Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interview
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RPS: I don't think there was any doubt that Looking Glass/Ion Storm had a bias. With the Thief games, and Deus Ex, Spector and his team were biased toward non-lethal routes. Do you have a bias in this game?
DeMarle: I know that I personally like to play stealth, but that's because I'm not very good at combat! But I wouldn't say I have a bias toward it. I tried, at least from a story perspective, to bear in mind that that's a viable way of playing, and the world needs to reflect that. And the characters need to reflect it.
Dugas: I don't think I have a bias either. I like to play stealth, I like to go through those maps, either to take down enemies or not, and have the feeling that none of them realise I was there. It's a really good feeling you feel like you're eavesdropping, you're the small camera in the corner that sees everything, but no one realises the camera is there. But as we developed it, it was important that all those aspects would be rewarding in their own rights. If you're the type of player more interested in shooting stuff, then it should be rewarding as well. You shouldn't feel like, (Oh my God, to enjoy this game I need to do this.) Especially as we're giving the choices.
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RPS: How much do you explore this idea of being detached from your own humanity through the augmentations?
DeMarle: The way we're exploring it is, we have the central conflict that you're trying to solve, and you have various people you encounter along the way, and various factions I hate using that word, because it makes you think of the wrong things! but you have different organisations who support certain views, and who believe certain things. So as you go along you're exposed to those different things. And then we use side-quests. We didn't want side-quests that say, (Go save someone's cat,) or (Go kill a thousand rats.) So the side-quests tell you more about Jensen and his background, or they explore the issue from different sides, maybe you're getting involved with somebody who is dealing with some problem with augmentations. So we can expose to you the differing views on this. Is this good for society to go in this direction? Is it good for mankind to go in this direction? And then certainly through emails and books that you're reading we have tons of books in the game. In fact, we should have had an achievement for reading every single one. No book is repeated. Then there's two different types of books. There's the XP books, which are the scientific ones that tell you more about augmentations and how they work, which give you experience points. So we explore it those ways as well.
