Eurogamer was given unparalleled access to Deus Ex: Human Revolution. It was one of the most open and interesting days of our young lives. For a Deus Ex fan the sheer amount of information to garner was exhausting, but we did our utmost.
Contained below are all the vital nuggets of fan-pleasing (or angering, potentially) information that we thought were too precious to abandon on a lonely wave file on our dictaphone. We did forget to ask how traditional lockpicking was going to work though. Sorry about that one.
Oh, and if you haven't already, check out our massive Deus Ex: Human Revolution preview and interview with the game's lead designer.
Steve Szczepkowski, Lead Audio Designer
On whether the Deus Ex menu music is coming back...
"To be decided. It's still in discussions. I can say that there probably are a few spots in the game where you might hear an NPC whistle it. There's a very subjective argument that goes back and forth. Some people say it's awesome, some people are like: 'Errr? It's a little dated.'
In Detroit crazy new architectural wonders rub shoulders with the existing dull and dowdy skyscrapers.
"I don't want you to feel that you need to defend it, because I do like the theme, but I can tell you that there's at least one guy on my team that's saying, 'No!' I think it works perfectly for the year 2000. I don't know if it lends itself to our game. I'd be surprised if it doesn't worm its way in somewhere though."
On whether cameos of characters from previous games will have the same voice actors...
"If I can get them. Definitely. For me keeping continuity is very important. It costs me a bit of extra effort, but to get that smile across your face isn't that worth it? I'm in the smile business. [Lengthy pause] Okay. I don't want to say there's tons: there's not and I can tell you that right now. But there are some cool interesting things, and we did manage to get the real actors. Which I thought was important."
On the hero, Adam Jensen, having a voice that sounds a bit like Christian Bale's Batman... (But nowhere near as bad.)
"I think we cast and started before Batman even came out, which was interesting. But I think you'll see he has a bit more dynamic range than Batman has. It's important that the character feels a bit like he's part of the JC Denton family.
"Anyone who's played the original game knows the voice is an important part of it - and maybe even in cyberpunk across the board. For instance, think of the Matrix and the way everyone speaks in a 'Yes Ma'am' 'Just the facts Ma'am' way. There's no emotion."
Mary De Marle, Narrative Designer
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."
Jean-François Dugas, Lead Game Designer
The Hive Club in Shanghai. If you're not on the augmentation list, you're not coming in.
On the reported augmentation that featured tentacles popping out from Jensen's back...
"The tentacles in the back - that's an old belief in the fans. What happened was that a long time ago we did a pre-vis of the bungee-jump that you've seen, and in the very first pre-vis that we did our art guy put in some cables coming out of Jensen's back. Then someone, I don't know if it was you or someone else, reported it. For us it was a way to illustrate to you guys the concept of the bungee. At the time we weren't sure ourselves as to whether we were going with the cables or not."
On multitools and proximity mines...
"We didn't go into Multitools because we wanted to make hacking more prevalent. So we decided that all the unlocking of things like that is done through hacking. As for proximity mines we have different templates where you can put different types of item together - you can attach one grenade to a mine template and stick it on walls and things like that. We have other things that are similar to what's been before too, like the meds and some of the nutrients."
On gas grenades, frag grenades and a few others...
"We have gas grenades, we have frag grenades... we have a few others."
On whether weapons will have different ammo for both non-lethal and lethal combat...
"No, we're going more with a full cast of weapons. All of them have their unique abilities - so there's a range of lethal weapons and a range of non-lethal weapons. And it's not universal ammo: it's a specific ammo for each. We wanted to make sure that each weapon had a clear-cut functionality."
On creeping up behind people and banging them on the head...
"No, we dropped that. We wanted to focus more on the takedowns. We thought about keeping it, but thought it would conflict with other things we wanted to do."
David Anfossi, Producer
On the use of said spectacular third-person takedowns...
"When we played the first and second DX games, we looked at how you could customise your character and there were a lot of sliders that you could move through the levels, but often there wasn't enough impact or reward for upgrading the character.
"What we decided for this game was that we had to make it spectacular - we needed some reward. We needed, as soon as you used an augmentation, to pull the camera out into the third-person and let the player see what Jensen is able to do. And, to be honest with you, it's something that might reach a larger audience too - through being spectacular and giving reward it's a little less 'hardcore gamer'."
On how non-lethal gameplay will work...
"There are two kinds of takedown - you can kill the guy, or stun the guy. If you hold onto your trigger, you'll kill him. If you tap the trigger once, you'll stun the guy. With the guns, we have over 15 of them in the game - and most support stealth in combat. And yes, we do have tranquilisers."
