Deus Ex: Human Revolution Message Board older than one year ago

Deus Ex: HR came saddled with a selection of preorder incentives, a phrase that tastes like a little bit of sick in my mouth. The upshot is that if you didn’t buy the game from a grid coordinate during the correct lunar sequence, you may be missing little bits of content. No longer. Now, everything can be yours, provided you’re willing to reach into your digital wallet once more. There are two packs available, neither of which I have any experience with so don’t expect an informed opinion. Personally, I haven’t found the game to be lacking any of the things that are listed below. Have you?(more…)

Adam Jensen’s story (which he never asked for) may be the canon prequel to the cyberpunk conspiracy theorising of the original Deus Ex, but the future-world’s a big place – there’s plenty of room to tell new tales from the time before JC Denton trotted across the globe. 2027 is a massively ambitious, Russian-made mega-mod for Deus Ex 1, the English version of which launched last week. It offers a new, apparently highly non-linear story, levels based on real-world locations, amped-up DirectX 9 graphics with stuff like weather effects added and a slew of new abilities, weapons and spider-bots. Also, new fonts. I do so like a font. Haven’t had a chance to give it a spin yet, but the below in-game footage certainly speaks for the visual upgrade.(more…)

"It's always [a set of] complex feelings when you finish a project," said Deus Ex: Human Revolution game director Jean Francois Dugas, speaking to me on the phone last week, as the Internet furiously debated his game's boss encounters.

Games have to ship eventually, even phantoms like Duke Nukem Forever. It doesn't always work out. And like virtually any other game developer, Dugas wanted more time to tweak his game. Human Revolution was a risk. Much was on the line..

To say Dugas and his team of Eidos Montreal were facing tough odds is an understatement.

In terms of open-ended game design, there are few games more cherished than Ion Storm's Deus Ex, a sentiment that's only engrained itself with time. You don't have to look far to see a designer citing Deus Ex as an influence, but the series came to a crashing halt after the disappointing Deus Ex: Invisible War. That Ion Storm imploded certainly didn't help matters, either.

Human Revolution walks a fine line of coaxing nostalgia and establishing its own identity.

Eidos Interactive tried to revive the franchise. Crystal Dynamics was working on a third entry, Deus Ex: Clan Wars, which was eventually released without the Deus Ex narrative hooks as Project: Snowblind. The combat attempted to harness Deus Ex's revered sense of player agency.

For the past four years, Dugas has been working on what was once Deus Ex 3 and became Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a sequel that's actually a prequel. A prequel gave him leeway to play within the Deus Ex universe without having to push forward story implications of Invisible War.

Invisible War was released in late 2003. It's been almost eight years since the last Deus Ex game. Anticipation for the game was all over the place.

The response has been hugely positive. It's probably my favorite game this year, praise I do not give easily, as I'd written the series off after Invisible War. I begrudgingly accepted the idea of a non-Warren Spector lead Deus Ex, but many hours later, I was in love.

"Where I'm the most at peace...often times, people have super high expectations, it's easy to fall short of those expectations," said Dugas. "Globally, it seems like, for the most part, we have met or surprised those expectations. For me, it was a huge relief and I was super happy because we spent a lot of time on that game and we were really dedicated and we put a lot of energy and effort in that, so getting that kind of feedback is really exciting. I'm in a good place in my head right now."

Part of what makes Human Revolution feel so different is how old school it feels. In some respects, it feels like an active rejection of modern, focused tested game design, which often struggles to offer true choices and consequence. If a player isn't having fun every second, is the game doing its job correctly? This has stamped out much of gaming's biggest taking too many risks, streamlining adventures to the point where the term "rollercoaster" probably means "scripted, linear experience."

That's not Deus Ex.

"I always wanted it to lower the level of intimidation as much as possible," he said, "whether it's in the control department or trying to evolve the mechanics and things like that, but I always said that I never wanted to compromise the depth and layers of what the Deus Ex experience was."

Deus Ex was never about amazing combat, but Human Revolution went a long way to making it work.

"It's always been our vision, so with the publisher [Square Enix], early on, that's what we were saying," he continued. "We wanted to respect the intelligence of the players. People are not that stupid, and we need to respect that."

You make choices all the time in Human Revolution, whether it's to clear a room with tranquilizer darts, spamming grenades, sneaking through via augmentations or blazing in with a shotgun in hand. And that's just what's happening in the combat; there's a surprisingly deep conversation system, too. One thing the game doesn't do until the very end, however, is make a judgement call on your actions. Your decisions are simply decisions, they don't inform a morality meter on a status screen.

