Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interviews

A trio of new Deus Ex: Human Revolution interviews are online and ready for your scrutiny, with art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête answering the first batch over at GamingBits:

How big is the team?

At this point, it is much smaller. The art is finished, my job has been done for about 5 or 6 months. I have been focused on making sure people hear about the game. But, at peak, we were about 140 or 145, not counting outsourcing for different things. Some concept art and modeling was included in that outsourcing. It is not massive, like some that reach 400 or 500, but it is not a small team. It got really big, really hectic.

I know, like I said, it is content full and code complete. But when making an action RPG that lasts for about 20-25 hours, we have to play test it quite a bit. During those play tests, we bring [testers] over for a week and they snoop a bit around, but whatever. So we know that the game could last a lot longer. This is just a huge game, there is a ton of debugging and polishing that needs to be done. That is what is going on right now at the studio. The release date is August 23rd, so now we have time to give the players the best product possible. There are no other reasons. The expertise at Eidos Montreal is a great place to develop games and a lot of the best games have come out of that city. But, the RPG experience was not there at all. None of the big companies had ever done a huge RPG like this. There were a ton of veterans on the project, but we are no BioWare or Betheseda. We just needed to understand what that beast was all about. We had to make plenty of mistakes, and I would be lying if I told you that we didn’t make any. My point is that because of this, I think we needed a bit more time. The sequel, if we do one [laughs] I did not say that we are doing one, [laughs harder] but the polishing phase would be much shorter. We now know how to finish off such a content heavy product.

Then we drop by Shacknews for a Q&A with lead writer Mary DeMarle:

Shacknews: There was only one optional side-quest available in the demo. How big of a role will they play in the full game?

Mary DeMarle: They become much more prevalent later on. Basically, when you get to some of the city-hub areas, then you’ll encounter characters who will [provide side-quest options]. The way we wanted to design them… we didn’t want to have sidequests that are like “Save the cat from the tree.” We figured, you’re playing a character that’s on a very important mission. What’s going to convince him to step off that path to help somebody? By doing the sidequests, you can find out more about Adam. You can find out more information about other characters in the game. You can find out more about the “augmentation issue.” So [sidequests] all kind of expand the universe, while still keeping you focused on it.

Before making a final stop at Edge Magazine for another interview with Mary:

Have you tried to make the factions relatively symmetrical, as they were in Deus Ex, with an equal weight in the narrative? Is that a game design or narrative design choice?

Part of what we’re trying to do with the narrative is to get the player to explore these issues, so it’s never a case of black and white there are always shades of grey. You can look at these groups and uncover their motivations, and perhaps some of them are being used by other people, but we never want to say that one way is wrong and one way is right so we emulate Deus Ex in that respect, because we’re ultimately asking who you agree with. Do you think that human augmentation is dangerous? Or do you think it’s a good thing? Does it need to be more tightly controlled? And we have groups who represent all of those different views.