On whether we'll still have that good old-fashioned Deus Ex wobbly aim...
"No, not for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. What we decided to do is start the game with the player skill alone - we don't want to diminish it. And after that it's upgrades."
It may be starved of light by the upper city layer, but that does at least fit in with the Deus Ex remit.
On how the hacking mini-game works...
"It can appear complex, huh? It's actually very simple - and to reassure you we did a lot of playtests before we found the right recipe. The goal here is that you have a network: you start at a node and you have to reach your target. There is a mainframe though - which can detect you through the network and will start to retrace you. I don't know if you know a game called Uplink [made by Introversion, the creators of Darwinia] but we're using a similar approach."
On how the sparring dialogue gameplay works alongside the usual question and answer...
"It's not complex, that's not the right word. But it's deeper than Mass Effect. In Mass Effect you can skip through dialogue, and ours isn't the usual way to do conversation.
"We wanted to have a form of social fighting, as you can see with Tong in our demo. You need information, and you have to read the character in front of you to deliver the right response to continue, and win the round. You have three rounds, he will have three counter-attacks. You can succeed, fail or have a neutral response. If you restart the conversation, it will move on to a completely different one. You can't learn the path. It's complex to code, very complex!"
On what the player will earn to advance himself...
"There's an economic system, and an XP points system. The XP is gathered through exploration and completing tasks for people, the money is more about building new augmentations, upgrades, buying and selling guns."
Jonathan Jacques-Belletête, Art Director
On the influence of Deckard and dreams of electric sheep...
"Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell have some of the best cyber-punk visuals ever created, if not some of the best visuals ever created. We knew right from the start that we didn't just want to reproduce Blade Runner (and a lot of the Blade Runner flavour is in the E3 demo - we've got tons of other places that are totally not like that) but it's something we felt we had to do.
"It's one of the main canons of cyberpunk - an Asian, super-cluttered, multi-ethnic place with all the signs in neon. From the get-go we had to nail it somewhere."
On the look and feel of Deus Ex Detroit...
"The interesting thing about Detroit is that it looks quite a bit like contemporary Detroit; this is really all about anticipating what the world will be in 2027. We've designed stuff like objects which recharge electrical cars - we've invented them, and looked at where billboard technologies are going. So it's a lot like today's Detroit, with those added layers grafted over it. Plus there are those interesting and very modern-looking buildings."
"It's sad for Detroit, because it was one of the hearts of America for quite a while because of the automobile industry. It's not really happening anymore - all those factories are abandoned. The idea is that with Sarif Industries, the company that Adam Jensen works for, David Sarif wanted to rejuvenate Detroit through the cybernetic industry.
"Just like the car industry did in the 20th century. That's why, in the game, you actually go to visit those manufacturing plants. Sarif bought those abandoned car plants and renovated them for super hi-tech cybernetics. He's sending a message to the city and the world: 'I'm from Detroit, I love this city, I'm giving it a new breath.'"
This is the office of a character called Megan. Note the clutter everywhere, a cyberpunk trope Eidos Montreal are keen to pick up on.
On the look and feel of Deus Ex Shanghai...
"Shanghai's Heng Sha is a lot more into the trans-humanist thing. It's a lot more accepted there - it's the Silicon Valley of all cybernetics. Within the art direction everything that's more like that is more golden, and a lot more towards the cyber-renaissance. The dual layer is inspired by a mockumentary we saw quite a while ago, which appeared to be a real documentary about Hong Kong..."
"In the game the idea isn't that it's the poor at the bottom and the rich at the top; the bottom used to be the Mecca of cybernetics, a lot of the headquarters of the great labs and manufacturing plants are there, it's just that when they built above it they chose a different architectural direction.
"So above they have new universities and new headquarters, but the bottom isn't a slum - there isn't an old school dichotomy. We put a lot of stuff in the game, like you'll see those student-types from the upper level coming downstairs at night to party, and hit the bars and brothels."
On how a prequel can look more technologically advanced than the first game...
"We released the first screenshots and people said, oh man - it's a prequel that's set twenty years before Deus Ex, and it looks more technologically advanced. Well the thing is that if you look at the computer screens or television screens in Deus Ex, then our real-world monitors are already bigger, flatter and of a higher resolution than that in the modern day.
"What do you do with that? Don't get me wrong we are doing this game for the fans and everything, but you can't just make it for the fans. It makes no sense. It's undebatable. It would be weird to make 4:3 ratio screens in the world, just because we want to fit in with the first one."
Deus Ex: Human Revolution is due out for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in early 2011.