The team did throw around the idea of having a visible morality meter but it didn't last very long.

"I'm more attracted to choices where it's more about your own ethics, your own morality and your response to that," said Dugas. "The [idea of] clear-cut morality [is something] we threw it out of the window very early on of the development cycle. We just moved forward with what we thought would be more engaging on an experience level, as opposed to a gameplay level."

Saving or not saving the Little Sisters had an emotional punch, as well as a practical one.

By "on a gameplay level," Dugas pointed towards games where players make decisions based on how they influence character progression, weapons and status. In BioShock, for example, players are asked to sacrifice or save the Little Sisters. If you sacrifice them, you gain more points to allocate towards powers than if you chose to save them. When Dugas plays games like this, he tends to make his decisions based on what will benefit him most as a player, not what he would do as a person.

There's a reason these feelings are swirling around. Soon, Dugas will be turning 40-years-old.

"As I get older," he said, "I'm more compelled to more meaningful stuff, than just the purely entertaining stuff."

You know...like ladders. And vents. Or vents and ladders.

Climbing ladders and crawling through vents remains the most common way of getting around--a Deus Ex staple. It's pretty ridiculous. Find a stack of boxes, there's gonna be a vent. Not sure how to scale a building? Look for the friendly, nearby ladder! When I asked Dugas how his team determined the future of mankind would deal with so many vents and ladders, he burst into laughter.

"Good question!" he coughed, as he worked to compose himself.

"One aspect where we kind of didn't have the time to spend more time in thinking it more through were those alternate paths with vents and ladders and stuff like that," he admitted. "It's something that if we were to revisit making that kind of game, it's something that would be different."

He alluded to the frankenstein nature of game development as a stumbling block, where systems and tech are constantly evolving and you suddenly have to make the best out of what you have. Here, ladders and vents helped stitch things together.

When in doubt, climb a ladder. Or climb in a vent. Because nobody thinks that's weird in the future, apparently.

In response to that comment, cue complaints about the game's controversial boss battles. Dugas adopted a very serious tone when I asked about the fan reaction to the inconsistent nature of the boss battles. The one-on-one confrontations shifted the game to a very action-oriented style of gameplay that didn't work for every character type (read: my stealth dude).

The situation flared up even hotter when the Internet discovered Eidos Montreal had not created the boss battles themselves; they were outsourced to another development studio named Grip Entertainment. Our interview was conducted as fans were reacting to the news about Grip, so this was fresh in his mind.

"The last few days we've seen a lot of people flacking the company Grip that worked with us on the boss fights and 'Ohhhh, now we understand why those boss fights aren't on par with the rest of the game, it's because they outsourced it.' The truth is that it has nothing to do with that," said Dugas. "We worked with Grip. and Grip did an excellent job in the confines of what they were asked to do."

Dugas did not excuse the boss fights. Rather, he acknowledged the issue, and said his team realized the problem too late in development to make any sweeping changes. Eidos Montreal had built key plot points into the fights, so ripping them out of the game was out of the question, so the primary objective became to make sure the boss fights weren't frustrating.

If you weren't a combat-heavy character, the game's boss battles were a jarring change.

"At some point, we were wrestling kind of bit with some of the features and the right amount of time and right amount of resources to work on those systems," he said.

The confused reaction is not what surprised Dugas but the outright frustration. Dugas claimed internal playtesting, which he credits improving many aspects of Human Revolution, didn't raise a red flag here.

"With the boss fights, this is the place where there was a disconnect where what we experienced during the playtest and what we experienced with the game being released," he said.

Dugas has chalked the response as a lesson learned.

Where Dugas will apply those lessons is a good question, too, though one we didn't mull over much during our conversation. Not long after Human Revolution shipped, Square Enix's said it's doubling the size of Eidos Montreal, signaling the publisher's happy. Combined with a sneaky epilogue, a sequel is all but assured, even if Dugas is unsurprisingly noncommittal.

Eidos Montreal is also making Thief 4, which finds the studio again resurrecting another beloved but dormant franchise.

"It [was] our goal to revive a Deus Ex experience, and that's what we did," he said.

I had to ask one last question before hanging up, though. As per tradition, Human Revolution offers a variety of options for how the game can end during a critical moment. If given a single option, I wondered which one Dugas would have picked.

You'll have to click below to find out.

SPOILER WARNING: Click here to reveal hidden content.

