Deus Ex: Human Revolution Preview and Interview

Eidos Montreal’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution was treated to another hands-on preview and interview this weekend, both of which we can only assume are courtesy of the recent Eurogamer Expo. The preview comes to us via Critical Gamer:

Jensen fails to get the barman on side but, we are told, this is possible and he would have given the player full access to every area of the club. As it is, the dev makes his way back down to the dancefloor empty handed. On the way, he overhears two staff talking. What’s that? Something about a security code? One of them has thoughtfully left details of the code lying around somewhere in the club? Off we go. Knowing where to go of course, the dev makes a beeline for. the toilets, where he finds the guy’s PDA lying on the floor. I was going to complain about this highly unlikely piece of happenstance, until I remembered that we live in a world where Apple employees leave iphone prototypes lying around in bars and British civil servants leave laptops full of sensitive information in taxis. When you look at it like that, it’s actually quite realistic.

Code acquired, Jensen makes his way to another area where we get a look at the stealth and combat mechanics. He starts off sneaking around, making use of the third person cover system. This didn’t grate as much as I had feared, perhaps because I’m used to the mechanic from playing the two Rainbow Six: Vegas games. I wasn’t so keen on the predictable guard patterns, the way a shipping crate containing a crossbow and plenty of ammo was left open, or the way that Jensen rolled from cover to cover right in front of a security camera without being spotted. Hopefully, this won’t happen in the final game. What I really hope cannot be replicated in the final game, and (almost) certainly can’t be, is the instance in which the dev carefully lined up a headshot from about four feet away from a guard. which failed to register. Yes, this is a bug that will be top of the hitlist; but I had to mention it, because it was incredibly funny to watch.

While the interview (with art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, producer David Anfossi, and marketing manager Andre Vu) is courtesy of CVG:

Obviously your fan service is amazing, but do you still find it’s an impossible task placating the hardcore Deus Ex fans?

JJB: Have you ever been on our forum??? (laughs) It’s insane, there’s your answer right there!

I think people believed we would fail miserably, that nobody thought we could ever make something that felt like Deus Ex 1 again. And there was this huge detachment. But now people are saying: ‘hey, wait a second!’ There are like 50-70 hardcore fans – there is no way to please them.

DA: They’ll still buy it though!

It really does hold up spectacularly well, and nobody’s really done anything like it since – bizarrely. Maybe the only spiritual sequel we can think of is Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines…

AV: Actually, some of our game designers also played that before they started on Human Revolution.