Deus Ex: Human Revolution — Director’s Cut - Commentary

So, the one thing I really liked about the character of Arie van Bruggen, he's such a small character and he doesn't have a big role, but we really wanted him to be memorable. We wanted someone
like a Gary Oldman performance in 'True Romance,' and we got very lucky when we found Alex Ivanovici as the actor. He throws his heart into it, so he makes it a very memorable character.
 Yeah, and also in the scene, the Belltower guards were going to attack the capsule hotel, and in the final game we didn't have time to put as many enemies using augmentation as we wanted, and therefore
I was pushing for adding the Belltower guards storming in using the Icarus Landing System, so it would compensate for the lack of real augmentation.
 Like, you'll still know they are augmented through that cutscene, even though once they start attacking you, there's not much augmentation.
 Yeah.
 And there was a little bit of a problem on my end in terms of design, because I'd already done all the attacking patrols, and none of the guards had augmentations because they weren't supposed to.
And suddenly I find out we have a cutscene where they are storming in, and Icarus Landing, and I'm just, 'Uh-oh, I've got to update all my patrols to make sure they fit the environment,' And it worked out in the end.
Here’s another cutscene where Jensen's going to interact with a potential enemy.
And I remember having a discussion with Jesse Sweet, our cinematic director, back in the day; because the constraint I gave him is that I didn't want Jensen in any cutscene with a gun, because we don't know what the player’s going to have.
And for me it was really important that the cutscenes were keeping the character that you were building consistent with when we were going into those moments. So for him it was a real, real challenge to still have Jensen look badass, but not using a gun.
That's why in this one we see with the hacker, that Jensen pulls out his blade from his arm. So it was a way to compensate for the lack of gun.
So again another wonderful cutscene. I really enjoy this one and I think I really enjoy it because I really love the character of Eliza...
I agree.
...and what we wanted to achieve with her, and I think we got really lucky with the voice actress on this one.
Yeah, we had the lovely and talented Kim Bubbs. She was fantastic.
I remember when we were doing the casting, we definitely wanted a bit of that sort of childlike innocence, sort of naivete, almost like becoming self-aware.
And for me when I heard her voice, just when I heard her read through the lines, I knew it right away, I was like, 'God! I hope Mary likes her the way I like her, 'cause she's fantastic!'
And really for me, there was a certain purity and innocence in her voice and the way she spoke that it was...
It had just enough of an eerie quality to it and yet still sounded young.
An eerie AI feel to it.
And it was real fun too, because like in writing the dialogues I really wanted to make sure that she never used contractions, and so I was very careful about that and
unfortunately, during one of the news broadcast I couldn't be in the studio and they let her get a contraction in, and I was so mad when I found, but what can you do?
So we get in Montreal here and actually the story behind why Montreal is in the game is very simple.
For very long time, since we're from Montreal, we're making games in Montreal, I always wanted us to take advantage of it because we always go everywhere else in the world and we never go to our own country or our own city.
And with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it was the perfect time for Montreal to be in the game. So I made sure that it was in.
 Represent!
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So Adam's apartment is one of the, I think, most intricate, interesting places in the game.
 During the production we actually called it ‘the Adam's Museum,’ and the whole idea is because that’s what we wanted it to be.
 We wanted people to just walk through it and just by observing you know, just through all the 'show, don't tell,' to get a lot of information on
 Adam's background, Adam's personality and what's happened to him in the past, and also show that he likes cereals a lot.
 And there's also a secret stash behind the TV, which is a bit of homage to the first ‘Deus Ex,’ which was, I think, in Paul's apartment where you had all the secret stuff, with the computers behind the shelves, and whatnot.
And also, Mary, there's all this stuff...
 Yeah, there's all this stuff on the work bench because we had written in his back story, this big long thing about how he's always been a collector.
 He used to go to old second hand stores and stuff and find old mechanical objects that he liked to take apart, because he was curious; he was very into that.
 And so we pulled that out and what was interesting about it is we didn't actually tell the story of his back story, but people who came and saw that work bench then
 made up their own stories and basically wrote to us and were saying things like, “Wow, it's so cool. It's like how he's trying to understand his own body and his new mechanics,”
 And I was like... 'I like that back story a lot better than what I came up with… so yeah, that's what we're going with!'
 But actually, it was that this room was supposed to give you all the personality of Adam Jensen through his environment.
So one thing that we really wanted was to show some kind of quirky side to Adam's personality, and a good idea, I think, that we had was to show that he really, really likes to eat cereal.
 Sugar cereal.
 Sugar cereal, absolutely, kids’ cereal, which are also the ones that I like.
 So we designed three boxes. Manuel, our storyboard artist
 who’s worked in animation for the longest time, he is an amazing artist in terms of cartoons, and he designed all these three boxes and they turned out amazingly well…
 Yeah, exactly.
 Yeah, they're insane, and also just the jokes that he put on them, and he said there were bowls lying around in Adam's apartment ,like unfinished cereal bowls, and all that kind of stuff.
 And it really hit well with the fans because there's a lot of fan art of Adam Jensen with his...
 Cereal boxes.
 Yeah, he's in a grocery store with his cart and he's just like...debating does he get you know, the ‘Augmentchoo’ or the ‘Crunchy Pirates’ or whatever, so people really got into the whole thing.
 And the ‘Augmentchoos’ are declined from the ‘Jonachoo,’ ‘Jeffachoo,’ all the ‘CHOO’s.
 Yeah all the ‘CHOO’ things... If you follow us on Twitter we all have that.
 But what I guess is my conclusion to all of this is you know, when you design a game, don't underestimate details and don't underestimate how much you push
 the quality of things that seem to be so trivial, because this is what actually gives life, not the only thing, but it's something that…
 Those details.
...can actually give a lot of life  to a game.
So here we can see all these cards that Adam received while he was in convalescence from his operation. He had to stay home probably for quite a while, and these are cards that people sent him to get better, the get well cards, and it shows, you know,
 the amount of details that we wanted to put in the game and again, the 'show, don't tell,' and  to have a lot of the universe live through little things like this that you could see.
 And the fact that they are still on his desk shows that it was not a long time ago.
 Yeah, yeah.
 And he was somewhat rushed out.
 Or that he just never cleans, but yeah...
 One or the other.
 Then there's the cracked mirror.
 Yeah, the cracked mirror in his bathroom is a big part of it too. I think that we were always saying even before we knew it we could have mirrors in it, we were saying we absolutely have to have a mirror in his bedroom and he has to have cracked it.
And it shows a lot about what he's been going through.
 Yeah.
 And it did help us cover some of the technical limitations that we had in the game, I believe…
 Because we decided we wouldn't have reflective mirrors for whatever reason.
 Yeah, for some reason this kind of psychological reflection of his anger to what happened to him really resonated with the fans and I think it made them empathize even more with the character.
 Like you said, because technically we couldn't do actual mirrors throughout the whole game, so we kind of rolled ball on it to have fun through the emails between him and the assistant
 Yeah, yeah it's true!
 down in the lobby, no?
 It became a bigger story.
That cut scene, actually in the first iteration in the first build of this map, it was a first person cutscene in which you are seeing
the computer through the eyes of Adam Jensen, and you would see everything that Prichard was finding, but it was very static.
It was lacking the drama, and then our cinematic director really wanted to do it differently with a third person approach where we see Adam Jensen interacting with Prichard and everything.
And in the end, I think it's much more dramatic and much more interesting, more dynamic than what we had at the first place. Yeah.
