My First E3

I had to google NYTD to find out what that is all about (sorta). Just as a side question, did any game UI influence the NYT's website (or if that's not what you were doing, did they influence whatever UI you were working on)? Basically I'm asking if that was budget money well spent :)

I suppose this is where we differ a bit. For me, the story-line of a game isn't so important (if it has a multiplayer aspect that is unrelated). But it seems that Deus Ex was initially not a multiplayer game... so I have one question:

Which did you prefer, the single player or the multiplayer aspect of the game? (I'm guessing here the answer is the single player one, though I can't be too certain yet).

Good questions! The trip did "inspire us" but the bandwidth issue back in those days made it really difficult for us to implement anything too fancy (page-load time was a constant battle). What did change for me was the idea of directing a visitor's path through the site for certain tasks - just like in a game. I realized that any block you put in a visitors path to reach their goal was entirely negative. For example, if someone who was logged out wanted to add a comment in a Q&A page they could but on submittal we would then ask them for their login info in a very unobtrusive way. This is something we termed "contextual login/registration". A simple thought really but it turned out to be very effective. Plus, I had great developers to implement ideas like this.

You're right, DUES EX wasn't initially a multi-player game. I really did enjoyed the single player DUES EX though. It was the first time I felt really invested in a game - like I feel when I read a good book. And that's exactly what got me hooked on games in general. I do love a good multi-player game though - especially when I'm playing with a group of friends. I'm not much of an explorer so if I'm playing by myself in a multi-player environment I find I enjoy myself the most when there is some sort of story-driven aspect that drives the goal you're trying to accomplish. Classic FPS personality I guess.

Ooh. Again this is something my man played and I didn't, but I'm curious as to whether you're one of the (apparently innumerable) multitudes who believe Deus Ex 2 was a complete letdown, and are viewing the emergence of Deux Ex 3 with some apprehension?