Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director’s Cut Interview

Couchpotato

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Eidos Montreal has posted a new community interview with Émile Pedneault discussing his bio,and talking about the Director’s Cut version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.


The improved boss fights are something fans are really excited about for the Director’s Cut. Can you give us some insight into your process as you worked to improve the design of the new boss fights?

This one, my friends, was a challenge! I’d guess that half my time on the project was devoted solely to the boss fights. It went a bit like this:

First, I took feedback on the original boss fights that the core DXHR design team had gathered and deeply analysed.

Then, I created brand new mock-ups of each map in 3D for each boss fight area to help me test my work. I wanted to take particular care to give more space for players in the boss fight areas to provide opportunities to flee, or give secret areas, cover etc. I also had to give special thought to the AI of each individual boss and consider how their behaviour and my designs could work together. This was a pretty huge task on its own.

Once I’d nailed down a good feel for each map, I moved on to exploring different original ways to deal with each boss for players who wanted to avoid all-out gunfights. This is much easier said than done when you start to take into consideration all the different possibilities of augmentation builds a player might have. Every time a boss fight occurs in the game, it was imperative that players of every play style have options to suit them.

Once I’d found cool new ways to handle the boss fights, it was time to tweak the AI. This was needed before we could move on to the playtesting, feedback and iteration phase of the game, something that was especially fun as we found some really sweet ideas that work really well!

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine the amount of time spent researching, thinking, trying, failing and then analysing every idea... Balance is so important, you don’t want to overlook an augmentation build that could make the fight super easy or impossibly hard. But it was also a really rewarding experience and I’m really proud of the new boss fights.
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Boss fights were lame. Would better ones made DX:HR GOTY of 2011? No. Bethesda's fog sellers (PR) made it impossible.

Still DX:HR is an awsome game even with those silly boss fights, it's not plagued with overexpensive DLC nor it was left in an unpatched state for years. And it's price is not scandalous two years after the release.

Instead of making director's cut, I wish Square Enix (and you know what I feel about them) and Eidos Montreal made DX4 instead of abandoning fans and turning into settlers on phones.
 
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Agree that DX:HR was awesome. IMO Eidos & Co handled the boss fights issue quite well originally by acknowledging the problem and apologizing.

What's really unusual and interesting to me is the effort here to go back, improve, and add to a great video game. Lots of different times and lots of different games, I've wished that a game I really liked didn't have this or that flaw, that seemed bothersome on multiple playthroughs. But these things don't get fixed because game companies and creators can't make a profit by fixing/improving an existing product.

Compare the outrage at BioWare when fans asked for a fix for the clearly defective ending of Mass Effect 3. For BioWare it was like, how dare any fan tell us, the experts and artists, that we did something less than perfect.

For Eidos its more like, we love this game. We want everyone to love this game. It's worth our time to try to make this perfect even if we can't expect to get a profit from the time we put into this.

I say Kudos to Eidos.

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