Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interviews
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IncGamers chats with art director Jonathan Jacques-Bellete:
IG: It's clear from looking at Human Revolution that it's taken influence from a number of sources you yourselves mentioned the general themes of cyber-punk and the Renaissance. Were there any specific references that you drew upon from established movies, books, art etc?
JB: The game at its core is quite stylised. It's not a photo-realistic game. In general, photo-realism is not something I'm really into, I prefer to have this homogenous look as it creates a much more credible world. It's a little harder to keep things flowing if you have a photo-realistic face, for example, but then in the backgrounds there's something that's not photo-realistic there's a disconnected there.
When everything is stylised in this homogenous way it may not look like the world we live in but it creates this really great, believable bubble for us to walk into. That's something that I really believe in as a designer and I always see it as something that's really important.
So, in terms of specific influences, I'm a big fan of the Japanese games. You can see bits from Metal Gear Solid, Ghost in the Shell and all that kind of stuff. It's not something I'm trying to hide at all, it's all out there in the open.
The gold and black palette of the game comes largely from the Renaissance. If you look at painters from the Baroque-era Vermeer, Rembrandt etc a lot of that stuff is very black and gold because they would often paint by candles at night and that kind of thing.
Strategy Informer quizzes Jonathan, as well:
Strategy Informer: What you would say is this games main selling point - The story? The multi-path? The RPG elements? etc...?
Belletete: I would say, it's probably as a whole - like everything you just said - it's the Deus Ex experience. I think we've fully re-created the feeling of the first one. A lot of games have taken a lot of what Deus Ex 1 created a few years ago - you know, bits and parts, some of the action/rpg elements and so on... which is a great thing, but I think the recipe as a whole - the exact experience that Deus Ex had back then hasn't been reproduced since and I think that's what we just did. I think it's just this really good meshing with the story, the multipath and the consequence... nothing is black and right, everything is a grey zone. Why we do the things that we do is a big thing in the game, and Transhumanism is also core to the game.
And then GameTrailers is hosting a three-minute video "Infiltration" interview with designer Antoine Thisdale.