 We had at first... yeah.
So we’re here on the roof of Adam Jensen's apartment and one of the things I really wanted when we landed there is that I wanted the players to be able to have a great view of the city and everything.
And it turned out that it was not as easy to do as  I would have expected, because we would have had to render the streets just below us and everything, and that was all cheated, and also with the riot going
on, we had to figure out  which direction the riot was and if it was in the direction where we could see, then it would be hard to pull off, so we had to make sure that the visible part of the city was on the other side.
 And we also wanted to have those cop choppers flying by with the lights and smoke and stuff like that coming in, and I just realized
recently, obviously we know that the choppers we never managed to put them in, but just recently I saw there is smoke, there are plumes of smoke.
 But it's very subtle.
 I didn't even know, and it's so subtle. Because these are the things we could've done, but I guess we just ran out of time.
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Yeah so, I don't know why but I really liked this side quest character.
He always felt really credible to me, the way he speaks, and all the things he's talking about make the conspiracy feel even bigger than what you’re actually playing in the main story.
It's kind of hinting at the shadow government and stuff like that, and I think it makes it much deeper.
 And I think a lot of credit for that goes to not just the guys who wrote the dialogue, but the actor.
We mentioned him earlier, and the casting of the side quest characters was an interesting part of what we are doing. Right, Steve?
 Yeah it was great. I mean, and I will even throw some… since we are giving credit out, I will throw some to our voice director, Simon Peacock, who did a great job.
He often would recommend some of the characters to us when we gave him the character design, and he would be like, “I know this one guy who would probably nail it,” and more often than not he was right on.
But I agree with what you are saying JF; he is one of my favorite characters, because when I saw the visual of what the character looked like, ‘cause it was
one of the guys we casted without knowing what he would look like, the voice, it was one of the rare occasions where the voice and the visual matched perfectly.
And when you played it, I think that's part of the reason why it feels so credible, is that the voice looks like it would come from that character.
So I guess we have quite a few things to mention about the apartment layout. It`s quite a bit harder than it seems, even though apartments are quite common.
But something I remember at the beginning is, with Frank, we sat down, me and Frank McCann, in the sense that we’re just getting down the volume that feels natural, like a real apartment.
Even though we have all lived in them, it’s actually not as easy as it sounds.
So at first we had art design and level design that felt a bit awkward in terms of feeling like we weren’t in an apartment. But I think it ended up quite well…
 I know. Also we had the challenge of the cover system...
 Yes!
 ...that we needed to make everywhere different.
 Yeah, that was a big part as well, why they felt a bit weird at first because they accommodated for that.
 And a big challenge as well in regards of the apartment is that, originally we had two models and we actually cut the larger one which added a lot more gameplay options for the players.
 That’s true! Forgot about that.
 For the first one, the Grector apartment, was a very large one, very gameplay focused.
But actually, we changed it because we had way too much stuff to actually place inside those apartments, so we get the more regular type of environment.
And the thing is also, during the production, it was ‘add support’ from Level Art to actually add props and do some paths on those apartments.
So until very late in production, it was all 'propsing' by myself. So chairs, tables, all that stuff. And for each apartment I wanted to have a specific thematic…
 Yeah.
…and I had almost no support in the middle of our team, even though we had paint over from the…
 Yeah, you’re right, those are things that happened, but you ended up managing it pretty well.
But one thing, speaking of props in the apartments; one thing that I can’t stand is the Icarus paintings. It’s like, the Icarus myth is just an analogy in the thing, right?
And the way that these paintings were probably just for one lab or something, and it ended up being like everybody in the game just buys paintings of Icarus. I was like, ‘What…?’
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Well, that's one of the really few secret passages, secret hidden places we have in the game.
 Yeah, I'm pretty proud of that one.
Since the beginning of the game, we focused so much on the main pillars of the game; how to support the ingredients we have in the game, and all that.
Eventually, once you are pretty late in the production, you feel very at ease with your mechanics and as a level designer, you always try to find twists and how to reuse...
 That's when you start having fun.
 Exactly. Every time you see an ingredient, sometimes there's a twist just to make it more interesting and whatnot, so that's why I wanted to have this big, huge wall.
Originally it was a classic bookcase, but we didn't do that, so we just used the wall, it just opened up with the lighting effect; it was very cool.
 But it's something that, when you look at the game, we felt that it's not that we should have done tons more, but it should have...
 But more. Not tons, but more, yeah.
 Like I said, because we were very late in production, we get used to all those things...
 Yeah.
 ... trying to figure out how the other level designers, the level team, can actually add to those.
It's very late in production, so those guys cannot do much.
My level artist, Sebastien Paviot, was the perfect guy.
He really helped me out at the end.
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So this is the basketball…
 The famous basketball court!
 The famous basketball court!
 My favorite!
 It's an homage to the original ‘Deus Ex’, but for us it was not necessarily something that we would do by default; we didn't have the physics for that.
We didn't have all the things we needed, and on top of that, some people in the team they were like, “Why spend time doing this? What’s the point?”
 “Why?”
 “Yeah, what's the point?”
 And that's the thing, one of our writers, Taras Stasiuk, was coming to me almost every single day, “I want the basketball in there. I want the basketball in there. I want the....”
 And he came to me too and I said, “We got the baseball in for Sarif so...hush!!”
 And then, eventually with T-bone, I managed to push him to create the ball and then…
 And the thing is, I'm actually the one who wanted my level artists to make sure we have a freakin' basketball in there, not the whole court, but just the basketball hoop.
And even the ball was not sure, but at least just the just the hoop itself to have that 'clin d'?il,' that just little tease from
‘Deus Ex 1’,  but the physics on the ball, man, it created nightmares on the programmers' side and they really hated me for this.
 But we fought...YOU fought!
 Yeah, we fought.
 But it's just a small example, for things that seem very mundane in the game, sometimes it's a big, big challenge and all; you have to mobilize a lot of people to make this happen.
 Yeah, especially when it was possible to do in 1999, yeah.
 Especially yeah, as crazy as it sounds.
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So here you have one of the rare moments, when you actually hear an Asian-American in Detroit.
 And it wasn't suppose to be this way.
 No, it wasn't.
 It was supposed to be these two guys, white or black, because we only had white and black NPCs inside the whole of Detroit city, both in Detroit One and also Detroit Two, but...
 Yeah, but what happened was, when you are dealing with this much dialogue and you have tools in the company that help you sort that dialogue,
and you have checkboxes that tell you whether it's been recorded or not, and it sorts for you so when you go for a recording session, it automatically selects for you all the lines…
And somehow or other it did not select the voice for that second actor in that, so it didn't get recorded and it wasn’t until later...
We didn't catch it right away and we'd already released our Detroit actors, and all we had left to record were the Asians.
So luckily we caught it at the last second. And so, we got one of the Asian actors to record that line, but that's how come we have only one Asian actor in all of Detroit.
 And also, if you look at the power tool that he's using; it's amazing!
 It's invisible.
 It's so well designed!
This power tool just shows you the amount of details that went into this game.
It's like you can't even see it, and if...
 And actually, if you go very close and you zoom in on the tool, there's the ‘Jon’ seal of approval on it.
 My seal of approval… but there is a brand on it,
there's a logo, there's everything. Just stop at the escalator, listen to the Asian voice and then look at the power tool. It's amazing.
 JJB quality.
