Deus Ex: Human Revolution Level Design Blog, Part Two

Eidos Montreal has published the second part of its blog post on the level design of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. While the first post focused more on the high level mandate behind the level design, this post focuses on the creation of the Detroit City Hub, which was the very first location created for the game, and was apparently influenced by the city hubs of games like The Darkness and Troika’s Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Before delving into the actual design and implementation, though, the team took some time to study the cyberpunk theme and how it would influence the level design:

CYBERPUNK

We took considerable time to analyze and understand the cyberpunk theme, which would heavily influence the level layout creation and mission structure.

This theme is set in the near-future and heavily focuses on high technology and dystopian society. The locations characterizing this theme are generally based on:

High Technology Environments :

o Multinational corporations HQ
o Scientific Laboratories
o Secret Compounds

Dystopian Environments :

o Urban environments (Rooftop, Street, Alley, etc.)
o Underground environments (Sewers, Catacombs, etc.)
o Industrial Complex

NEAR-FUTURE DESIGN

We did extensive research about the kind of innovations being pushed in those three main spheres of interest: architecture, transportation, and furniture design. This helped us creating moodboards and brainstorming on near-future interactions with the game’s world.

REFERENTIAL MOVIES

The amount of movies and animes which already touched on the cyberpunk thematic really helped us get immersed in this kind of universe, to notice the main traits, and guide us on the creative aspects of level design. So, we watched a lot of movies, such as:

o Blade Runner
o Robocop
o Appleseed
o Ghost in the Shell
o I, Robot
o Minority Report
o Johnny Mnemonic

After much research and analysis, which gave us so much inspiring material (including games mentioned earlier), we started the brainstorming sessions to create the blueprint of the game. This very important milestone would then help us plan and organize the levels’ production, based on the level design propositions.

Now, we had to prove to ourselves that we were able to recreate the Deus Ex experience through a First Playable.