Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interview

Barely a month after release, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Jim Rossingol and Eidos Montreal’s game director Jean-François Dugas discuss Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s development, reception, themes, future and more in this interesting postmortem interview. Here’s a sampling on boss battles and the upcoming DLC from this recommended read:

RPS: Why do you think the boss battles didn’t work?

Dugas: When we started the goal was to have those boss fights with the same design and rules as the rest of the game. We had our pillars of stealth, of non-lethal actions, and everything else, and we wanted to make sure that was reflected in the bosses, but in the end it was not. It’s the place where people were surprised because they would equip themselves in a certain way and then they got their and everything they’d fought for disappeared. You have to change your mindset, which can be upsetting. I think the biggest weakness there wasn’t the concept of having boss fights, it’s just that our boss fights are not Deus Ex boss fights and that’s why people are complaining about them. I guess we live and learn.

Should we have cut them? It’s a decision we made, we said (well at least they will be entertaining in some fashion). The biggest surprise, actually, was having released the game and finding that people thought they were frustrating. Not just that they weren’t that interesting, but that they were frustrating. The playtesters internally gave us a lot of good feedback for the game, and on the bosses they felt that the fights were entertaining and making you use what you had learned. They didn’t say they were frustrating. We knew it was not in step with the rest of the game, but the surprise for us was that the playtesting was correct everywhere but the bossfights. So lesson learned.

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RPS: What can you tell us about the forthcoming DLC?

Dugas: The DLC is coming in October. It’s going to expand on Adam Jensen’s story within the story of Human Revolution. It explains a part of the conspiracy. We are getting better with the engine, so we were able to improve the lighting system and the so the DLC looks quite a bit better than the full game! We also have a boss encounter which is more in line with what we were trying to achieve in the first place, so hopefully we will get some good feedback from that. There’s a lot of new content in there, and it keeps the pillars of the main game. I don’t want to talk too much about the story, but it happens after the explosion in Hengsha, and you are aboard a boat going to Singapore, and it explains a bit about what happens during those few days.