Interview Deus Ex 3: Jean-François Dugas Interview

[VentilatorOfDoom]

Tags: Deus Ex: Human Revolution; Eidos Montreal

<p>Rock, Paper, Shotgun - a site dedicated to PC Gaming since 1873 - got in touch with Deus Ex: Human Revolution lead designer Jean-François Dugas <a href="http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/09/13/deus-ex-3-jean-francois-dugas-interview/" target="_blank">pestering him with questions</a>, hardly being able to prevent to explode in a ticker-tape parade of giddiness.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>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?</strong></p>
<p>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!</p>
<p>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!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Robocop.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>On stealth gameplay:</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>RPS: Can you talk about the stealth mechanism? Hiding in shadows? Line of sight?</strong></p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>this newsitem is a courtesy of <span class="postbody">Nowanmai </span></em></p>

 

[ElectricOtter]

On stealth gameplay:

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.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

moles will be popped

 

[DraQ]

Popamole*.

*) Actual popamole not included

Fix'd.
Might actually work, now that I think about it (as long as no supernatural aiming/vision is involved).

I'm puzzled by lack of light based sneaking - it's not like DX system didn't include pure sound and LoS mechanics that worked perfectly well even in brightly lit places.

 

[SoupNazi]

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.

Sounds like good news.

RPS: Okay, this is a bit of an odd question. In DX one there were mutant animals. The greasels, and some kind of crocodile thing. Are there going to be any mutant animals in Human Revolution?

Dugas: Uh, no.

RPS: Good, I hated those things.

Dugas: [Puzzled laugh.]

Sounds like bad news. In fact, sounds like he hasn't played the original game at all.

Ninjedit: I mean, I don't want monsters in the game either, but the guy seems like he has no idea that there were any in the original. How am I expected to believe he knows anything about the game then?

 

[waywardOne]

he's french. he probably thought greasels and karkians were some kind of futuristic chickens and cows. everything is food to the french.

 

[Freelance Henchman]

maybe its payback for the atrocious french accents in DX1.

 

[DraQ]

maybe its payback for the atrocious french accents in DX1.

Argh, I now have 'French' pronounciation of "Mr. Denton" stuck in my head oh god why dont it go away

 

[commie]

Sounds like bad news. In fact, sounds like he hasn't played the original game at all.

Ninjedit: I mean, I don't want monsters in the game either, but the guy seems like he has no idea that there were any in the original. How am I expected to believe he knows anything about the game then?

Hmm, you think so? A lot of the people that made IW played or worked on DX, so just knowing how DX was doesn't mean shit. I'd rather ol' Frenchie not know and make a half decent game without shitty monsters and without trying to forcibly outdo DX which usually leads to shit results.

It's a prequel of sorts anyway, and there's so much franchise rape these days that so long as the game is good on its own merits then I don't care if it follows the DX canon to a letter or not.

 

[Rogue]

It is really not very complicated

Thank god, for a second there I thought this game would be complicated like everything else that's being released these days.

 

[zeitgeist]

Sounds like bad news. In fact, sounds like he hasn't played the original game at all.

This is a pretty common practice. I vaguely remember an interview about either the Monkey Island remake or the new MI sequel where the developers were asked about the original games, and the answer was along the lines of "oh yeah, those... our designer looked up a playthrough on Youtube".

 

[Zomg]

Have any stealth games ever worked with camouflage-against-your-background and front/backlighting rather than just light gems and camouflage-depends-on-where-you-are-standing?

Like a guy in a white hoodie is hard to see if it's dim and there is a white wall behind him, whereas if you move 90 degrees relative to his position and see him against a dark background he's easily visible. And a guy that's completely backlit will just be a black shape indistinguishable from a tree or something while someone front lit can be ID'd, etc.

I've never seen it more sophisticated than "I'm standing in snow, white camouflage is goodest, light gem light gem"

 

[denizsi]

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.

Please see the cinematic multiple takedown in the gameplay video ie. he is a lying scum back. Also, it's gotta be hard to be hit at all when you're hiding behind stuff AND seeing what goes on beyond.

 

[SoupNazi]

Please see the cinematic multiple takedown in the gameplay video ie. he is a lying scum back. Also, it's gotta be hard to be hit at all when you're hiding behind stuff AND seeing what goes on beyond.

That gameplay preview was played with godmode and all augmentations fully leveled.

 

[DraQ]

Have any stealth games ever worked with camouflage-against-your-background and front/backlighting rather than just light gems and camouflage-depends-on-where-you-are-standing?

Like a guy in a white hoodie is hard to see if it's dim and there is a white wall behind him, whereas if you move 90 degrees relative to his position and see him against a dark background he's easily visible. And a guy that's completely backlit will just be a black shape indistinguishable from a tree or something while someone front lit can be ID'd, etc.

I've never seen it more sophisticated than "I'm standing in snow, white camouflage is goodest, light gem light gem"

That would be tad hard to implement - remember that AI doesn't see the surrounding like player does.

A reasonable compromise might be storing textures along with their average colour, and either continuing the trace behind player till it hits something, then verify its colour adjusted for lighting and compare it with player's respective parameters, or make several additional traces framing the player and sampling their background in similar manner.

