November 22, 2010 - In part two of CCC's two-part in-depth look at Deus Ex: Human Revolution, writer Steve Haske examines the mechanics that govern the game's open-ended gameplay to get an idea of how effectively the game's constituent parts work together.
It wasn't so many years ago that games were designed with the explicit linearity that's now commonplace in most big-production releases. FPSes required finding keys and flipping switches rather than just mowing down enemies between meticulously orchestrated setpieces; action and adventure games might have required a little exploration. And western RPGs allowed you to roam where you chose, picking quests at will and allowing a certain degree of freedom within the broader scope of a game's overall narrative mission structure. With the copious checkpoints, continues, and elements like regenerating health, the average face of game design has morphed into something more cinematic, designed almost as much to deliver so-called on-rails thrills while providing you some agency to move forward.
The next chapter of Deus Ex doesn't exactly do this, nor should it. Since the series is known for its open-ended, multi-solution approach, Human Revolution isn't a game that's going to force you down one specific path. Instead, it tries to achieve a happy medium of old and new design principles, and from the looks of what I recently got to check out at Eidos Montreal's studio, the dev team has done an admirable job in letting you pick and choose just exactly how you want to play through the game.
Much like the Deus Exes of old, Human Revolution lets you choose how you want to develop the traits and skills of the game's protagonist, Adam Jensen. Jensen is part of a security detail working for Sarif Industries, a biotech corporation that's embroiled in a political controversy over the development and spread of new cybernetic augmentation technology for humans, a new advancement that allows augmented people to improve their natural physical and mental capabilities. The corporation where Jensen is working is attacked by a group of augmented terrorists in Human Revolution's opening—an act of violence that almost destroys the corporate headquarters and nearly kills Jensen, who is forced to undergo emergency augmentation in order to save his life. But once Jensen decides to pursue an investigation to uncover who attacked Sarif, why it happened, and what's really going on, agency becomes the machine that drives Human Revolution forward. Care to go on a killing spree? You can. Prefer to get the drop on your enemies with stealth? You can do that, too. And if you're feeling social, you can also talk to any number of NPCs, as well as friend and foe alike, in order to get their information. Finally, if you so choose, Jensen can become adept at hacking machinery, rounding out a diverse collection of augmentation skills and upgrades you can choose to use or simply ignore. In order to illustrate the different ways of going about solving your problems, Eidos Montreal demonstrated four scenarios in the game utilizing different methods to gain information or execute attacks.
The first of the two demos showcased by the development team at a recent press event sheds some light on how Human Revolution maintains its linear structure while giving you choices over how you want to go about getting through any given level. The scenario, first shown at E3, followed Jensen in an effort to discover the location of a skilled hacker who could give him a lead on his investigation, specifically making use of Jensen's social abilities. Taking place on the (fictionalized) Chinese two-story city of Hangsha—though the location is real, it's just an empty island today—Jensen makes his way to a bar called The Hive, a place similar to the seedy bars seen in Mass Effect 2's Omega, to seek out the club boss, Tong, whom Jensen believes will be able to tell him where the hacker is hiding out. Early on, the dev team made note that while Jensen paid the fee to get into the club during the demo session, he could have just as easily beaten up the bouncer guarding the place, scouted around town listening to NPCs for clues, or snooped around back to find another way inside. This kind of thing is common in Human Revolution; there's rarely only one choice in front of you. Once inside the dimly lit bar, pulsing with bass-heavy beats and bathed in a golden light (the place had a bit of a beehive motif going for it), Jensen made his way to a back part of the club where he found a man with a cybernetic arm tending the bar. Much like Bioware's sci-fi RPG series, Human Revolution also has conversation trees for most social interactions that you can get into.
Interestingly, rather than taking the binary approach of simply making the clear "good" or "bad" choice, the game's social elements can fluctuate depending on the scenario. Sometimes talking to NPCs is as simple as choosing the approach you want to take with a person, a la Alpha Protocol; other times you can actually choose what you want to say as Commander Shepard would. What's of particular note, however, are Human Revolution's so-called social boss-battles—essentially a conversation tree where an adversarie's responses can change dynamically depending on what you say or how you say it. The way to win these would-be battles is to get whomever you're talking to agree to give you information; if they refuse, that particular avenue is then cut off from the player, meaning you'll have to figure out how to proceed without that character's help. Furthermore, since the "moods" of the AI change (which roughly translates to them addressing you differently each time), you can't just reload your game and try the same responses in order to get a desired outcome.
