Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interview
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GB: The game breaks down Adam's inventory into two tabs - a base inventory and a quest inventory. I have yet to receive any quest items, but will that second tab become quite important throughout the game? Mary: No, you didn't get quest items yet. The quest items generally most quest items have to do with side quests, but there are some on the critical path as well. For instance, a character might give you something that you need to unlock a specific door I'm just making the example up as we're talking and that would go into your quest item inventory. The difference between the quest items and the other inventory is that quest items stay in your inventory until they're used, so you can never drop them, sell them, or whatever. Whereas, in your normal inventory, we didn't want them to take up room in your normal inventory because resource management is a huge part of the game.
GB: How about city hubs? How many different city hubs are there?
Mary: You travel around the world because this is a global conspiracy, so you go to different cities. [Mary asks the Square Enix rep which hubs have been revealed previously]
GB: I think we know about at least two hubs so far, don't we?
Mary: I think we know about two, yes. We know that you're in Detroit, your home city, and we know that you go to an island off of Shanghai called "Hangzhou." Let's say you go to China, basically. So we know those two. I don't know if we know of others. We might know of others, but I'm not sure, so I can't tell you. [Montreal, Canada is also a previously confirmed location]
GB: Alright. One thing I'm really enjoying in my first play-through is that you've made a significant effort to put pertinent and background information in inconspicuous spots - emails, newspapers, magazines, e-books, and that sort of thing. There appear to be dozens just in this demo.
Mary: Oh, yeah, there is a lot.
GB: I noticed that reading through some of the e-books even grants you experience, though not all of them do.
Mary: Yes. Okay, that's what we call behind the scenes the "e-books" and the "XP books." XP books are also e-books, but the difference is that there are certain books in the world that give you experience points, that can be applied to your augmentations. Those are called the "XP books." Eventually, if you start collecting them and reading them, there are the ones that tell you all about augmentation, and they tell you about how the augmentations came to be the theory behind the development of them, et cetera. So they're more scientific than the rest of them. All the other e-books in the game are just fun to read, but these particular ones are there to give you experience points.
GB: There's a lot of relative information to be found within emails - passcodes, passwords, and that sort of thing. For the e-books, were you mainly looking to inject additional lore and back history to the game? Or will there be important in-game information that can be picked up from the e-books?
Mary: With the e-books, it's everything to create that immersive world, and to help you understand the characters in the story, and the conspiracy that the player is following in the story. For instance, when you're in Sarif headquarters, you might find an e-book, which is the Sarif Industries employee manual, and it tells you all about the philosophy of Sarif Industries. Or you might find some about other companies or that fill you in about the game's conspiracy groups.
At the same time, we have additional e-books in there - we have the whole series of the Global Politic Review, and it basically gives you the history of the world in all the different perspectives you know, to help set the world environment - where is the world in 2027?
And we even have a romance novel that exists in there.
GB: Is it true that the team cut the ability to hack ATMs?
Mary: Yes.
GB: With the absence of ATM hacking, how prominent is theft in the game? Does it mainly just consist of rummaging through lockers and desk drawers, or is there full-on theft that we can engage in while working with weapon dealers and other merchants? Can we go into a store and steal weapons?
Mary: We definitely want to encourage exploration, and we want to reward you for that. So when you go into apartment buildings, you can steal when you find things in them. Maybe you'll find weapons; maybe you'll find more credit chips; maybe you'll find more of what we call the "pocket secretaries," which reveal codes and things like that.
So there definitely is the possibility to be stealing throughout the game. But there probably isn't a situation where there's a gun store and you can go in and steal every gun in the store because we have to be careful about the balancing for the game.