So here's the idea behind the convention center that we had: sometimes some convention centers, some of the smaller ones in the cities, cater to a specific industry,
or whatever. It's not that they’re not going to let any other industries come and do stuff there, but sometimes they cater to new media; they cater to all sorts of things.
And we said, 'Hey, this one is in Detroit, let's make it as a convention center that usually hosts talks and conventions that have to do with transhumanism and augmentation,’ right?
But then, it hosts a personality like Taggart, because he decided, ‘You know what, my talk, my anti-augmentation talk; I'm going to hold it, it is going to be held inside that kind of pro-transhumanist convention center.’
 To really make a statement.
 It's provocative; it's making a statement, exactly.
It's a free country, so you know you can do it.
So the idea is, that's why the place is extremely gold, just to represent this idea of transhumanism in the art direction.
And it's quite a nice place. It's by one of our more ‘junior’ concept artists.
He's not a junior, but he’s not one of the most experienced guys, and he did an amazing job.
This kind of modern architecture, like somewhat futuristic but yet credible; the carpeting… beautiful place. I really like it.
Oh yes, that character, the infamous ‘Rhonda Mitchell,’ who actually had a name, but she was originally part of Detroit One, as not a side quest per se, but an actual encounter you could…
...encounter in the Detroit back alleys, where she was harassed by one of the guys. Well just, supposedly one of the random encounters you could have in the game, in the city hubs.
And if the player decided to intervene and save that woman, she would actually appear here in Detroit Two.
And being an opposite version of what Bill Taggart is trying to convince everyone inside…
 Against augmentation.
 Yeah.
 And well, the whole event, the whole encounter inside Detroit One was completely cut because of scripting issues and the whole aspect of following chaos on those kind of encounters.
So we just managed to keep the character.
But I even suggested to JF that maybe we could, you know, bunch it up a bit, where she actually, at the end of her speech she has a vest with explosives, and just explode herself inside
the lobby. But JF wasn't too keen on that idea.
 Yeah.
 Hahaha.
 And he wanted a nuclear mushroom, and after that I said, “Woah, woah, woah!”
 Just mushrooms. I was hungry.
When we pass the infamous locked door and then we are in the VIP type of the environment of the convention center
where Bill Taggart is currently doing his press thing on the stage in front of the millions and millions of press media people...
 You mean the four NPCs?
 Well those for me are actually millions. But anyway...
Yeah, I know I don't count. But yeah, we had alternate paths because the actual objective was not to talk to Bill Taggart himself but to get the information, and the information was either was on his computer or Bill Taggart himself.
So the player had choices and we wanted to make sure that the player understands there are alternate paths because everything was, well...
We tried towards the conversation with Bill Taggart, but as a level designer, I always have more interest in the actual alternate paths.
So maybe I focused a bit way too much on the actual alternate path, the patch room and scripting and the backstage and all that, so I had fun, but...
 Yeah but after that, we realized that as you go through the corridor, what you see that is obvious is the alternate path.
 Yes.
 And that the auditorium is totally to your right and we had to build all those signs to be very obvious on the choke point to make sure that the players knows that.
 But what's funny is that it's right there in your right.
 So therefore they're like 'Let's go see this very expensive thing that we created for them to see.'
Yeah at the same time what's funny is that we did all these things to attract you there but it's like ten feet to your right, it's just...
 But it's surprising. Sometimes it's all weird to...
 Totally.
 Absolutely.
So this social boss fight with Taggart, it actually represented a lot of challenges for this team to pull off.
It was actually the second one that we ever wrote or ever tried to do, and we chose it second because we knew it was going to be a difficult one and we wanted to see if we could do it.
We had all these plans to have the audience participating in it and stuff.
But because we did it so early, we didn't even had the design for the room at the time and we were just, which I'm sure Frank, you probably appreciated that.
 Oh man. I loved you for that one because, yeah, having the social conversation already written and ready and all, and we didn't even start to do the level design of that place.
 And you didn't start for quite a few months.
 Exactly.
 But we had to do it early and actually, it was also where we first tested the whole MoCap of these conversations, and so we flew to LA with the actor, myself, and one of the animators went to LA, to carry this out to see…
And the whole time we were like, 'We are not even sure, we've never really done this, we have no idea how to move it.' And we were being so challenging in terms of having Jensen move closer; can we even pull any of that off?
So it was quite a challenge to...
 Yeah. It was, and it was also stressful because the first one that we did was Wayne Haas; we said he was hand animated, and it took roughly six months
from writing the dialogue, to the design of the dialogue, through the final version of it, and we knew for the other ones we couldn't afford to take six months each.
That's why we went to LA with the MoCap session and everything.
So it was really crucial because a lot of the leads on the team were not convinced that those encounters would work,
and they were casting a lot to do and everything. I defended them until the end, and finally we managed to pull them off.
 And then it fell straight into the problem of sound and level design!
 Yeah, with the speech and everything.
 Yeah, well for us the fun part was that, you walk in and you’re supposed to hear Taggart giving his speech.
The problem, in an open world game, we realized later on, was well, what if the player just stands there for half an hour?
And what do we do? And how do we record all the speech in dialogue and where does it come from?
So we said, you know what, to hell with it, we're going to go with what is called 'Walla' which is, you know, 'mumbles' overheard but indistinguishable, and it worked surprisingly well. Like, you'd be surprised.
You’re wondering, ‘why did they have such a bad sound system and speakers in the auditoriums in 2027?’
Well, this one just did, and it worked well because once you walked into the auditorium we released to let the speech play, but until you go there it's just a loop of 'Walla' playing as you walk around the auditorium.
 That's the quick story of Taggart.
So I'm not exactly sure how you may have pulled the information about where Isaias is located.
There are many different ways to do it.
You could've got it from Taggart, and thus would've seen him talking to you right now, or you would have had to get it off the computer.
But what was really fun for us was that all these things have repercussions.
How you actually do it, have repercussions on what's going to happen very next, very soon in the story, because as you end up getting to see
Isaias, if you got the information from Taggart directly, Taggart is going to go on the air and he'll end up telling… basically leading to Isaias wanting to commit suicide.
And if you snuck here, never got to Taggart at all, and agreed to Sarif's request to frame them, then Taggart will go on the air and you’ll end up having to convince Isaias out of suicide.
And there's one possible way that you'll actually not have an entire conversation with Isaias Sandoval to talk him out of it.
 Yeah.
 And that's if you basically sneak in here and then deny Sarif what he wants.
 Exactly.
 And in that instance…
 And now when you meet Isaias he's going to attack you, yeah.
 He'll actually attack you straight up.
So it was interesting figuring out all those challenges and all those ways to connect it and it actually led to the possibility of cutting an entire conversation boss fight.
 Absolutely.
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This environment, the whole courtyard environment was the very first one where we basically tested outside of our very independent gyms and the static gyms
from the programmer side. But this is where the actual in-game environment, where we wanted to test the play-out, if the AI responded correctly from the player on the stealth
aspect, and also the combat aspect. We also had the police station, but the police station was mostly corridors; here we had a very open type of environment
with verticality and whatnot, so it was a very old environment. But it was almost a test gym that we actually produced and left in the game so...
Here's the antenna that we need to shut down, to end this part of the quest.
Thing is that, it looks like a pretty normal antenna at this point but it used to be a very, very high design, I guess.
We had designed something that looked nothing like an antenna.
 And nobody would guess, 'Oh, that's an antenna?'.
 No. People would just get there and just like, start spinning in circles looking for a ‘goddamn antenna,’ and the whole time they were just right next to it.
But I thought it looked nice...
