out-of-reach areas

[Neveos]

I am realizing something interesting about Deus Ex's design:

Few to absolutely none of the areas in Deus Ex are unreachable by the player (aside from obvious observation windows in the training mission). No space is ever devoted to simple scenery within the boundaries of gameplay, which is unlike half life, in which they had the luxury of decorating what the player could see, and would ignore what he couldn't. (Thinking back, Half-life's sheer attention to detail in map design was super shoddy {I still love the game}). In fact, one of the only places I can think of in Deus Ex which only serves as scenery is the small little closed pet shop in the wan-chai market. Other than that, the game developers fully expected you to see every area that an NPC could inhabit.

In DX, if it appears out of reach, it will simply take time and resources to get there. This leads to you going behind bars and secure areas, going into closed shops and empty apartments, on top of buildings, and best of all: behind those places where you pay for admittance. That was so educational as a young man who has never seen behind the stage of life.

[Jonas]

In fact, one of the only places I can think of in Deus Ex which only serves as scenery is the small little closed pet shop in the wan-chai market. Other than that, the game developers fully expected you to see every area that an NPC could inhabit.

Uhh the one you can break into where somebody's been spying on the police station from?

Yeah it's cool, but I think at least some of it is that the computers of the day could barely handle all the parts of the level the player had to be able to enter, let alone a whole other layer of game world just for show. So simple skyboxes were used to draw most of the out-of-bounds stuff instead.

There are a few places though. Some of the Paris maps have scenery where you can't go. The NYC cemetery map comes to mind as well.

[DDL]

Plus of course the inexplicable "MAX CHEN ON TOP OF A SKYSCRAPER".

I believe the argument is so they can shift him down to the meeting in the temple, but it's not like they didn't have access to a perfectly good bInWorld system, so what the hell, people.

So yeah, I'd say you weren't supposed to go up there.

....and alright, the devs clearly didn't anticipate 'nade climbing (best bug ever).

[Hassat Hunter]

Could be from a time before that was in.

You really REALLY often find stuff in games where you think "why the heck did they do it like this, when they just have a function for it"... and the asnwer simply is "the function didn't exist back then"
It can be a real pain in the bottom

From personal experience (so, KOTOR2); Before they centralised global loot, each script got it's own version included. Of course (like most of the game) they screwed up and there are a dozen bugs in there. But after I fixed that, I still had to modify about 100 scripts that used the old system of including the faulty version in their own script instead of referencing to the 1 file, so if there was a change it can be quickly applied everywhere...

[DDL]

Yeah, that was my best guess too. There's a lot of that in the dx code, to be honest.

[Neveos]

I remember that spot where someone was spying, but I'm pretty sure you can't actually get in there with the dog. Not sure, now.

I actually think it had more to do with how simple it is to permit the player entry. They may have even made such areas and then thought "oh what the hell". Relatedly, the devs thought making such decorative areas would have been a waste of time, and upon making them, they just linked it up and put something interesting or useful in there.

That's another thing about DX: rewards can either be instrumental or intrinsic. A useful tool or a simple thought provoking information device.