Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interview

Eurogamer managed to track down Deus Ex: Human Revolution lead designer Jean-François Dugas for a lengthy three-page interview that covers the game’s action/RPG split, replayability, PC and console differences, and more. An excerpt:

Eurogamer: How will Deus Ex emotionally engage players on an adult and intelligent level?

Jean-François Dugas: It’s not out yet so I cannot say it does it. I can only say what we’re trying to do.

At first, internally, when we were brainstorming and going around with ideas of player choices, sometimes we had heated debates.

‘If we don’t give a big reward to the player for this then this choice is meaningless.’ We were debating that. I was like, no, it’s not meaningless.

If we talk about something on a human level that something as a player, as a human being, you can relate to, you probably had that experience in the past or you know someone, you understand the emotional aspect of the choice.

Hopefully that is going to help the player focus on choosing because of that, as opposed to, oh, it’s going to give me this or that.

Sometimes we have choices where it gives you something, and if you choose something else it gives you something different. What is good is normally something the player decides.

But we’re trying to stay away as much as possible from that.

In the end, do we succeed? Is it going to work the way I explain it to you? I have no idea.

The feedback we received with play tests, we received comments that people were experiencing certain interactions with a character. They said, ‘I want to kill him.’

It was the reflection that this person was emotionally engaged with that character. If you want to kill him, he was pissing you off or annoying you.

In the end we’ll see when the game ships.