Deus Ex: Human Revolution Fan-powered Q&A, Continued

More fan questions have been answered by the team at Eidos Montreal on their Tumblr page since we last checked, and they’re quite obviously almost all focused on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, in addition to a slew of photos concerning a recent signing session.

Working in the industry, what do you think is the biggest thing holding gaming back? The one thing that if it didn’t exist, gaming as a whole would see a huge leap in quality. The inability by suits to take a risk on a novel idea? Developer aspirations being too high and having to be scaled back? something else entirely?

Frank says:

(There’s only one answer I can give you: technology.

It’s been holding us back since the beginning.

Whether it’s the hardware the games run on or the tools used in making them, for now technology trumps design.

There are many ideas for games that we just cannot implement nowadays because our level of technology just can’t handle it.

We’re just now figuring out other ways to interact with games aside mouse, keyboard and controllers.

Give us the power to recreate real-life and there’s no end to what we could design.)

(…)

why is this masterpiece releasing two weeks before my university semester starts? Is two weeks enough to fully experience the game? And also, what games are you really looking forward to as a gamer in the coming months?

Old question, but it’s still relevant.

Frank says:

(Hey Joel.

I’d say the first half of our production cycle was pretty nerve-racking.

While we were working on what’s called the ‘˜vertical slice’ (a feature-complete portion of the game), we’ve hit roadblock after roadblock, as we were trying to figure out the visual style, multi-pathing, multi-solution and various other mechanics.

I can’t say there was ever a feeling that we had bitten off more than we could chew, but there sure was doubt on the team as to whether all of this would work out in the end.

Fortunately for us, it eventually coalesced into an alpha prototype that we were able to playtest with external people.

To my recollection, that’s the first time we had confirmation from actual players that we had something worthwhile on our hands.

That was 2 years ago. (already?)

It was the moment when the whole team got traction and we really put our heads down to nail this sucker.)