#deusex Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a masterpiece which was only sullied by a number of poorly-designed, ill-fitting boss battles. The bad news is that the game's upcoming DLC will also include a boss battle. The good news? More »

#deusex I learned a lot of things while playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I learned that it is always better to stun than to kill (unless I'm fighting a boss battle), I learned that the easiest way to get from a rooftop to street-level anywhere in China is to jump, and I learned that if I run out of juice for my flashlight, I can slip it a power bar to keep it going. But one of the most unexpected things I learned was what, exactly, a funicular is. More »

As much as we loved Deus Ex: Human Revolution, we weren't crazy about being wedged into an irritating shootout whenever a boss reared its cyber-head. While we tried to roleplay as The Rock in The Rundown (you know, vow against guns, relying on our brains and fists), Human Revolution seemed intent on turning us into The Rock in -- well, pretty much every other movie he's in ... and the end of The Rundown, come to think of it.

Eurogamer reports that all changes in DLC "The Missing Link," which Eidos Montreal developed totally in-house, rather than (as in the case of Human Revolution) farming boss battles out to another studio. Missing Link producer Marc-Andre Dufort said, "You can actually not kill the boss. You can do a non-lethal takedown on him. And you can kill him from afar. You can even kill him without him seeing you. It's more of a bigger challenge than a standard boss fight like we have in many games."

Fine, Mr. Dufort. But will we be able to steal their teeth while they are asleep?

The kerrrrayzeeeee hi-jinks of Adam ‘Elbows’ Jensen are set to continue very soon, with the impending The Missing Link downloaderised content injection. What mad scrapes and hilarious misunderstandings will our man with the facially-implanted sunglasses get into this time? Well, let’s have a little look, as Eidos Montreal’s Lead Narrative Designer Mary DeMarle narrates a five-minute taste of the new, ship-bound corridors, staircases and security control rooms Elbows is due to explore.(more…)

I'm not sure if Deus Ex: Human Revolution's first add-on, "The Missing Link", could have stumbled into view more clumsily than it did. A sort of alternate reality game revealed its existence, but clever players figured out more than Square-Enix and Eidos Montreal bargained for, leaking the premise and "The Missing Link's" primary gameplay conceit without any sort of context. It really hurt the general excitement levels for one of the most well-received games of the year.

I'm here to give you that context. And I might just be here to give you back some of that general excitement too.

Yesterday I had a chance to catch up with Deus Ex: Human Revolution lead, Jean-François Dugas, and to chat about the state of things now that the game has been released. Read on for what he had to say about the “disappointment” of the boss battles, the way in which the ending of the game did not match the original plan, and the delight the team felt in having managed to create this formidable game as their first project.(more…)

#deusex Deus Ex: Human Revolution's "gold" filter may be a visual trademark, but it also affects the way you see the game world. A new mod for the PC version removes this (and makes a few other changes), and boy, do things look different. More »

Unfortunately the recently released patch had a negative impact for some players. This patch is a hot-fix to address those issues.

- A specific issue that caused performance degradation for some DX9 players in the 1.2.630 patch has been fixed.
o We are still evaluating further measures to counter stuttering and plan to have a further update for this in another patch.
- Crashes when examining quest items have been fixed.
- Some issues related to switching between fullscreen and windowed mode have been fixed.
- Additional fixes have been made for the TYM medical card. The current fix should also allow users that already have the problem in their savegame to pick up the card again.
- Russian text language option now shows up correctly regardless of current text language.
- An issue that may cause the game to have stability issues on certain RAID setups may have been addressed. Even with this patch, if you have a RAID setup, please ensure you have the latest drivers for your controller.

In addition to stuttering and performance problems we are continuing to investigate any other issues that players may have and will release a full new patch soon that also includes the previously mentioned 3DVision and Surround support.

Right, so here’s the first step in answering the mystery of Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s boss battles – they were outsourced. Meaning, a lack of continuity during the development process, one has to assume. That’s not a condemnation of the work done by G.R.I.P., the company responsible for the bosses, who will have their own story to tell. As I said in my review of the game, the real story of how they happened will likely come out in a few years time, once enough people have moved on to be willing to explain. So why such a feature was outsourced, why there wasn’t a coherence between them and the rest of the game, and why they weren’t just ditched when it became clear they didn’t fit in, are questions that will perhaps one day be answered. But not yet. But as a magazine noticed, there’s a behind-the-scenes video with GRIP’s president discussing the battles that quietly appeared last month. So yes, this information was always out there. You can see it below.

(more…)

#deusex For the six of you here who game on a Mac, and I am one, be advised that Deus Ex: Human Revolution will be ported to that platform by the end of the year or early next year. More »

Welcome back to Extended Play, a new series of features and podcasts where we and you spend a whole month dissecting the biggest games. In week one, we told you what we thought of the game, and last week we heard what you, our erudite readers, had to say about the game. This week, it's the tur...

