Earlier last week MonsterVine was invited to participate in a Deus Ex event where we were able to get a full hands-on of the upcoming mobile game Deus Ex Go. During the event we had the chance to interview Nicolas Verge who is the Community Manager on the team.
MonsterVine: So if you don’t mind, could you introduce yourself real quick?
Nicolas: Yes, I’m Nicolas Verge Community Manager at Square-Enix Montréal.
MonsterVine: So in what ways has this game improved on the previous iterations?
Nicolas: So yea, every time we release a Go game, obviously, we look at what we’ve done before and try to improve on our shortcomings but they’re still super different games. In terms of what we have learned, we can say that Deus Ex Go is a bit harder than our other games. That’s something that a lot of our fans playing Lara Croft Go thought it was too easy and so we’re ramping it up just a bit more. This is also our third game so people know the concept at this point and are used to it so we tried to do that. But again in terms of improving it’s tough because it’s just different, it’s so different. It’s always the same basic mechanics in terms of turn based puzzles, but we’re trying to bring a new spin to it and make it different. Even in like the first level of the game you encounter the first guards for Deus Ex Go which act differently than any of the stuff we’ve done before. When you talk about a franchise like Deus Ex, which is very much steeped into stealth mechanics and infiltration, guards have to be intelligent and react to you and so as soon they see you they chase you down, they’re going to track you down and try to take you out and you have to go off by the sides behind them and stuff like that. In terms of improving, some of the stuff I can say is we’re looking at how our games live in the market for a long time and how we want people to keep playing our games as time goes on. So what we’re doing for the first time ever is we’re going to release a puzzle maker feature so people are going to be able to create their own levels in DXGo that’s going to be coming in at post-launch. So at launch what we’ll be able to deliver is a feature where, called weekly puzzles, we’re going to be able to deliver new puzzles every week to our fans. And so it’s super interesting thinking how Go games are not like, small experiences that you play through for five-six hours and then you’re done with them and delete them from your phone. We’ve done big DLC updates, add-ons before, but now it’s going to be very much incremental where every week you’re going to get puzzles and then maybe after months we’re going to be able maybe to add in some story stuff or new mechanics. And so that’s super interesting to think of the game much more as a service. It’s our first time dabbling with stuff like that but we’re super excited.
MonsterVine: It was interesting how you said your big focus was making it harder and I noticed that immediately, like right away. There was already more tactics, more thinking how to get around a guard than in the previous two Go games.
Nicolas: Yea, which were very more like… let’s say you had a few more levels in-between hard stuff to really get a grasp on the mechanics. I feel like that’s exactly where we’re at in the franchise and that’s what people are going to want to create as well. When we release the puzzle maker, that’s what people are going to want to want to create. They’re going to want to create the most intricate, complicated puzzles so that they can send that to their friends and when their friends play it they’re like “Oh man, you’re way smarter than me. How did you create that I don’t know how to solve it” and yea that’s kind of what we’re shooting for this time; something more different and a bit more challenging as well.
MonsterVine: So this is just an overall question for the series, when you’re taking these big franchises and adapting them to this formula, what are you looking to make sure you’re hitting the aesthetics and mechanics that people are familiar with?
Nicolas: Yea, it’s an arduous process I’d say, we call it distillation in terms of looking at a franchise and boiling it down to its core elements and we’ve done that for Hitman Go and Lara Croft Go. For this game it was very much so, Deus Ex is a very much mechanics driven game, stealth is super important like luring games, manipulating the environment to your advantage, and augmentations are on obvious must-get. Hacking was a must as well so there are terminals in the game that you can use to, like, when you open them you see a grid on the level which is different from the path you walk on which you can actually draw from the terminal to a turret for example then you hack that turret. So that turret’s now not going to shoot at you, but is going to shoot at your enemies and so you can use that to your advantage. So there’s stuff like that. We always try to look at those things to nail down what the franchise is about and yes stealth was a very important thing.
MonsterVine: So you mentioned a community that wanted a harder game, is there anything else that they maybe influenced in the development?
Nicolas: Yea, I’d say the level creation feature is very much community driven in terms of like, for a while now we’ve heard people clamoring for that for Lara Croft and for Hitman but the games weren’t meant for that. They were not created for a feature like that, Deus Ex is. If you look at Deus Ex’s art direction everything is very flat and there’s no vertical stuff and also the props are very few and far between in terms of like, there’s no washed background. In Lara Croft Go we had this crazy level of detail where our guys were like, hand placing flowers on your path to make sure it felt almost like a painting, something very much handcrafted. Deus Ex had to have this more flat art direction, still looks good, it has to anyone basically for anyone to be able to create those kinds of puzzles so that was a challenge but it’s super interesting. So yea, I’d say that’s probably the biggest feature that was asked for in the past and as a fan as well I think narrative is a big plus. This is the first time we do full narrative with dialog and characters from the franchise that are coming back so that’s super exciting as well.
MonsterVine: So for the future of the series, is this more narrative focus and community driven focus a big push for future games?
Nicolas: Yea I think, as a studio it’s super interesting. We’re at a point in our history where so far we have three Go games in our belt and we have this other game that’s Hitman Sniper that we released last year 3 months before Lara Croft Go that is still going strong which is a very mobile focused product and we have a big community there that’s super crazy about the product. So it’s been living for more than a year now and we keep updating it and adding stuff to it and players are still super engaged in that product. It’s super interesting to see how different experiences engage people differently, and yea for sure in the future we’ll think about that. Obviously I can’t talk about what we’re doing, but we’re doing crazy exciting stuff and doing stuff differently. People think of us as a Go studio, but yea we’ve done different stuff than only Go games so you might see more Go but you might see something else as well coming out of the studio for mobile. So we’re mobile focused, so that doesn’t changed, but we might do something different in the future.
MonsterVine: So just as a sort of fun question, if you could take any other franchise, it doesn’t have to be owned by Square-Enix we can keep that on the down-low, what would you like to do?
Nicolas: [Laughs] You’re gonna put me in hot water there. Yea it’s tough because that’s a very personal question. I’m a big fan of the Spiderman stuff, yea how crazy would that be? What’s cool about the Go games as well is that it feels like it can apply to many franchises, and as a community manager that’s the thing I like best when people send in suggestions like “What about Life is Strange Go? What about Final Fantasy Go? ” Yes that would be awesome “What’s your interpretation of that franchise? How would it look like?” Like, all the games look like miniatures as well. Even though they’re not tabletop figurines the characters are so small on screen they look like miniatures or figurines and yea, I’d be excited to see people just having fun with what Life is Strange Go is. I talked to, just having fun again, with Michel from the Life is Strange team when we were showing Hitman Go on consoles and we were talking and he was designing features, like, he was designing mechanics of how a Life is Strange Go would work. How you could stop time for a turn, how you could go back in time to change your position and stuff like that. Yea, if feels like a very versatile concept that could apply to anything. I could say many numbers of games that I love but yea, it wouldn’t make sense.
MonsterVine: Alright, well that’s all I had, thanks for the time.
Nicolas: Thank you so much man.
