Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interview

Siliconera continues their recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution coverage with a two-part interview with producer David Anfossi (here and here), during which they discuss the game’s HUD, approach to difficulty scaling, the “confidential” matrix system, and more.

Why did you add in auto-regenerative health to Deus Ex: Human Revolution?

David Anfossi, Producer: Good question. Yeah, it’s controversial because the Deus Ex fans were not happy when we revealed that. But, there is a good reason behind this.

When we replayed the first two Deus Ex [games], we experienced a bad thing in the sense that you start something like combat, for example, but you don’t have enough medikits with you and then you start getting killed. You have to jump out of combat. The game brings you out of the immersion to find some medikits, so you can come back and retry that. To make sure that you stay in combat, to keep the immersion, and that you experience the game correctly we decided to implement this kind of feature.

By doing that it doesn’t mean it will be easier for the gamer because the AI will react to that. If you stay too long behind cover, they will try to come to kill you. The AI has been coded to support that also, but you will stay in combat which is very important to us.

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Can you elaborate about the matrix system and how it works? Is it on automatically if your console is plugged into the Internet?

We have to work with Microsoft and Sony to integrate the matrix system. Everything is very confidential. We just get feedback about the maps, how people played it, how they experimented during social conversations and so forth.

That will help us build a new game. We have a mandate to build a new game.