Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interviews

Following up on their extensive preview, Eurogamer has also published an interview with Deus Ex: Human Revolution lead designer Jean-François Dugas and a selection of “vital nuggets” that the development team revealed about the direction they’re taking the prequel. A little something from the former:

Eurogamer: Deus Ex is a very old game (and I realise that we’re somewhat skipping over Invisible War here) but is there anything from the original that you thought doesn’t really work in modern gaming, and that you’re scrapping?

Jean-François Dugas: We didn’t go into it thinking, ‘That doesn’t work anymore, cut it out!’ It was more like identifying what we thought was really strong, and identifying what we thought was less strong. Then making sure we were taking the strong stuff and condensing it, while working out what we’d do differently with the content that wasn’t so great.

At the beginning, when we were first developing Human Revolution, we had the augmentations and skills separate – like in the first game. Later on we realised that we wanted the augmentations to be centre stage of the experience and that the skills were starting to conflict with that. So we decided that they should be put back into the augmentations; so they don’t exist anymore, they exist in augmentations.

Deus Ex: Invisible War actually already did the same thing, so basically we had to go full circle to understand that and do it ourselves.

And a bit from the latter:

On being able to kill main characters…

“We definitely wanted to create a story that, despite at heart being a linear story, had key moments in it where the decisions you make can cause characters to disappear from the storyline. Or, can enable them to come back later. We very much want to have that, just as Deus Ex 1 did. So we have those instances in the game.”

On hacking into email accounts…

“When we’re creating the story the way I describe it is that we’re creating the layers of the story. We then start writing to fill those layers. The emails and things like that are one of those layers of the additional story that you can get.

“We use them to potentially shed more light on things, like maybe you’ll hack a very important person’s email and you’ll find the full bio on one of the villains. But you’ll also have the emails that are related to the Nigerian scams, or someone selling tickets for a show.”

On the code for a door being 0451…

“Yes. 0451 is an important one. That one’s in our game.”

Ok, I’m excited.