 You just have to realize at one point that this design really sucks and it's just...
 Is this ‘form over function’ or ‘function over form?’
That was ‘form over function,’ literally, and then we ended up putting it into ‘function over form.’
But what's cool about the antenna once it works and people know it is an antenna, actually, is that you can go there before getting the actual mission, and you can complete the objective ahead of time.
 Yeah, we had a lot of fun with that one, just kind of trying to figure out what would happen if you went to it first, and I personally love what happens with
Pritchard when you do that. You're like, “Pritchard, what, what, what?” and he doesn't answer, and it was very funny here on the team because not everybody knew…
 Exactly.
 …that within our team we had planned that you could do out of the order. And I remember one of the programmers, one day sitting down playing the game, and suddenly
realized, ‘Wait a minute, I'm going to go straight to Derelict Row and shut down that antenna, and trick game design and prove to them that they didn't figure it all out!’ And then they got
there, and they shut it down and they heard Pritchard's dialogue and they thought, 'Oh my god, they really did figure everything out ahead of time!'
So we were smart that time.
 Yes, that time.
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The LIMB clinic actually, it's one of the few places where you cannot use your guns, like in Sarif Industries, and that was also a big debate in the team…
 Yeah.
 Because the philosophy of the game is to let you play the way you want and it's all about letting you face the consequences of your actions, and everything.
 But the chaos management in the game came in quite late, and if you really want to support it well…
 We tried so many scenarios in both the LIMB clinic and the Sarif building, just trying to figure out ‘How do we support chaos?’ And mostly with the railway station, when you
 go back to the LIMB clinic, when you go back to Sarif, how do we deal with that when Jensen is supposed to be a neutral character, almost an ally character, even more so in the Sarif building?
 But even in the LIMB clinic, it's a neutral place where it doesn't make sense to create chaos, and we wanted to support chaos everywhere. Technically, it was very challenging.
 I remember endless meetings about the LIMB clinic.
 Definitely.
 Weeks and weeks after the first meetings.
 Yeah at first, we put Marcovick and everyone behind bullet proof glass so that if the player did create chaos, they would go into cowering mode.
 But that’s what they are.
 We even wrote lines for them, like, you can still get your augmentations even though you just shot and killed everybody in front of them.
 But they’re still behind those glass…
 Yeah, they’re still behind the glass.
 It would have been possible to support it but it would have felt kind of... off.
 Exactly.
 Or to make it sound right, it would have been almost...
 And remember, that for a big part of the development we actually had to go to the LIMB clinic to get augmented…
 And that makes me think about exactly like with the Praxis kit system…
 Originally you didn't have all the augmentations in your body and you had to go, basically getting there to have your legs cut and then be replaced by augmented legs.
 You basically had to go under surgery every time you wanted an upgrade.
 Yeah, we had the whole cutscene, remember? The surgery...
 Variation of cutscenes in detail.
 It was not totally eloquent, and on top of that the other problem that rose was that, it was only giving the city hubs for the players to augment themselves. And at some part in the game you go in Picus, you go there and there and
 for a long time you are not in the city hub, and we wanted to go with a system that was allowing the players to upgrade whenever they wanted when they have the right XP points, and this is where the Praxis kits came in.
 And I remember when you brought that up to me with a Praxis kits, I was ready to kill you because we'd already rewritten and re-recorded Marcovick behind the glass, twice!
 And now we had to rewrite her entire speech a third time and bring the actress back in yet again, to record and make that make sense.
 And you didn`t kill me because you knew it was the right call, right?
 So many people almost got murdered on this... Jesus Christ!
 If you say so..
 And also, one of the things that you did with that, with Steve and everything, was to have the doctors being like, “Oh man, the ‘X’ team members,” and stuff and...
 Oh no, that's the... if you pay attention to the, when you're in the LIMB clinic you will hear the paging system and the people been paged, 'Doctor Trechery', 'Doctor Szczepkowski;' these are all members of the team.
 And, what happened to Marcovick? She used to be pretty.
 No, it's just that she was younger but the model didn't work super well.
 And yeah, she was younger but it took us so much time to make that game that....
 She aged with us…
 If we did, she did too.
 And also the visuals of the LIMB clinic is also one of the big cyber-renaissance places of the game and it kind of works okay, I guess…
So, this is the operation room that actually…
Originally when we spoke about how Adam Jensen was getting augmented, it was by having some limbs severed and eventually replaced.
We had a cutscene where Jensen was on the operating table, so it was used each time that you were getting augmented.
 And we were going to do multiple versions of it.
 Absolutely, and...
 That was back when we smoked drugs or something..
 Yeah, but it was back in the days.
 Yeah, back in the days.
 You did.
 And when we changed the system for the Praxis kits and everything, it was the system that, like we said, you already had the augmentations, you just have to kind of awaken the power in some ways.
And we didn't need that cutscene anymore and therefore we had produced one version that was not used in the game.
But as we built the game and we came with the recall for the chip later in Hengsha where you can go and have your system
augmentation fixed or not, then if you do it, we reused that cutscene that was supposed to be used for augmentations.
 Yeah.
$
So, another example about the world boundaries, where we tried to make the city bigger and more alive than where we actually played. We tried to add places where you could see cars in the background
driving by, and we ended up putting it in places where you really need to pay attention, you really need to look in that direction and ultimately, not necessarily giving the instant...
Yeah, feeling.
Feeling! Exactly, so....
We wanted to actually have a more of an alive feeling on indoors wall boundaries, but because of time constraints we had in production, we barely had the
time to have one model of one car , even having the lights on. It was very difficult, and having that car actually animated; just the tram that goes inside of the city hub was...
Hell!!
Definitely hell, so having just cars on those so...we managed the minimum we could actually place inside of the game and that's it.
But it looks really cool when you stand there and see  the cars go by, and you are like, ‘Wow, that's me!’
One car every two minutes.
It's true, it's like one car every...
Yeah, it's really exciting.
You know, there's a gas shortage.
Now we're entering Derelict Row, one of the parts of the Detroit city hub that started as a zone of exploration that was
added the gangs to have some combat opportunities or stealth opportunities and a bit more to see, and everything.
But the thing is that in our story beats we already identified that we didn't have…
 We didn't have much, no, the original plan for Detroit was that you had the objective of going to the LIMB clinic, go to the police station, and the police station would be the area with the real
challenge and then you would go to your apartment and then you would go straight to FEMA. But we had this entire section that sprung up from the level designers wanting to put that darn gameplay into there.
 And that whole environment was actually from the very first vertical slice; the whole environment, the whole courtyard with the room buildings is very, very old and we just patched in more gameplay
aspects, smaller rooms and all that. Throughout the production it's all ‘VS one,’ ‘VS two,’ all the way to alpha and beta, so that environment is old both visually and technically in the game.
 Yeah, and so suddenly we have this area where there's like, ‘Ok, well we were kind of thinking about rival gangs in the city,’ so we kind of
suddenly made it the gang territory. But then that was like, ‘We need an objective to send you in there,’ and it was like, ‘We don't have one!’
And that's where the antenna came from.
 Yeah.
 We just kind of had to…
 So well played.
 …come up with the story reason why you have to get in to gang territory to shut down an antenna.
 And players weren’t finding the antenna.
 Oh, we had some real problems, yeah.
That was on me, I mean, it was basically bad level design to place that antenna not in your line of sight or entice it properly and what not, so it was a very bad thing to do, but we tried to patch a good system.