“Patch notes, RPS? Really?” YES REALLY WHAT OF IT, EH? When it’s a game as big as Deus Ex: Human Revolution, a lot of what might otherwise be minor becomes major. Square-Enix have chased a few bugs out of their bearded man simulator, including some important-sounding stuttering performance snafus, as well as adding in the really very useful windowed full-screen mode, the saviour of impatient alt-tabbers the world over. Most importantly: you can now skip the logos at the start of the game. Alas, the loading screen ads, as seen above, remain intact. No, I don’t have time to watch a 70s cowboys in space soap opera for the millionth time: I have a world to save from corruption and people with robot legs.

Full patch notes are below. Bulletpoints!(more…)

The new patch addresses a variety of issues as well as adds some new features:

Fixes:
- We have addressed various issues that can occur for players that would result in stuttering.
o Stutters that are the result of graphics driver shader processing are now removed or significantly reduced.
o Stutters that are the result of data streaming have been removed or significantly reduced.
o Performance has been improved and made more stable on dual-core systems. This could previously also result in stuttering.
- Fixed issue where some players couldnt complete the Motherly Ties side quest.
- Fixed an issue where doors in Omega Ranch sometimes wouldnt open.
- The TYM medical card should no longer fall through the table if an NPCs body comes into contact with the card. Players already stuck in this area will need to revert to a previous save before the card fell through.
- Occasional hangs for some players during video-playback have been fixed.
- A crash on startup when running DX11 on a single-core CPU has been fixed.
- An issue causing Eyefinity setups to not be correctly detected for some players has been fixed.
- Fixed an issue where the HUD would get permanently disabled for some players.
- Fixed certain issues that caused the mouse cursor to be able to leave the game-screen on multi-monitor setups.
- Fixed an issue that caused the mouse cursor to not be visible in-game when the user has mouse trails enabled in Windows. We still recommend disabling mouse trails for a smoother in-game mouse cursor.
- Fixed issue where ammo count for collected guns is incorrect when Adams weapon is augmented.
- In DX9 mode:
o Fixed error message for some users when trying to use FXAA Medium or FXAA Low anti aliasing modes.
o Fixed shadow-mapping lines on some graphics hardware when using anisotropic filtering.

Feature Additions:
- The Enter and Numpad-Enter keys can now be bound to game actions in the keyboard control menu.
- Intro logos can now be skipped on all but the first run of the game.
- Added windowed mode.
o Selectable in the menu, and can be toggled between windowed, fullscreen, and fullscreen windowed using ALT-ENTER.
- Added an option to change the text language of the game. This setting only changes the text language, the audio is controlled by the language option in Steam.

On top of this we are continuing to monitor for any issues that may need to be addressed in a future patch. One extra feature we can already confirm for a future patch is support for Nvidia 3DVision and Nvidia Surround.

We hope this patch will allow players to further enjoy Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

In the future, the world is split between augmented superhumans and boring, meat-based humans. In the present, our technological distinctions are a little more pedestrian: Xbox or PS3? Mac or PC? While the former has already been addressed by the multiplatform release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the latter is a decidedly PC-only affair.

But like the original Deus Ex, which was ported to Mac OS shortly after its release, Human Revolution will enjoy a Mac OS release courtesy of the good people at Feral Interactive sometime this "winter 2011/12." Specifics on pricing, date, and system requirements will be announced "later this year."

Eidos Montreal general manager Stephane D'Astous says, "We are delighted to partner with Feral, a leading expert in development for the Mac platform, to bring the acclaimed Deus Ex: Human Revolution to Mac players." With two million units already shipped, a Mac release should help Eidos Montreal's surprise hit find an even larger audience.

Attention, owners of expensive, hard-to-upgrade aluminium PCs: Square-Enix have just sent word that Deux Ex: Human Revolution is going to be getting a Mac release. It’s due out in “Winter 2011/12″, and London based Feral Interactive are going to be responsible for it. They tackled the Mac ports of the likes of BioShock, Borderlands, Rome: Total War, LEGO Star Wars & Tomb Raider: Anniversary, so I guess they know the ropes. Has anyone played any of their ports?(more…)

In Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Adam Jensen's life is in your hands. You decide how Jensen augments his body in order to best complete the dangerous missions that stand between him and the answers he seeks. Human Revolution is a game of choice, and no two players will approach it in exactly the same way...