 

[entertainer]

Please see the cinematic multiple takedown in the gameplay video ie. he is a lying scum back. Also, it's gotta be hard to be hit at all when you're hiding behind stuff AND seeing what goes on beyond.

That gameplay preview was played with godmode and all augmentations fully leveled.

 

[Achilles]

Ok, I'm just going to come out and say it: If All the things he's been saying are true (or even most of them) then the game may actually prove to be pretty decent, maybe even good. So I predict one of two possible outcomes:

a) Frenchie has been lying his ass off and the game is popamole dumbed down console bullshit, ie Invisible War all over again. Another little part of my gaming soul dies.

b) Frenchie was honest and the game is indeed good, maybe even great. Console gamers across the globe return it to the store claiming that it's boring and broken because they press the button but the character doesn't stick to cover. The game is a commercial failure but gains cult status with the fans of the original.

 

[denizsi]

Or maybe it's a little of the one and lots of the other one.

Please see the cinematic multiple takedown in the gameplay video ie. he is a lying scum back. Also, it's gotta be hard to be hit at all when you're hiding behind stuff AND seeing what goes on beyond.

That gameplay preview was played with godmode and all augmentations fully leveled.

Son, it was a pre-animated cinematic, note the word cinematic as in you had no control over it other than pressing the right single button at the right time, "press teh buttan watch your character take 3 guys down" type of thing.

Stop being a cocksucking apologetic. The game looks good and desirable despite its inconsistence with the original games which is ok, some things sound good as in the game might be enjoyable at all, and quite probably a lot more than Alpha Boretocol, but then this is one of the bits that is obviously bullshit considering what we have been shown which was just shit.

 

[SoupNazi]

Son, it was a pre-animated cinematic, note the word cinematic as in you had no control over it other than pressing the right single button at the right time, "press teh buttan watch your character take 3 guys down" type of thing.

Stop being a cocksucking apologetic. The game looks good and desirable despite its inconsistence with the original games which is ok, some things sound good as in the game might be enjoyable at all, and quite probably a lot more than Alpha Boretocol, but then this is one of the bits that is obviously bullshit considering what we have been shown which was just shit.

They said several times that augmentations affect the way cinematic takedowns happen, i.e. how many people you can take down in melee at once. I'm not apologetic, just stating facts.

 

[denizsi]

Do the cinematic takedowns happen or not?


I thought so. Weigh your "facts" more carefully the next time.

 

[SoupNazi]

He's not lying because he said in the interview that once you're fully augmented you might as well feel like a robocop. In the video where he does all the takedown shit and jumps down from a skylight and takes out 5 guys at once, that's the player fully augmented AND with godmode. It's not like in the original game if you cheated full augs at the start and all skills, you couldn't run around easily headshotting everyone without ever loosing a single HP.

Stop being so grimdark brutal edgy by dismissing everything without even bothering to check up on the facts. The game is going to be far from perfect (I too would prefer if there were no cinematic takedowns period) but you're just trying too hard.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Do the cinematic takedowns happen or not?

Yes, but I don't see how that implies the guy is lying about the difficulty of combat against multiple people in general.

 

[bert]

Have any stealth games ever worked with camouflage-against-your-background and front/backlighting rather than just light gems and camouflage-depends-on-where-you-are-standing?

Like a guy in a white hoodie is hard to see if it's dim and there is a white wall behind him, whereas if you move 90 degrees relative to his position and see him against a dark background he's easily visible. And a guy that's completely backlit will just be a black shape indistinguishable from a tree or something while someone front lit can be ID'd, etc.

I've never seen it more sophisticated than "I'm standing in snow, white camouflage is goodest, light gem light gem"

I'm not sure what you mean, but MGS3? It had a camo system and you often had to change camo as you entered indoor to outdoor environments and vice versa, and even then it depends on what material you're trying to lean against. (IE Brick camo for bricked buildings. There are also camos specifically for hiding in bushes, trees, or grass or whatever the fuck and then there are the all-rounders for specific environments like snow, desert, jungle, etc.)

 

[denizsi]

Do the cinematic takedowns happen or not?

Yes, but I don't see how that implies the guy is lying about the difficulty of combat against multiple people in general.

Push butan, sit back, watch. Sorry but has the definition of "difficult" changed or what?

 

[denizsi]

He's not lying because he said in the interview that once you're fully augmented you might as well feel like a robocop. In the video where he does all the takedown shit and jumps down from a skylight and takes out 5 guys at once, that's the player fully augmented AND with godmode. It's not like in the original game if you cheated full augs at the start and all skills, you couldn't run around easily headshotting everyone without ever loosing a single HP.

Stop being so grimdark brutal edgy by dismissing everything without even bothering to check up on the facts. The game is going to be far from perfect (I too would prefer if there were no cinematic takedowns period) but you're just trying too hard.

Typical newfag accusing someone of something over what he doesn't even know that he doesn't know.

I'll cut you some slack: God mode, full augs and whatever are irrelevant because nobody will ever let the player die in a press-sit-watch type cinematic action. At best, related augs/updates will grant you the ability to pull the cinematic bullshit but not die in it. That's how things roll in consoltardia. Not to mention what has god mode to do with a fucking preanimated cinematic to begin with at all. Start making sense.

So don't be a clueless undesirable by accusing someone of edgykoolness -which is the new edgykool these days- because you can't handle him saying his piece.