Deus Ex: Human Revolution Interview
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RPS: Going back to what you were saying about core values, it struck me playing DX again recently, as well as System Shock and Thief, that all those games basically leave you feeling pretty vulnerable. You have to run away from multiple adversaries, have to hide, and so on. Will Human Revolution have a similar sense of threat to your character?
Dugas: At the beginning you don't have much augmentation, so you aren't that strong. But as you progress and explore some of the areas off the critical path, then you will start to beef up your character. You will not be invincible at all, at any stage, but at the end of the game you will probably be more like Robocop than a human being.
Right now we are balancing the game, I was playing with the new tweaks this week, and if there are more than two or three enemies on screen you will go down fast, especially if you don't pay attention to your surroundings. We're aiming to make the frontal assault approach a possibility, like any other means in the game, such as hacking or whatnot, but the frontal approach will require some thinking. If you want to play it as Serious Sam you might not find this to be the game you are looking for.
RPS: Can you talk about the stealth mechanism? Hiding in shadows? Line of sight?
Dugas: It is really not very complicated, it's quite a simple system in that you refer to the cover around you, but what you are trying to do is break line of sight and manage the amount of noise you produce. And why we decided to go that way since we knew that our game would not be built with light and shadows, we would have some brighter, lit environments, basing it on shadows would have been even more complicated. Going with breaking the line of sight and sound produced means you could play stealth in a well lit area. It was about making that stealth work for the player without breaking either the game or the visuals we wanted to produce.
For the cover system, well, I don't know if you played Rainbow Six: Vegas, but it is similar: there is no automatic cover, if you don't hold the button then you are not going into cover, release it and you go out from cover. It's very simple, very natural, and it gives you a good sense of what is going on in the environment to help you plan your next move. Of course if you wanted to just stay in first-person you can do that. There's no mechanic tied to the cover, especially for stealth, it is not tied to the cover mechanism.