#deusex A few days back, Plunkett posted a pretty funny video in which an intreped modder tweaked the original Deus Ex to look a lot more like its current-gen, gold-tinged offspring Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Now, the mod itself is available for download over at ModDB, created and shared by ModDB user "ceski". More »

You there! Remember the parody video in which the likes of DLC references, object highlighting and iron sights from Human Revolution were added to the original Deus Ex, and how even-tempered everyone was about it? Well, now you can recreate that past-meets-present, JC/AJ mash-up yourself, as creator Ceski has released the mod he made to achieve the video.

Also includes instant wristblade takedowns (press use when behind an enemy), regenerating health and a surfeit of black and gold. Grab Deus Ex: Unreal Revolution from here.

We're starting to see a trend develop -- a super, super disheartening trend. According to the NPD group, total sales in the U.S. gaming industry dropped 23 percent year-over-year during the month of August; almost exactly the same amount sales declined in July. NPD's Anita Frazier explained, "the bulk of the decline can be attributed to the shift of the annual Madden release from August to September." (The NPD actually counts August 30 as part of September, which seems pretty zany.)

Gaming hardware saw an increase in sales over July, largely fueled by the price cuts endured by the 3DS and PlayStation 3. According to a memo sent out by Nintendo following the NPD report, the 3DS discount moved 185,000 consoles from August 12 through the end of the month. This wave managed to increase dollar and unit sales of handheld hardware to a year-over-year increase over August 2010, which bucks the downward trend followed by the rest of the industry. Hooray for discrete electronics!

Surprisingly, the top-selling game for August was Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which was only on store shelves for five days during the NPD's tracking window. The group doesn't expect the augmented title to rollover its reign into September, instead expecting Madden to reign supreme. Check out August's Top 10 software performers after the jump!

The order in which information arrives is very confusing. Everyone heard about Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s The Missing Link DLC earlier this week, and today Square have officially announced it. But that means we also get pictures and a video. I’ve augmented the post with the details below. Do you see? I said “augmented the post”. Because in Deus Ex you augment yourself with augments, and so in saying “augmented the post” I’m applying that theme to a piece of writing about the game. It’s a bit of wordplay.

(more…)

When Deus Ex: Human Revolution hit store shelves two weeks ago, thereby ending gaming's annual summer drought of triple-A titles, critics welcomed it with the thirsty zeal of nomads discovering an oasis in the desert...

#deusex I bet you thought I was done writing about Deus Ex: Human Revolution. How wrong you were! Though in truth, I just wanted to share a particularly outstanding piece I just read about the game. So, this is me writing about writing about Deus Ex: Human Revolution. More »

The new Deus Ex is about many things, but ranking high amongst them is DRM. I’m not even joking.(more…)

Here’s a huge news story that we somehow didn’t manage to post yet, because we’re big, silly poo-poo heads. Also, I was distracted by being stung on the eyelid by a wasp, which is something I can recommend to precisely nobody. While I was busy bellowing in horror, the Deus Ex Human Revolution DLC teased by last week’s rather inelegant ARG finally came to light. As suspected, it’s called The Missing Link, and as speculated it concerns the rather odd scene late in the main game where Adam goes on a secret journey to an unknown location. (And if you think that amounts to a spoiler for a game that’s all about mysteries, I honestly despair.)

If you haven’t gotten that far in the game, don’t read on – because more fulsome details are below. If you can’t read the rest but are itching for safe DX reading – well, how about browsing RPS cunningly rejiggered to look like one of DXHR’s in-game electro-newspapers? Top work, Nir Yomotov. Truly, his vision is augmented.(more…)

This isn't quite the Deus Ex: Didn't Have a Subtitle remake we had in mind.

The more modern values of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, transplanted into the resolutely year 2000 Deus Ex 1. Admittedly, this video occasionally strays into tiresome ‘THE PAST WAS NECESSARILY BETTER AND EVERYTHING IS RUBBISH NOWADAYS’ whingeotron territory, but it’s nanotongue-in-cheek enough to elicit a good few guffaws, I think. What if… JC Denton had elbow swords? And augmented vision? And could only rescue Tracer Tong if he’d preordered?(more…)

Scaleform? Dolby Digital? AMD? I didn’t ask for this. Neither did you, probably, so if you fancy a way of disabling all those annoying unskipable splash screens, here it is. Word on the street is that the member of staff at Eidos Montreal responsible for them fully intended to make the splash screens skippable, but as they entered the meeting room to discuss it, a prerendered cutscene took over and forced them to make the splash screens unskippable. What a shame. (more…)