Interviews// Deus Ex: Human Revolution

SPOnG: The first two Deus Ex games introduced a lot of gameplay mechanics that many titles today now take for granted, like the branching pathways. How do you guys go about pushing that forward even further?

Jonathan Jacques-Belletête: It's a good question. And you're right, I mean if you look at what Mass Effect does today, or Fallout 3 or BioShock... they probably wouldn't be the way that they are if it wasn't for Deus Ex. Or maybe System Shock for BioShock, but you get what I mean. One of the things that we really did push was the social aspect of play. I think we've brought it to this game in a way that feels more emotional.

That being said, all of those games we've talked about might do certain things that Deus Ex did, but not all of them. You know, they still have their own flavour and... they don't feel like Deus Ex in general, really. They're taking some things that Deus Ex established but using them in different ways, and I think using them in the Deus Ex way creates a very specific flavour that we haven't seen since the second game. And that's what we made sure we reproduced.


SPOnG: The series has always been played through a first person perspective. Human Revolution is going to have instances where you see Jensen from a third person perspective. Warren Spector and Harvey Smith have said in the past that the first person view was to make the game more immersive. Does adding a third-person element destroy that element of immersion somewhat?

Jonathan Jacques-Belletête: No, I don't think it does. I've been immersed in all sorts of games, be it first-person or not, and sometimes I've not been immersed at all in games that exclusively play in a first-person perspective. So it's not a given to assume that, I don't think. Immersion is the output of so many variables, that amount to much more than just being in first-person.

What was important to us was... Eidos is a company with strong main characters. You have Lara Croft, Kane and Lynch and Hitman, and we wanted to have the same thing with Human Revolution. We wanted to put the augmentations at the forefront of the game, but we also wanted to do the same for the character. If the game is always in first-person, you never get to see the main character unless it's in a cutscene. We wanted to have the player look at him for a second or two every now and then.

Does that break the immersion? I don't know, I can't really be the judge of that. People will tell us, but it's never really been brought up during playtests. Because of the world we created, the music and all those cool places we explore and how we present them, I think there's so much that can immerse you in this game regardless.

And it's still a first-person game at the end of the day. It's not that you can choose whether to go into third-person. You'd never say that Rainbow Six is a third-person game, even though you see your character when you're taking cover. It's the same thing, what we're doing here. In Human Revolution, you only go into third-person when you take cover and when you perform takedowns.


SPOnG: You've said that you wanted to respect the original Deus Ex games, while also giving the game your own flavour. Aside from the obvious things like the setting and design influence, what have you changed or added to the core gameplay that makes it feel more like your place in the Deus Ex universe?

Jonathan Jacques-Belletête: I don't think the game designers and the director, Jean-Francois Dugas, saw the gameplay mechanics as an opportunity to make the game their own really. Not as much as I did in terms of art direction. Putting our own stamp on the game was more important for me, from an artistic perspective.

For those guys, the top priority was that it really felt like a Deus Ex game. However, if you look at the hacking or the social interaction, those are definitely some novel ideas that they have brought in themselves. They're really cool. I love the hacking for example, and the way it gets more complex as you progress, and the way you can get all these augmentations and software upgrades to hack in different ways. So there's definitely all these things that help make it stand out and be different.


SPOnG: What did you take from the past Deus Ex games from an art direction perspective? Obviously you have your own influences in there, but what sort of design and style makes you think 'Deus Ex'?

Jonathan Jacques-Belletête: It was really all about the Cyberpunk archetypes. That's what it looked like, felt like, so the way I treated it was that I made sure I was able to dissect those archetypes properly. It was really the way that I saw it.

The game was set at night all the time, it was really blue and really grey... those were elements that I definitely wanted. Just not for, like, 85 per cent of the game or anything. It's extremely thick in all these Cyberpunk motifs, and I made sure those things were in Human Revolution as well.