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