It's actually where we try to optimize our checkpoints to sell the object locater, place it to be more like a piece of bread that …
 Bread crumb.
 Yeah, bread crumb, thank you. Throughout the game, so yeah.
 So when we are asked if story comes first or gameplay comes first, well, in this case gameplay really came first.
So, the entry of Derelict Row, we had this door which was kind of the main path of the choke point to get into the gang territory.
But it turned out that it was really, really, hard to draw players' attention in that direction; they were always distracted by other things, and we did tons of things here to try to draw their attention in that direction.
 Yeah, and trying to link this whole environment, the whole Derelict Row environment, with a very gameplay-, very combat approach; combat supported,
and to stream that environment, which visually is completely different from the rest of the city hub, to technically stream it
properly, we had to make sure that the door is not always facing towards the street itself, and so we have a kind of 'S'-shaped type of corridor.
So typical in level design, but it was very difficult because of the placement of the door itself.
 And after that we were kind of putting some letters that were blinking.
 Yeah, there's that sign, but it's not directly on top of that place.
 No, it was too high.
 But it's much higher, but it's just the way we ended up lighting it, and it ended up attracting a lot of the players' attention.
Well, now we are with Patrick Garon, who was our technical level designer on the project. And for this moment, what we want to talk about is the fact
 that we wanted to have some events in the game where they were not necessarily side quests per se, but they were events in which your
 morality could be affected, if someone is attacked or something like that, and you could intervene and with consequences. But it didn't happen right?
 Yeah, to do those kind of events in ‘Deus Ex,’ it was hard, like we had lots of good ideas and…
 We had two major limitations; the first one I can think of is the engine, but also production-wise. The engine was allowing us to put
 animation, but to be able to synchronize NPC together to manage the interruption and all that was not something that was simple to do with our engine.
So, lots of the ideas were cut because of that.
 And when we were able to do them, it became a problem for the production, because to create a very simple situation, with the
 ‘Deus Ex’ game you don't have a choice but to ask, 'What happens if the player could do that?' or they can do so many different things..
 The chaos and all that, you know.
 Yeah, he has augmentations so that he can go and sneak and be invisible so he would not interrupt. When someone disappears, what do we do; what does he say?
 What if he starts to talk to a guy before the event, after the event...
 It's very complex.
 So something so simple becomes very complex.
 So we always ask ourselves ‘what if.’ And for a game, we want to create quality, so we will ask, ‘Will the player be happy with the result?’ And we spent most of that time doing the
 side quests instead, because there will be a good story that will be developed. And those encounters, we decided to cut them or to change the scope to something very simple.
So here's Adam Jensen's apartment building. What is it called Mary?
 I believe it's the Chiron building.
 The Chiron building. I used to say ‘Chi-ron’ but, it's ‘Ki-ron.’
 A lot of people have asked us how come there's such a really nice and posh-looking building in the middle of the prostitute district and gang district, and whatnot.
 It's like, you're in this really nice place and you walk out, and right away there are people who want to sell you drugs. The idea was at the beginning of the
 project, we wanted to have a really nice, rich neighborhood in Detroit, where a lot of these kind of cyber-renaissance, new age buildings would be added. This is where Adam
 would live and obviously it's David Sarif who's paying for this apartment, because if you look at Adam's personality, it's probably not the kind of place he would live in.
 No, it's not at all the place he would live in.
 Exactly. But we ended up realizing that we couldn't do this entire neighborhood, but we wanted to keep the nice building
 for Adam, and probably after some talks with the level designers as well, we figured out this was the best place to put it at.
 So yeah, it's automatically a little bit of clash, but it's part of the concessions we have to make sometimes.
So, we’re here in Detroit in front of the police station and actually, that's one of the parts that was the first vertical slice with did for the game, which was trying to have a fairly good representation of the final game
 early on. It was the city hub that we thought would be more challenging than the compounds and stuff like that, and that's why we focused on it, and therefore it was one of the first really playable maps.
 And at the same time the police station ended up being becoming very important later on in one of our other demos, right?
 The ‘games con’ demo.
 Yeah definitely, the ‘games con’ demo.
 The funny thing about the police station, both the inside and the outside of the police station itself, is since the very first vertical slice we had so many level designers who actually worked on it, so I think…
 Several artists, yeah.
 So at the end we ended up with almost a hybrid of so many ideas in the ‘games con’ demo, when David Anfossi, our producer, actually came to me, “Yeah, we want to show the police station as ‘games con’ demo,” like, almost a month before the actual ‘games con.’
At first I cried, and then after that I decided to...
 ‘Ok, let's cramp it up,’ since the design itself, the scripting, was fairly good for that.
 So there was just a minimum amount of work, but still was very late.
 That's also the first time that Warren Spector ever saw and played the game, with the police station map at the games con.
 That was a very amazing experience.
 Yeah.
So, if you look at the convenience store, something that we spent a lot of time on is to research what they look like, especially here on the East Coast, what the convenience stores look like.
 The ones in Detroit and the ones here in Montreal are very much alike, so there were a lot of people that literally went out on scouting trips and took
 lots of pictures, and we realized they literally had hundreds of stickers in there and on their windows, so it was important for us to reproduce this properly.
 I think we did a pretty good job. And as well, there’s the whole parallax technology thing that we used, to give the impression of depth and
 there was an interior behind all those stickers, where there really isn't, and there's other store fronts that use that as well.
 And it works, it works pretty good! Yeah.
 And you had some artist take a PhD in convenience store design right?
 Something like that, yeah. Drink beer...
Alternate paths in the city; when we started, we realized that most of our alternate paths were more of the same, in the sense
 that they were not giving you an extra challenge and they were not making you use your augmentations. It was very limited.
 Yeah, every time we… on the level design side, one of the first things we wanted to nail right from the start, is the infamous multi-paths, multi-options that we so dearly like in the ‘Deus Ex’ universe. And so every time we
 do critical path type of design for an objective or a challenge and whatnot, then when we design the actual alternate path or even secret path, because we have some secret trilogy critical path, alternate path, and secret path;
 for the alternate path and secret path we always try to mismatch and balance the type of challenges that we want in there.
 And here, we have the infamous ladder that we used from the first vertical slice as well...
 Oh my god, yeah, I remember that.
 ...and we've tried to mix the physical objects as well.
 The ladder to heaven?
 Yeah, the ladder to heaven.
 Oh my god.
 So we always try to balance gameplay options, gameplay alternatives to our alternate paths, multi-paths and multi-options as well.
 And actually here, what is fun is that if you're really, really patient, there are some boxes around that corner, and you can take two boxes and just throw them in
 front of you, jump on one, go on the second one, then pick up the old one, put it in front of you, and just go like that until you go over the electricity floor.
 Yeah, I think we liked way too much the crates in our game.
 And air vents.
 And air vents.
 Oh, yeah.
Hey Mary, ‘MDM,’ it sounds like you, doesn't it?
 Yeah! Those are my initials, and actually that's something… We did put a lot of different hints to a lot of different people in the game, and this one is supposed to be a play on a name.
 It was supposed to be the ‘MDM Grand Hotel,’ instead of the ‘MGM’ and so that's kind of where it happened but somehow or other we lost the ‘Grand’ part, so it just ended up being my initials.
 So it's the Mary DeMarle Hotel.
 The ‘Grand’ should have been there.
 I think it's because it says it's a fine restaurant and dining as well, because you know I like fine restaurants and dining.
 Very expensive. Haha.
