Classic Levels: Deus Ex (2000), Hell's Kitchen

"The plot is mine, but the story is the player’s."

Warren Spector

"Hell’s Kitchen" is one of the levels that really stood out to me so far in the OG Deus Ex. I don’t know how it stacks up in terms of square feet but it felt like the biggest, busiest slice of 2052’s gloomy New York yet. It is a textbook case of high-quality level design and well considered pathing enabling players to make a story completely their own as they progress toward the objective.

It certainly fits with a Warren Spector interview from when the game was released, where he stated that by having a linear story and therefore the same ultimate objective for everyone, they could provide an immense amount of freedom as to how they got to it. In "Hell’s Kitchen" you need to shut off a generator – that’s all the knowledge you need. You can shoot, hack, talk or climb your way to it, or as in my case some combination of those things.

Arriving in the level isn’t particularly impressive, as you enter onto a pretty empty street. But I couldn’t take a step in Hell’s Kitchen without stumbling onto some kind of adventure. I broke a basement window and found some secrets. The NSF were engaged in a ferocious battle with UNATCO in the park, so I went round and ended up finding a ladder and fire escape leading to JC’s brother Paul’s room at the hotel. I poked around the apartment and read Paul’s emails. In an impressive flexing of technical achievement for the time, you can look down from the roof of the hotel and see the park with the ongoing battle far below, as well as the path to the objective.

Going into the bar was one of the best moments, just coming across little short stories about the lives of ordinary people. It has big CRPG energy. I rescued an escort from an abusive pimp, then bought a bunch of drinks for a guy in the bar to get him drunk enough to talk, only to find out he was supposed to be flying a helicopter with Paul in it later that night. If only more games now would show this amount of care put into NPC interactions – the Deus Ex team couldn’t even afford to give their character models ears, and yet I was more immersed in these interactions than in any number of conversations I have had with immaculately modeled NPCs recently.

In an earlier essay from 1999, Spector talked about the large contiguous worlds of recent RPGs like Daggerfall, and about how the mission structure for Deus Ex would allow Ion Storm to “break the world up into more manageable sections to minimize walking around and maximize fun.” Good advice even now.

I certainly enjoyed every minute of it, from the bar to realising I could just go round some groups of guards with dogs by platforming and climbing around, and after a failed attempt to get to the generator from the roof, simply breaking into the control room and hacking it to blow it up. I know for a fact I could do this two or three times more and do different things each time, and only then feel like I had a real mastery of the area. But I bet if you talked to ten people about their first experience in this level, there would be commonalities but you would inevitably get ten different "narratives".

It was definitely a story that feels like it was mine, and yet at the same time I felt like there was a lot of level left, and I somehow broke the game by taking the shortcuts and advantageous routes I did.

Which is probably exactly what Ion Storm was hoping for.