Much like the threat of death or mistakes in Heavy Rain, it's pretty clear the developers want gamers to live with their mistakes rather than trying to prevent them. After a brief exchange with the man in the cybernetic arm, Jensen was forced to retreat from the social battle during the demo session, giving him no choice but to find some other way of getting the information he needed. After some eavesdropping on some local thugs, Jensen learned of a way to bypass the club's security in hopes of sneaking into Tong's office. A brief stealth section followed after Jensen bypassed security via a stolen door code, showing off the game's third-person sneaking elements, which work like a stripped-down Metal Gear (you can hug walls, perform stealth takedowns, and hide bodies). Although with so many gameplay systems working at once the AI doesn't seem too complex—no guard is ever going to notice that his buddies have suddenly all disappeared, for instance—stealth in Human Revolution is much more of a "point A to point B" affair, though I was told for those who want to utilize stealth more there will be upgradable augmentations for that purpose.
The second half of the E3 demo was much more straightforward. Tracking the hacker to the bayside harbor, Jensen infiltrated an industrial warehouse area crawling with guards who were then dispatched by the demo rep in a number of ways. Jensen's battle armor has retractable blades not unlike the weapons used to swiftly attack in Assassin's Creed, and he can brutalize enemies using takedowns with them in a number of ways: running them through, stabbing them in the back with acrobatic flourish, even just knocking enemies out. Jensen's augmentations in the demo also allowed him to ambush a group of enemies from above with what looked-like a cluster of mini-carpet bombs that launched in a circle around his body when he body hit the ground. Though again I was informed that the whole dock warehouse segment could be played with stealth, by the end of the demo, guns were blazing. Jensen had a variety of weaponry available to him, from standard pistols and machine guns to bazookas and a crossbow. The icing on the cake came when, inside a warehouse, Jensen was spotted by some guards who called for backup, which arrived in the form of a Fuchikoma-esque spider tank—a scripted moment that would have never happened if Jensen hadn't been spotted. The segment ended with Jensen coming face-to-face with a hulk of a man, grotesquely augmented with a retractable cybernetic hand that transformed into a gatling gun.
The second demo shown involved Jensen undertaking a heist in the middle of the police station in Detroit, just one of the locales you'll be spending time in during the events of Human Revolution. The goal of the mission was simple: Jensen had to get to the police station's morgue and extract a brain chip containing valuable data from a corpse being housed there. Though the demo segment was relatively short—generally taking about fifteen minutes to complete, the dev team ran through it three times, with Jensen choosing to approach the situation differently.
The first approach was the most obvious: blast through everything that moves. Once inside the police station, only the lobby is available for public access. Beyond the front desk, there was a guard that warned Jensen that the rest of the station was a restricted area. Barging through anyway, every cop in the place suddenly drew their arms, and what followed was a series of shootouts that showcased some of Jensen's offensive augmentation abilities. One of the most useful (and innovative) moves Jensen could use was moving heavy objects during a shootout and strategically arranging them to provide cover. It may not sound like much, but using movable cover was actually an effective defensive strategy, and certainly not one seen in most other games (at least outside of using riot shields). After killing everyone in the station, Jensen was able to easily nab the brain chip from the corpse and make his escape.
The second scenario involved a different approach: as it turns out, the desk clerk at the station used to be Jensen's old partner, who was demoted after an incident involving the fatal shooting of an augmented fifteen-year old boy. Using social skills, Jensen gets the poor sap to open up about the incident, where it's revealed that he actually took the fall, after Jensen refused to follow orders to fire on the boy. His partner wasn't so lucky, and has been playing desk jockey ever since. Although you have the option to simply demand your ex-partner allow you to roam through the police station at will, he did not seem keen on the idea during the demo session. However, by talking through his past with him (and the promise of helping him out of his situation as best he can), Jensen was able to gain access to the rest of the station. Of course, since the cops aren't your enemies this time, you can choose to talk with them and get additional information (including the location of a non-lethal stungun you can choose to use if you're not the bloodletting type). Upon arriving at the morgue, you are mistaken for someone else—the brain chip contains data that would be of use to certain parties in the game that may or may not be opposing Jensen—and, going along with the case of mistaken identity, Jensen is able to retrieve the chip.
On the last playthrough, Jensen was able to break into the police station going through a nearby entrance to the sewers. Although this puts you at the furthest point from the morgue, Jensen's stealth abilities make getting there easy: taking a cue from Metal Gear, Jensen is equipped with stealth camo (our hero was given unlimited energy for augmentation abilities for the demo session). Along with stealth and x-ray vision (think Arkham Asylum), Eidos Montreal promised there would be a host of others. Getting through the police station required navigating some cloaked shootouts, the biggest issue was getting past the security system that had the morgue on lock-down. Thankfully, Jensen's hacking abilities—getting through a security system without activating any subroutines—made short work of the alarm. As before, Jensen was mistaken for someone else and allowed to take the brain chip.
If the demo session at Eidos Montreal was any indication, it seems pretty clear the developers have gone to great lengths to make an experience that allows to approach any given scenario in any number of ways (within reason). Given the tunnel vision that so many games seem to suffer from these days, I can't wait to see more. Hopefully Eidos Montreal's hard work will pay off when the game hits sometime next year.