“The most important thing is what I heard and still hear from players.”
Deus Ex creator Warren Spector recently spoke to IGN about his influential first-person action RPG and shared what’s most important to him about the game.
“I couldn’t care less about sales. I don’t care much about reviews, I don’t read reviews,” Spector said on the latest episode of our monthly interview show IGN Unfiltered. “Influence is very important to me. I’m now old enough that the word legacy means something to me… but leaving something behind is very important to me.”
As such, the stories he’s heard from players about their experiences playing Deus Ex is what he values most. “The most important thing is what I heard and still hear from players,” Spector said. “The whole idea of Deus Ex was to recreate the feeling of playing Dungeons & Dragons and telling stories with your friends—not being told a story, but telling stories with your friends and with a dungeon master.”
With Deus Ex, Spector believes he and his team were able to achieve that vision. “In Deus Ex, what we were trying to do was lay out the skeleton of a story—here’s why what you’re doing is important—and then let players own the minute to minute, and have every player finishing the game having had a unique experience,” he said. “I heard from a lot of players, and so I know we succeeded at that. Players had unique experiences and they did things that we didn’t know could be done in the game that we made.”
For more on Deus Ex, which ranks 13th in IGN’s top 100 games of all time, stay tuned for our full interview with Spector, when this month’s episode of IGN Unfiltered goes live later this week.
Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his YouTube channel.