and never took away from the fact that while us as players might not know our drowners from our necrophages, Geralt himself was always able to be a reliable source of information and provide the condensed version.

Realms of the Haunting

Here’s a retro classic, sadly not helped by the low-resolutions of the mid-90s. Nothing damages the mood of an otherwise well-made document like peering at it through a letter-box and finding it more poorly compressed than an old JPEG from a lost Geocities page. It’s not quite as bad blown up to full screen though, and even with its technical problems, it demonstrated how to write documents that actually fit the world and contributed to the lore without feeling like extracts from the design bible. Most took the form of letters between the characters, their identities not always immediately obvious, and turning the relatively simple battle between good and evil at the heart of the story into an epic tale of Faustian deals, ancient cults, doomed love, and a deep mythology stretching between multiple worlds. The visual look certainly didn’t hurt, with everything presented as aged pages, hand-drawn maps and messily scrawled journals. And if you didn’t like them, you got to burn several of them as part of a puzzle. Splendid.

The Neverhood

Of course, if you really, really want to make sure nobody misses your game’s lore, there’s always the Hall of Records—aka The Place Where Basically All The Game’s Backstory Is, as carved onto the walls of a corridor that takes about five minutes to trudge through even if you ignore all of the words. Oh, and when you get to the other end? You have to walk back, obviously. You know it’s good stuff when even a game’s own wiki states, and we quote, “it is suggested by most not to read all of it.” Truly great literature. Who could ask for anything less?

But of course, these are just a few cases. Which games have convinced you to pause saving the world to flick through a good book, and when has that background just been so much blah? It’s fun to get lost in backstory, just as long as the writers aren’t too obsessed with their own lore.

This was originally published back in PC Gamer 305 in April 2017, and here it's presented online for the first time. Subscribe to the US and UK magazines for more features like this, designed beautifully for print and digital. 

Reading the reviews of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, I noticed a trend. Almost every one of them, including my own, mentioned one level in particular: the Palisade Bank. This dense, complex map is arguably the highlight of the game, and a neat microcosm of everything I love about Deus Ex. It's an intricate web of security systems and shortcuts, with severe brutalist architecture and gleaming marble floors. And the first time I set foot in it, the urge to cause trouble and test the limits of the security was irresistible.

The design of the Palisade Bank level was led by Clémence Maurer, who worked on it from the earliest concept to its completion. "It was always planned," she tells me. "We have a high-level story document called the blueprint, which details all the places the player will visit during the game and the most important branches of the story. And the idea of breaking into a highly secure data haven was a core part of the game from the early stages of development."

The initial pitch was simple. Jensen has to break into VersaLife's vault and get something. They didn't know what yet. And that's all it took to fire Maurer's imagination. "I used some concept art depicting the exterior of the bank to inspire me," she says. "Then I started working with this shell, testing various gameplay spaces within it. It was still pretty organic at this stage, as I didn't know exactly how the space would function. Everything in Deus Ex must have a meaning and must feel plausible, so I couldn't just place random objects everywhere. The layout had to make sense."

The first design was more conventional. The kind of big city bank you might have queued in yourself on occasion. "It had a front desk, offices, people waiting in lines, etc. But as the story developed and it became a corporate archive, I realised that it shouldn't be a bank where people go to withdraw money. It's a cold, elite, very secure place to keep top secret information, where the megacorps keep their most valuable data. Not something as trivial as money."

The Palisade Bank is where the sinister corporations that rule Deus Ex's dystopian society keep some of their darkest, most precious secrets. There's no vault with a heavy circular door stuffed with gold bars, but thousands of sealed containers filled with data and things they don't want the world to see. Break into the vault belonging to Tarvos Security and you'll find experimental armour and computers tracking the company's enemies.

"I started rethinking the space," says Maurer. "Where is the data locked away? Is there a vault, and what would it look like? Are there offices and people working there? How would the security systems work? Answering these questions was meticulous, demanding work, made even more difficult by the fact that this kind of building doesn't exist in real life."

Vault boy

The vaults are stored in an immense vertical shaft, which players can sneak into with some effort. "The idea of a shaft containing movable vaults came pretty early. I wanted this to be the backbone of the layout, used as an alternate entrance and exit. It was originally more connected to the structure, at the very back of the lobby. You used to be able to see the shaft from the main lobby and vice versa. But now it's below the parking lot."

After three months of work, the bank was starting to take shape. "The art direction was very clear," says Maurer. "This is not a bank where a lot of people work. It's so elite that very few clients visit, and most things are automated. That's why you don't see many people."

