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Gaming website Computer And Video Games has posted the second part of their interview with Warren Spector, head of design studio Ion Storm and producer of the highly-anticipated sequel to 2000's most impressive gaming title - Deus Ex: Invisible War.

In the second round of the Q&A session, the half dozen questions posed to the legendary designer cover game design issues, the difficulty of AI programming, and the gameplay differences between this version and the original game:

Have you balanced the difficulty this time, so that different approaches don't offer hugely varying degrees of difficulty?

Spector: I think we did a much better job of that this time round. In the first game, because we built on top of the Unreal engine - you know, Unreal was fundamentally a shooter, a shooter with a very powerful engine, but still a shooter. And the resulting game, if you tried to play it not as a shooter, was way hard [laughs]. Way hard.

So this time what we did, and thank god we had that foundation, was take all the elements that weren't exactly what we needed for our game, and we ripped them out and replaced them with the elements we knew we wanted.

And so the AI is ours, the lighting model is ours; the stealth experience is better, more robust than it was in the first game. Sadly, pulling a virtual trigger is always going to be easier than adopting a stealthier way of playing, it's just a fact.

So if you want the easiest experience, you're still going to stick with the shooting approach. But it's certainly better balanced this time, maybe as good as we could hope to make it.

While the PC and XBox versions of the game are expected to hit the shelves in the next three weeks, there has been no official word yet on a Mac port of the game. If our chances are good, however, we should expect to be able to play the new title on our favorite platform sometime in the new year.

Warren Spector Interview, Part Deux

Six New Deus Ex: Invisible War Movies

Deus Ex 2: Invisible War (add to watch list)

Ion Storm (add to watch list)

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