 And the ‘Grand’ should've been there because for the people who have never met you, Mary, what's your height?
 8 feet tall?
 6.
 You are 6? I thought you are taller than me.
 I know you are all jealous, I know you are all jealous.
 Well, she looks like she's 6'6.
 Without heels.
 Without heels.
So here is a billboard with Eliza on it, and that's pretty cool because one thing that we really wanted to do with Eliza; she was a bit of our poster child in the game for this cyber-renaissance fashion, like the
 really pushed one because she's a personality. She's probably rich; she's on TV all the time and these are the people usually that are at the forefront of fashion, and all those trends.
 The thing is that we could only afford one model for Eliza in the game, not because of memory but because of like, time constraints and whatnot.
 So we had this idea that if we only have one model, then what we could do because she's a personality, there's got to be ads and...
 Posters.
 ...posters and marketing and stuff like that of her in the world.
 So why don't we portray some of her other costumes or clothes or whatnot, through these things instead of making other models, and that ended up working really, really well.
And we also had to make sure that these things were positioned in almost a choke point so that...
 It attracts attention.
 ...it attracts your attention and players would see them and whatnot.
So I think it's really clever that we came up with that idea.
It made us save a lot of time and money, and it ended up giving the exact same result.
 It worked; she attracted attention.
 Awesome.
$
So now we just spoke to Megan Reed's mother, which is the first side quest that the player, actually, it's the second side quest in the game that you are exposed to…
 Yes, it's the second side quest in the game.
 …after the one in Jensen's office. And basically at the beginning, when we started to design the side quests, we were really hiding them in the world and they were hard to find. That was one of the main problems we had.
 I think it was initially what we wanted. We wanted you to have to explore and find, and through the exploration you would come upon side quests.
But we also had plans for many, many more side quests than currently exist in the game.
 True. And the other problem we had as well is that our side quests were very shallow, like they didn't really capture anything interesting.
We always said we wanted to avoid those typical, 'Go get the milk at the convenient store,' kind of side quest.
 'Save the cat from the tree.'
 Save the cat, exactly. And the first pass, we ended up pretty much with that.
 Yeah, we for the first pass we just… a lot of it was for early vertical slice, the early testing of our game, and we did have quite a few in there that ended up getting cut and then we had to go back.
After we played through that, we realized, 'Whoa,' as you said, 'these are way too shallow, and we really need to take the opportunity to really make them much more interesting, both from a gameplay and a story standpoint.'
 And a theme standpoint.
 A theme standpoint. And we really wanted them to reflect the themes of the game, and we also came upon the knowledge that,
'Okay, these need to be designed: Here you are, you are playing Adam Jensen, you are on a quest to save the world. Why should you be pulled off of it?'
They had to be relevant, they had to relate to him personally somehow, or somehow invoke more of that world.
 To the characters around him, yeah.
 Yeah, but because sometimes a basement is just full of rats and somebody needs to take care of it.
 But the characters had to be interesting as well, and it was well written and I was really happy with how we cast it because I thought they were all really like...
Sometimes in games, when you go from the main cast and you start going to lower-tier characters, you can feel the quality drop-off, and we didn't want to have that. I know you and I spoke about it.
So I really like that, in fact, some of the side quest characters are probably some of my more favorite characters in the game.
 I agree.
 Yeah, and some very interesting acting that came out of it. One of the actors, I think he was Vasta?
 Vasla.
 Vasla, and he is just the security guard…
 And it's perfect.
 That was awesome.
 …in Megan's mother's quest and his acting is absolutely amazing.
And it was really nice that we were able to get that extra depth, and the guys who jumped on board to write the side quests, Bruce and JF, were just amazing and they really rose to the challenge.
It was great.
 Yeah, so it saved our side quests.
So this is a big sculpture that's in front of the Sarif Industries building. The idea is... there is a big analogy to the Icarus myth in the game.
I am not going to get into all the details right now, but the idea is we kind of divided a lot of the motifs from the Icarus myth, and gave them to different parts or different parties in the game.
And Sarif's corporation kind of represents the ideal for transhumanism, if you want. They want to give power to the people, they want to enhance people, not necessarily at the most expensive cost neither.
So we felt that we should represent them with the wing, which is the idea of kind of like, expanding ourselves.
 Yeah, and even in the title of the Sarif Industries, we came up with the name 'Sarif' because we were looking for an analogy to angels and wings, and so 'Sarif' to us, was a shorter form of 'Seraphim'.
So it really, really works. And when the sculpture then reflects that whole wing mythology as well is…
 Their logo is actually that wing as well, but it was interesting to have this kind of like art installation built in front of their building, that's shaped like a wing.
So, you noticed that there's a lot of street signs all over the place in places like Hengsha and of course Detroit, and one of the things that fell on the writing team, at some
point was we would see these signs very late in the production process, and at one point I saw one of these street signs for Detroit, and I realized that it was in metric.
It was not in feet and miles and all those things like this.
 It was in the proper system, and we needed to switch it to the crazy system.
 Yeah, and as one of the few Americans on this mostly French Canadian/Canadian team, I then had to basically send an email to the whole team
saying, “Guys, sorry but we are in Detroit and Detroit doesn't use metric, so make sure that all your signs are in the correct... footage, not...”
 Non-scientific method right?
 Can you tell me where Detroit is again?
 Ah yeah! So anyway...
 Hehehehe
 So anyway!! So, that was kind of funny cause we sent that out and I think that it was one of those silly things you are sitting there, going, 'Gee... nobody thought about that!'
 No, but it's true! It was really good that you that you made us notice... that it was measured in that, yeah.
 So, that's why we had an American on the team.
 Yeah, for that.
 The only reason.
So Jon, you managed to do promotion for your girlfriend back in the day.
 So, there is a… yeah, something like that. A lot of the posters in Detroit City, my girlfriend at the time, my ex-girlfriend actually, was studying for her masters in industrial design.
And there were all sorts of events that they had to prepare for and they had to do posters to promote.
And because we wanted to have a lot of realism and credibility to all the ads or logos or whatever, all the way down to posters and magazines in the game, one night I was just trying to design posters.
I was at home in my apartment, and as I was designing these posters, I was looking around my house, and there were all these already
made, really nice posters made by real designers, real graphic artists, real industrial designers studying at the masters level, so it is like...
 Wait a minute.
 ...what the hell, I am just going to take that and you know, and I remember not even telling her. She ended up finding out later. But yeah, so a lot of them in Detroit are, it is actually her work.
So this is a pretty funny one; this is the kind of the electric charging box for electric cars.
Obviously we are in the future, and we said most of the cars are probably going to be electric, and there is, you know, the oil is probably going to have peaked down, or whatever.
What's funny though is that the box itself, its design is pretty good in terms of you know, the mechanical design and its overall look.
It's not an object that I dislike, but what is funny is that if you compare it to the actual charging beacons or charging kind of things that are actually, that exist today in our world, in 2013, I guess...
 Almost the same.
 They are already so much slicker than this, they are way smaller, much prettier, and here we have this huge...
We probably were missing polygons, I don't know, probably the tech artist told me, “There is only six polygons left in the game,” and I said, “Well, that’s fine, let's just make a box,” but yeah.
 But that's the thing, like for the entire game we never saw ourselves being a science fiction game; we always said that we are an anticipation game.
We are trying to kind of anticipate what the world can look in twenty years from now.
 Twenty, thirty years, yeah.
 Yeah and we were always wondering as we were going through this like, 'Oh, in 2027, when we are there for real, how wrong were we back in the days.'
