Warren Spector on Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Warren Spector’s opinion on Deus Ex: Human Revolution is only one of the subjects dealt with in this interview with him at GamesIndustry, but it’s by far the most relevant for us, as both the Warren Spector-lead original and its recent Eidos Montreal-developed prequel fall under the scope of our coverage. Apparently he thought the game captured the spirit of the original, but also screamed at the game more than once:

Q: You mentioned playing through Human Revolution and obviously since you were intimately involved with Deus Ex a while back, what are your thoughts on Human Revolution and how they’ve handled it?

Warren Spector: You know I’ve tried to stay out of that discussion since the game came out. I mean every person I have met at this show had asked me that. And so I’m “just forget it, I’m just going to start talking about it.” It was one of the few games I finished, and I know the guys on the team and I know how dedicated they were and how respectful of the original they were; their hearts were in the right place and they did a wonderful job.

And I’m not just saying that. It really captured the spirit of Deus Ex; I mean the moment I booted the game up it sounded like Deus Ex, and they understood the importance of how the game sounded. It had a lot of the sort of gray of the original game where nothing is right and wrong – I really like that a lot. It made me feel like I was making decisions that revealed more about me than it did about my character, which I loved. The interesting thing was – and we don’t have time to get into this right now, even if even if I were ready to get into it – my wife will tell you, I screamed at the television as I played this game. I loved the game, at the end of the day, but I screamed constantly because there were two, three, four things they did where I just said “Nooooo, why did you this? Noooo!” and, and it wasn’t that it was right or wrong, it was different than what I [expected].

When I got the end of the game and realized that, overall, the experience had been a Deus Ex experience, I sort of sat back and reflected and said, “Ok, they made different design decisions to achieve the same end goals that I had.” And some day, either I’m going to write an article about that, or somebody who is getting their master’s degree at MIT or someplace, is going to write a master’s thesis about the systemic differences, the game system differences between Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. And it’s so cool to see philosophical ideas, game-designed philosophy, explored by two different groups to achieve the same goals in completely different ways, in ways that drove me crazy. So it was really cool. I really enjoyed that. Just on an intellectual level, I thought it was fascinating that they did some stuff that just drove me nuts.