Deus Ex 3: Human Revolution Preview

Rock, Paper, Shotgun is the latest website to crank out a preview of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the contents of which are based on a trip to Square Enix’s Wimbledon offices.

Where things could get a bit contentious is in the areas where Eidos Montreal is clearly attempting to upgrade Deus Ex, which is to say with its combat and presentation. Those fiendish schemers over at Eidos Montreal seem to be trying to fund this project by making sure Human Revolution (sells), and they want to help it (sell) with its art design, that aforementioned cover system, the cucumber-cool takedowns, some action-packed cutscenes and a clear focus on these cyberpunk augmentations. You know, all the stuff that makes the American games press unironically stand up from their chairs and scream at the screen.

The reason this rankles me isn’t to do with them trying to get some decent action in my Deus Ex. The combat in Deus Ex was always shit. That they’re trying to improve it is laudable, and on paper, none of these improvements step on the toes of that Deus Ex core I mentioned above. In practice, it might result in more action-centric levels, but we’ll almost certainly have to wait for the game’s 2011 release to find that out. And in any case, it won’t be anywhere near as violent a shift from System Shock 2 to Bioshock.

No, the reason this makes me sad about Human Revolution’s status as a sequel is the attention paid to recreating Deus Ex’s design, and then the team getting on with their own thing. Deus Ex wasn’t a game about hacking, stealth, shooting and chatting. It was about providing us with more freedom than we were used to, freedom which extended not just to level design but to being lied to and making our own long-term mistakes. Which again, Eidos Montreal say will be in the game. Hell, they’re even whispering about providing multiple endings that don’t only rely on a choice made in the final 15 minutes of the game. But this is them only seeing, or caring about, the surface of Deus Ex rather than the mentality behind it.