 Yeah, how wrong or right?
 But there, already in 2013 we already know that we were wrong about it.
 We know which ones we are wrong and it makes me think it's funny.
Remember we used to say that in 2027, the real 2027, we’ll have dinner, we’ll have an evening where we’ll put the game back into the console
and look at it and probably have a good laugh because most of the things we thought that were way too advanced are probably going to end up being completely dated.
 I don't know what you are talking about. We predicted the whole Olympic thing with Oscar Pistorius, what happened, and we said exactly when it would happen and it did. So there you go.
 There you go, little bits of info here.
So, something that was really important again, you are going to hear this coming back over and over; it's this whole idea of credibility to a lot of this stuff. Like JF mentions in another one of these beacons,
 the idea was not to make a sci-fi game, it was to make an anticipation of the future. And in order to do this properly, a lot of the things need to look just like they look today, in a very precise way.
 And the store fronts for us were something very important. These are the things sometimes that miss the target in video games.
 They just look like things that, it’s almost as if we have never walked on a real street before, or we have never been into a store; it is an abstraction almost, of what store fronts look like.
 So that was pretty important, I mean, some of them are better than others but...
 But at the same time, that shows that the attention to detail was super important for the game.
 Yeah, it is all part of that.
 Not only in visuals, but in all the aspects of the game. But yeah, that's the prime example.
 No, that's very true and you can see… not only can you see the products in those store fronts and you can see what the brands are, but also the actual design of these store fronts.
 The interesting, artsy things that they have; it’s something we worked really hard on.
 And one of the things that we were saying many times is that we didn't necessarily fully care if people would recognize all those details.
 As they would walk the street, as they would go into the environments, they would absorb it in a natural fashion, because that's how the real world is built, and therefore, even though they don't notice it consciously…
 Their subconscious is going to pick up on it. Actually, if something is wrong, most of the time you notice it consciously, and if something is right, it's actually more your subconscious that registers it.
 You just absorb it.
 So it's a lot easier to really affect the player if you are wrong, because then they really know and pick it up right away. So yeah, you need to work pretty hard at that.
Alright, so this was a subject that seemed to kind of raise a slight little bit of controversy, even though we didn't see it coming for a mile.
 Basically, we had this character, Letitia, and she was designed or planned designed to be as a bag lady, a real hardcore hobo, 'cause we had a lot of them.
 But Jensen had a relationship with her in the sense that she’s been around and he's seen her around
 and he often, I guess, would get information from her, because it was kind of hinted at that they had that type of rapport.
 But first, if I can jump in and say, Letitia was a character who was added to the game very late.
 We were in Beta already and we mentioned earlier about David Sarif and having to bring him back in.
 When that call was made for the hostages, we said, the game design team said, or the level design team said,
 “We would love to have a helper character. Can we throw this character in at the last minute?”
 So we had to write this character very quickly and we only had a pool of four actors we could choose from and it was either… she was either gonna be a black girl, a white girl, a black guy or…
 A white guy.
 ...a white guy. And so when we looked at all the actors available, we didn't actually plan her to be a black female character. It was just, “Which of our actors are available?”
 It was more for the convenience, and we had a good actor pool, like we were comfortable with any of them.
 But it just happened that… when booking sessions, sometimes you are going to have lines for three hours and you can only book a four-hour block.
 So you try to look and see, ‘Well, how can we maximize our money and our time, and maybe we can give them another character and help ourselves, and not have to book another session.’
 So it kind of fell into that. And for the record, I also want to say that the actress was African American, and it was her idea to play the character that way.
 Yes.
 In hindsight, where we kind of dropped the ball is that, I think, what really disturbed people or what really seemed like a rude
 awakening was that she kind of didn't look like a bag lady and I think again, you were stressing that it happened very late in the game.
 You know, everybody is kind of running and taking care of their own fires and we are doing our best to kind of keep all the balls in the air at this point, and we know that the clock is winding down.
 So everybody is really frantic, and then it was just like we saw it in-game and it didn't really phase us as we were sort of like, you know, “She doesn't look as hardcore as we were expecting, but whatever.”
 You know, like at that point we were nearing the finish line and we had much bigger issues to look at. It was only once the game shipped and we started seeing some of these comments...
 And realized....
 ...that we looked at it with a different filter, saying, “Okay, we can understand why people sort of were a little put off.” And I still think that had she been presented…
 As a homeless.
 …as a unique character, as a very homeless woman…
 Someone mentally disturbed, a homeless woman, bag lady that you might find in the streets… It would have worked.
 I don't think it would have been perceived the way it was by certain people and I was glad that not everybody took it that way.
 But we felt pretty bad when we saw how some of the people were reacting 'cause that was not our intention at all.
Alright, so if you look at the building here, if you just look upward a little bit, you can see this big face kind of flashing on the windows, and this is actually called ‘Media Architecture.’
 It's something that's already pretty big, and it's going to get bigger and bigger in the future, and I really want to make sure that we had it in the game.
 And sadly, this is one of the very few places that remain at the end of the production of these media things.
 We had a lot of them in the upper Hengsha map; that's really where we were concentrating this whole kind of new… ‘architectural philosophy,’ if you want.
 But we ended up cutting that map, so all these efforts were gone. But here is a nice one!
So, the name of the gas station is something that I came up with while we were designing the textures.
The name 'Oron' is actually one of the provinces of Nigeria, which is a country that is totally being decimated
by Exxon, with all the oil exploitation, and they are making sure that it's a puppet government that is in place.
The population cannot get educated, and stuff like that, to make sure that they will never really rebel against the exploitation that the US and Exxon is doing there.
But anyway, I suggest that you go research this, it's really interesting, and here is just a little snippet of
information that we decided to, you know, ‘Let's take some of what's going on there and somehow put it in the game.’
So with the LIMB Clinic, one of the interesting things that happens in Detroit; we see that the tension between people who can afford augmentations and those who can’t afford it, the tension is rising.
And we really wanted to feel that early on in the game, that it was palpable, something that you could feel. And we had decided through the first vertical slice about this riot that just happened...
 Yeah.
 ...and all the work, like it seems very simple, but all the work among level design, art design, story design, to make this work and make you feel that something happened there; it was quite a lot of work actually.
 Yeah, and there is a reason why we did this because there was no way we could've done a real riot.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, I think we actually did that at first.
 Because that was what we wanted at the beginning; we wanted to have all these people, you know. There was a little crowd, but they only...
 There was a crowd and we had a chant and we recorded the chant...
 In the first version I did I placed a flaming car with a lot of stuff happening...
 That's true.
 I remember that, yeah.
 Five minutes ago there was a protest and now there's not. There's also some kind of Easter egg about that story, about the event that took place, and the player never saw.
It's the sniper rifle that you find in the gas station that was just a quick story, with two objects that were not there
prior, and the pocket secretary, with emails on it, which is actually a contract about killing… something.
They have to kill one of the protesters just to kick-start the huge riot, which actually was cancelled. That's why the player can find the sniper rifle.
 But for the riot you had your revenge in Detroit two, right?
 Oh yeah!
 Yeah, and also the design of the building, again shows very well a bit of the art direction for the architecture.
The idea is that it looks really much like cells, you know, like the way that the facade is done, which has to do with biology, and all that kind of stuff.
It's pretty much taken from a real building that's in Japan, in Tokyo, and I think it's a store, actually. But it’s very much alike, I have to admit, yeah.
So yeah, here we have the world boundaries.
