Deus Ex: Fan Service
Fact after fact straight from the cyber-horse's augmented mouth.
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
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."