When Jensen finally reaches VersaLife's vault, he finds himself in a vast chamber with containers stretching as far as the eye can see. "This was much harder to conceptualise," Maurer says. "We knew there would be a vista. We knew there would be big boxes full of corporate secrets, and that one would be brought to the player. Making this system come to life, and appear grounded and functional, was the toughest part of the bank's design for me."

Some of her problems were external. "There was a lot of resistance to the idea of a shaft containing nested vaults. And as I presented the map to my superiors, they didn't really get it. So it was tremendously important that my design be bulletproof, allowing me to answer every question about how the space worked. It also had to provide engaging gameplay, meet the requirements of the story and art direction, and not blow the budget."

The logic behind how the vaults worked was finally settled on, with help from Eidos Montreal's team of talented concept artists. There would be an immense archive room with thousands of vaults stuffed with corporate secrets. And when a client (or Jensen in this case) requests their vault, a crane plucks it from the stack and brings it over to them.

Production on the bank proceeded quickly, and after six months the basic layout was set. "A few areas were a bit awkward and would need a lot of refining," says Maurer. "This was due to the fact that most people were working on the vertical slice of the game, which was of course a high priority task. Overall I worked on the bank for about two years, but I was also working on the Prague city hub at the same time."

As well as being responsible for the grand vision of the Palisade Bank, Maurer also paid attention to the smallest details. "I'm a big believer in subtlety," she tells me. "I didn't want to just throw codes and key cards at the player. So that's why I spent a lot of time designing stories to give these items context. I also tried to convey useful information in a subtle way—like a clue to the manager's door code—so some players could find these things themselves rather than be handed them."

Hard luck

I've always thought of Deus Ex levels as giant puzzles that you're given the tools to creatively solve, and I ask Maurer if that was the intention. "That's exactly what it's meant to feel like," she says. "We give you the tools, but not the answers. It's a tough, rich, and super dense map, and rewards smart and adventurous players who explore every corner of it. The pieces of the puzzle are not meant to be given away, but earned."

The bank was also designed to be one of the toughest levels in the game, and was in fact originally designed as a playground for the new remote hacking upgrade, at a time when it was forced on the player. "We eventually ditched that idea," says Maurer. "We never want to push augmentations on players. But it made sense that only a heavily augmented person could break into the bank using a combination of abilities.

"It seems almost impossible when you first enter the bank. Especially if you aren't well equipped. I paid attention to how the challenge would evolve between your first visit by day to returning at night. I actually made it more difficult the first time you visit. This really makes you feel the power of the place, and rewards players who attempt to break in before they have to as part of the story. This also gives players who took the time to do this unprompted an edge later on, but they have to earn it."

As well as the main vault, there are two chambers branching off from the lobby containing the executive lockers. I remember finding my way in here and feeling like a kid in a cyberpunk candy shop, merrily hacking every locker I could find and stealing the contents. Credits, ammo, Praxis points, biocells. I left with Jensen's pockets bulging and a sense of dubious satisfaction from robbing the place without alerting anyone.

"I used the executive lockers to entice players back to the bank when they found a code or key card in Prague," says Maurer. "This would reward them with some nice loot, and some cool storytelling that would expand their knowledge of the universe. If you get caught in there, the lockers will actually retract into the floor, leaving you exposed and making them inaccessible."

Although Adam Jensen is, in theory, one of the good guys, Deus Ex encourages thievery like no other game. In my save game I've cleaned out every accessible apartment in Prague, for no reason other than they were there. But Maurer is, of course, well aware of this, and makes allowances for players like me when designing her levels. "When I design levels, I always have those players in mind who will explore every inch of it," she says. "We support other player types, but I have a fondness for explorers."

Success story

Eidos Montreal took on a considerable job when they decided to reboot Deus Ex, and they did it justice. But of all the places Adam Jensen visits, from Detroit to Prague, the bank sticks out as one of the best examples of the series' detailed, open-ended level design. When you've cleaned out every executive locker, office, and vault, and casually stroll out without raising so much as an eyebrow, the feeling of satisfaction is immense.

I ask Maurer if she expected such a positive reaction. "I had my doubts at first," she says. "But I'm glad people liked it. I think people appreciate how challenging it is, and how rewarding it is to bypass this seemingly impossible security. All of this is contained within a pretty small map, but it's absolutely packed with content."

Sadly, the Deus Ex series appears to be on hold as Eidos Montreal turns its attention to the Marvel universe. Who knows when it'll make a return, but the Palisade Bank is a hell of a parting gift.