Deus Ex: Human Revolution And The Soul Of Deus Ex 1

For Golden Week we have a week long special on the goldest game (in terms of color palette) from Square Enix. Jonathan Jacques Belletete, Art Director on Deus Ex: Human Revolution, had a candid chat with Siliconera about Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the third game, which is actually a prequel to Deus Ex.

The little bit of gameplay we saw was both first and third person. It was in stills, but can you talk a little about that?

Jonathan Jacques Belletete, Art Director: Yeah, it’s a first person shooter. You can also do these third person takedowns on enemies. You can like trigger your augmentations and lethally or non-lethally takedown enemies. At that point the camera comes into third person and you see Adam pulling off moves on enemies. And when you take cover it goes to third person like Rainbow Six: Vegas where you see the guy.

It’s interesting that you say point out it is a shooter. I remember the first game had choices like diplomacy and hacking… will Human Revolution have those choices?

Big time. One of the things I say all of the time is there are aspects, very import aspects, of Deus Ex 1 that we identified straight from the get go. We even had an exterior firm also kind of do a study of those things for us, making sure we identified really what those the core elements, that made spirit, like the soul of the first one, what they were. We said, these things we’re not touching them. These things we bring them back into Deus Ex 3 and then we give it our own texture around it.

So, all of that freedom of choice, you know, is there. All of that I just want to go through the entire game without killing is there. Or if you really want to be the last man on Earth you can do this. If you like stealthing more than using weapons, if you want to hack through things, and just like the first one the level design is really built around those choices. Yeah, it works well. The comments that we had were this really feels like Deus Ex 1.

Since were on that are there any connections to Deus Ex 1? I realize this is a prequel, but are you going to tie up missing links, maybe foreshadow events?

Oh yeah. Definitely, I think it would be a big mistake not to do those things. Is there cameos of character in the first one or of situations of the first one? Do we explain stuff that was unexplained in the first one? All of those things are up in the air right now. In the sense which ones do we choose to use, work with, and implement into the game.

We worked with Sheldon Pacotti, the writer of Deus Ex 1. He came to the studio two or three times. We regularly send him parts of our script to review and everything to make sure it fits within the mythology of Deus Ex and it has the right tone. That plus a few winks at the first one really make a strong Deus Ex story and flavor in Human Revolution.

Tomorrow we’re going to discuss connections between Deus Ex and Deus Ex: Human Revolution. See you then!