Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interviews

PCGamer has been running a Deus Ex week, made up of a variety of articles such as screenshot analysis, Deus Ex retrospective and three interviews with Human Revolutions developers. Game director Jean-Francois Dugas.

PCG: For me, the moment that I got Deus Ex was when I realised that if there’s two guys around a corner, you can’t just run around and shoot them both. It seems, from the demo we saw today, that you’re incredibly powerful in Human Revolution. Do you force the player to think around situations, or can he always shoot his way through?

Dugas: We’re balancing the game, but in the demo you’ve seen today, it wasn’t possible to die. He was invincible in the first place. That was more to showcase the game and the potential. In the game itself, we don’t want it to be a run and shoot game. We’re balancing it out like if you try to run and go at the enemies, 2, 3, 4 bullets maybe, and you’re dead.

I mean, you can acquire the augmentations and the weapons that will make you a very kick ass killer on the field, but it doesn’t mean that it’s running all over the place, it’s going to be hard. So, taking cover, looking at the possibilities and trying to find other ways, are all the possibilities that will often times save you from dying. It’s really important to us to balance the game in a way that is going to encourage you to explore the augmentations, to explore the maps, to explore all the different tools around you.

It doesn’t mean that it’s going to impossible to be a straight shooter, but it’s going to be quite challenging.

Art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete.

PCG: You talk a lot about the amount of detail that goes into the game’s environments; it seems to me like one of the principles of Deus Ex is being able to choose your own path, and the natural consequence of that is that you don’t get to see everything in the game. Isn’t it kind of counter-intuitive to have a method that involves a lot of work for every square inch of space, and then a game that demands a lot of space in order to allow the player to have freedom?

Jacques-Belletete: The thing is that none of that was done at a compromise of the amount of areas you can explore or how expansive the game is really. What became a challenge, though, within all that amount of detail, was to make sure that we still had proper visual tools to kind of guide the player within all those different paths and everything. Now obviously some paths are really really hidden, we don’t want to have like an arrow that points you to that direction, but we needed to come up with a lot of good ideas to make sure that the player can decode the image properly.

But apart from that the fact that the game has a lot of sections for you to either find or see or not see or whatever, and the fact that they’re all really detailed and cluttered and stuff I don’t think really affects one another. Also just thematically some placers are a lot slicker and cleaner just by design, by what they are.

Lead writer Mary DeMerle.

PCG: It’s interesting that you pick up on that, because one of the things that surprised me watching the demonstration was that the guy failed the conversation. And I know Deus Ex had moments like that, where you could fail to get what you wanted, but it’s very rare in games for a social path to be closed by you saying the wrong thing. Even in BioWare games, you get a good ending and a bad ending, but it’s not a dead end. So is that a conscious focus for the game?

DeMerle: Well, certainly in the conversation gameplay. So we have different types of conversations in the game. The one we were showing you there was the conversation gameplay, which has that gameplay component about it. So yes, it was very much a decision that you could fail the conversations. I actually would like to see a lot more of that kind of thing, because I feel that it was such a strong moment for me in Deus Ex to know that my path got closed because of my decision.

I actually don’t like it in a lot of roleplaying games where you get these choices and then it’s like, (Okay well, I followed that path. Let’s go back and do the other thing,) and then you get all the information. To me, that’s fake: it’s not what a real dialogue is like. And so I like moments in the writing of our story where we can do that. Where we can say, (You’ve got to choose this or this.)