The Nameless Mod – a Deus Ex mod that was 7 years in the making – got released earlier this year by Off Topic Productions. We pulled aside the lovely Jonas Wæver to ask him questions about it.
How did The Nameless Mod come about?
It started with a thread on a forum where a man shared his plans to make a Deus Ex fan mission in which the characters were named after the forum users. The man was Lawrence “Trestkon” Laxdal, who became our producer, and in the space of a fortnight, he had a full team of modders helping him out, eager to participate in this crazy project. We extrapolated the concept into a virtual world where a Deus Ex fansite would be represented as a cyberpunk city, hammered out a modest design document, and the feature creep sort of took it from there.
Was a core story in at this point and is it recognisably the same now? Having a virtual world is different from a full conspiracy laden plot after all.
Originally the mod took place in a single hub, and your only mission was to solve the kidnapping that still lies at the heart of TNM’s plot. You got no missions to solve during the investigation, however, just a completely non-linear city district with a whole bunch of enterable buildings and a cast of characters to interview. Once you’d gathered enough clues to figure out who was responsible, there would be a showdown in a climactic end-game level. That turned out to be far too unstructured to work well in Deus Ex, so we rewrote it a couple of times until we ended up with the basic two-faction branching storyline that we released with. It was just a lot shorter originally – we added missions along the way to make proper use of all the levels we were creating for the world. It was a bit backwards./
TNM was in development for positively ages – why the delay?
Primarily, it’s a very large project – TNM has roughly the same length as Deus Ex, and more actual content, and we all made it in our spare time, while working or studying or participating in other such boring activities. I like to say the reason it took so long was because of the feature creep, but of course if we’d planned to make something this enormous from the beginning, it would still have taken 7 years to create. There’s just an insane amount of work involved in developing a game.
At least you managed to release – just about every other mod this ambitious inevitably fails. You must be immensely proud that you saw this through to the end.
Very proud, yes! It helped that a couple of us decided along the way that we wanted to make a carreer out of game development. It was clear by then that TNM would make an impressive centrepiece for an entry-level portfolio, which was great motivation to stick with it./
Was it ever a worry during development that at some point in development Deux Ex would simply stop being relevant?
Yes, especially when Invisible War was about to come out. We were quite worried that the fanbase would forget about the original game and our past 2 years of work would be rendered obsolete. But then Invisible War had some problems and people stuck around. Eventually we stopped thinking about it, but we were never really quite sure how large a splash we’d be able to make upon release. I think the attention we’ve got has exceeded our expectations.
Were there discussions of porting over to a Deus Ex 2 mod or was it simply not feasible?
We debated it, but in the end, Invisible War was released without a toolset, so it wasn’t possible. And to be honest, we still prefer the original Deus Ex, if not for its graphics or its AI then for its control scheme, its interface, and its feature set./
How many people have actually worked on the mod? Was it hard to keep it all under control?
I count 19 people that I would consider to be the core team and a further 54 whose contributions were somewhat less regular. Just staying in touch with everyone was almost everything Lawrence did for most of the project, and I still had to spend a lot of time in dialogue with the active members, helping them to create something that worked and fit into the game. And that’s not even counting the 74 voice-over artists whom we needed a third manager, Gelo Fleisher, to keep track of.
How do you think the release went?
A bit worse than we had hoped, but about as well as we could’ve expected in hindsight. We had a lot of bug reports in the first month, and we had to put in a lot of extra time on the first two patches. The worst problems were a couple of persistent crashes pertaining to the new ogg music system we’d implemented, which none of our testers had experienced. We did manage to iron out those issues pretty quickly though, and the last half year of fixes has been a lot less stressful, just polishing the whole game up a bit. We’re pretty happy with the press we’ve got, though we did shoot ourselves in the foot by using a few minor things that we don’t have copyright for, which prevented us from getting the mod onto the magazines’ cover disks in most countries. That was sort of stupid.
I wouldn’t be so hard on yourselves – commercial releases have gone worse than that by the sounds of it. Have you enjoyed the release at least – it must have made you a minor Deus Ex celebrity now?
I suppose we do have a lot of respect in the DX community, but it’s a pretty small community, so that’s not saying a lot. We are super happy about the coverage we’ve received though, especially the PCPowerPlay review which they chose to put in the proper review section instead of the mod section, that really blew us away. Apparently they still love Deus Ex in Australia, maybe because all their new releases get banned? I think the most important thing to us has been all the great feedback, especially from the journalists, which we can bring with us into the development of our next project. We’ve learned a lot./
Do you still consider TNM a bit of a work in progress or is it ‘done’?
We’re certainly done with it now. Most of the requests we get on the forums now are suggestions for new features or further details, and we’re way past the point where we have the energy to add stuff like that. We’ll still try to help out those of our fans who want to add new stuff to the mod themselves, just as we’ll try to help any other modders who want to use our assets in their own projects, but with version 1.0.4, there are very few bugs left in TNM, and we’re happy to leave it at that.
What’s next for Off Topic? Are we going to see another TNM in 8 years for Deus Ex 3?
Only if Eidos pays us for it! Our new project, which is currently in the prototype phase, is an independent commercial game. I can’t say too much about it or I’ll have to fire myself, but after a couple of iterations on the design, we’re now working on something which I believe will please most of our fans. It’s not going to be a Deus Ex clone, though I certainly wouldn’t mind playing some of those. It’s going to be a new game with its own identity, but we’re still working with our favourite structures and mechanics from TNM. It’ll be smaller, but hopefully even more detailed than The Nameless Mod.
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