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

A batch of new answers to fan questions on Deus Ex: Human Revolution is available on Eidos Montreal’s Tumblr, including some interesting bits of a planned intro sequence for the title that was scrapped. Here’s a couple of them:

Hi, first off you have created one of the greatest video games of all time so congrats! Now for my question: I found that your characters were very complex and had various motivations, yet there seemed to be almost no screen time to the most interesting female characters such as Megan Reed and Yelena Fedorova. Were these woman originally planned to be in the game more often? As I felt Yelena was a great opportunity to add some sex appeal to the game.

Lead narrative designer Mary DeMarle said:

(I really wish we could have given both of those women more screen time. We knew from the start that it would be hard to see much of Megan, given that [SPOILER ALERT] she gets kidnapped in the first few minutes of the game, so we initially planned a completely different opening sequence to counteract this. (This opening had you breaking into Sarif’s headquarters in order to test their security systems, using Megan as your (inside-man) and briefer. It also included a conversation boss fight against Megan at the end of the sequence so that you could learn more about Adam’s and her failed relationship. Unfortunately, too many people on the team didn’t think we could pull this opening sequence off since we planned to (trick) the player into thinking they were actually breaking into a competitor’s firm for most of it, so we had to drop it.) In the end, I believe the opening we have works better for setting up the world and story, but it did mean losing valuable screen time with Megan.

As for Yelena, we designed her character before our blueprint was completed. (For those who don’t know, the (blueprint) is a document we create before production begins that merges story and gameplay together, resulting in actual missions that convey story.) We did hope that we’d see more of her and the other boss characters when we designed them, but unfortunately things didn’t work out that way.)

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I like Adam’s fighting style. It’s like bar-fighting mixed with MMA. What was the inspiration for this? Game director Jean-Francois Dugas said:

(Our initial inspiration came a lot from Brazilian’s Capoeira. We thought it had elegance to it and yet, it was spectacular. But we struggled quite a bit with that one for too long and eventually, our animation director took it in a more street brawler kind of direction because we couldn’t nail the original feel we were going for.)