 Actually, one of the important things we wanted is that to make you feel that the cities or the places where you are, feel and are bigger than what you actually play.
 But it turned out that it was much more difficult to come up with satisfying world boundaries than we thought in the first place.
 It was very difficult because at first, designing anything, you always base yourself on experience and what you can learn from either competitors or online and experience from other guys,
 and since I was coming from mostly a ‘RAINBOW 6’ type of environment so, as a designer, I actually used to design compounds and very close quarter type of environment…
 Interior kind of stuff.
 It was, just a huge challenge, was really good, really cool for me to actually experience that challenge.
 But doing the world boundaries, for me was just like, 'Let's do a dead end and that's it, and not focus on…'
 ‘Cause even the streets in ‘RAINBOW 6’ are a lot more kind of corridor-like, almost...
 Yeah exactly. In ‘RAINBOW 6’ you just place an invisible closure; you don't care about that, but of course in a ‘Deus Ex’ game you don't want to do that.
 At least I tried, but you know, the thing is, from the first play test we did, we received some feedback while seeing those guys and we definitely could see that those boundaries were not good enough for the production.
 It was feeling artificial and it was constantly reminding the players...
 Yeah, exactly.
  ...that they were in a game, and in a small contained map.
 So, very late, we actually had some meetings, trying to define, ‘how can we make them more fun to be looked at?’ And I actually changed them to windows to the actual
 background city, which was a very tough thing to do, because we already had a lot of constraints on memory; the amount of NPCs, things that we can actually move around, and stuff.
So here’s the weapon merchant inside of the gas station, and the whole gas station was a very old building that we kept from all the way back from the very first Vertical Slice, and instead
of trying to redesign it as we went along in the production of the old city hub, we actually tried to keep it because we thought it was one of the very cool things, visually, you know.
So gameplay-wise there was a lot of potential to do something with it and we always wanted to have a weapon merchant; a black market merchant inside of it.
And the thing is, for us, since you work on a game, you lose some kind of objectivity about what you think is good about your game, so for me, it was very obvious that there was someone in there.
But from the play test, almost every single play tester did not see the weapon merchant, so...
 Not a lot of people thought about that.
But here we were debating like, “Oh, should it be obvious or should it be hidden,” and etc... And we went back and forth a couple of times until we decided, “Ok, let's make it more...”
 Exactly. Definitely, yeah. At some point, we had an icon about those guys, trying to create some ‘Metal Gear Solid’-ish type of group or something like that.
 At the end we said, “fuck it.”
So, originally we wanted tons of side quests. What happened, Pat?
 When we started to work on ‘Deus Ex,’ the critical path was the main focus and the side quests, we knew we wanted them, but we would tackle the task later in production.
And there was one moment where we said, 'Ok, we cannot do 25 side quests. We’re going to talk about all the different fallouts of the game, going
to support all the mechanics, with a beautiful matrix of what side quests there would be. We're going to spread them around the game and every time the player
goes into a city hub, you would have five to seven side quests to do,’ and everything was possible. And then when we started to implement them, the reality really hit us.
And I just remember that JF at one point wanted to kill me, because, I would go see him every two to three weeks, and at first I'd say,
 “Ok, this is where we are, we have 25 side quests,” and two to three weeks later, I'd go see him: “We can probably do just 23.”
Then two to three months later I'd say, “Ok, we can only do twelve.”
 Yeah, my heartbeat was racing every single time.
 Yeah, and I don't think you saw all the love and writing and re-writing that went into them.
We focused on the quality versus quantity.
So what we ended up doing was putting more side quests on the critical path, which basically people would be submerged into, those alternate stories, and when we reached near the end
of the game we said, ‘we'll put more side quests,’ because what's interesting is that the players will have already been discovering the city hub. And then we said, ‘they will probably like to finish the game.’
 And since we cannot change exploration setups between Detroit One and Detroit Two, players could actually explore almost everything
in Detroit One, and in Detroit Two, well, there was not much else to explore, only the additional side quests, or a few things I managed to place in somewhere.
$
Well, depending on how you play, now you have the conversation system with Isaias Sandoval or he just attacks you.
But if you had to experienced the one where he commits suicide, I always hated the fact that once it happened, Jensen doesn't recognize the fact, and he just goes on with Pritchard 'Hey Pritchard, I found out this and that.'
 I think....
 And like he's totally like no....
 Yeah this is like one of...
 He doesn't acknowledge the fact that he just committed suicide here.
 Exactly.
I think this is one of those examples you know you work on something for a long, long time and the script itself goes to many iterations, and originally we had planned that this was all happening inside a completely
different location in Utah at the rehabilitation center, and so what had happened script-wise is we'd written the first pass of the main dialogues and the main briefings that you get.
And so we hadn't known how it was going to play out, and so we had this briefing that we figured triggered as soon as Jensen left that room and got somewhere else...
 Made sense on paper.
 And it made sense on paper, it totally made sense on paper and it was just one of those things that as production keeps going, you don't catch it until it's all pulled back together.
 Yeah, it was implemented so late that once we were able to really play it the way it should be played, we figured out it was missing and I went to my producer to say, 'We need to fix that! We need to fix that!'
But we were pass beta and it was like too late now, it was too risky because we were on debug phase and everything, so we couldn't…
 David's always been pretty, David the producer, has always been...
 Supportive.
 Really open-minded with us like he's let you do some pretty big stuff so when you..
 Yeah so when he says no it's...
 That time he was like, no way.
 When he says no, you know it's a real no.
$
So Barrett, interesting story about the actor with this one and how we cast for Barrett.
 Yeah, I love Barrett. In fact, Barrett was cast very early.
In fact, I can even remember when we used to do our casting sessions, I would often go back and take the tapes, the ones that
I thought were interesting, I would make the scene, we would go with our audition script and, let's say, the scene is Jensen and Barrett.
We would audition Jensen and we had sessions with Barrett, so I would put the different Jensens together with the Barretts.
And I remember one of the ones with Barrett, and I would sit just in with the directors, pretty much the creative group we had
here, and I remember when they heard him like, you know, doing this scene, and it's sort of Jensen grilling him and he was like, 'In FEMA?'
And he had that great accent that I loved and I remember…
 Yeah, that FEMA theme.
 'I love this guy. I love him,' you know.
 And it was almost like Goulem and Jensen together. We heard them and we were like, 'These guys are perfect.' They really brought the characters to life, and I should say Alain Goulem looks absolutely...
 Nothing like Barrett.
 Nothing like Barrett. Hes probably about 5'5, and a little rounder, in his late forties.
 But the guy's so talented. He's been on Canadian TV shows, movies… The guy is great.
So, Antoine, with the Barrett boss fight, it actually went through multiple revisions.
 Lots of.
 Like most boss fights, all boss fights, should I say. You remember it was multistage at first.
 Yeah. Originally we had Barrett use a second level ledge or something with the guards and everything.
He was supposed to take snapshots at you or something with a… I think it was the sniper rifle, and we wanted it to be the first time the player actually gets a sniper rifle, originally.
So when you beat Barrett, you actually get this as a reward. But then, later, we gave it earlier on in the map.
 And we were also supposed to support in the design that if you were using the tranquilizer gun, eventually you could put them to sleep and…
 Yeah, you could actually render everybody unconscious. But then it caused a bit of a problem with the story itself, where actually Barrett needed to sort of...
 Disappear.
 Yeah, exactly. Question him and everything, and then he sort of commits suicide and all that stuff, so that kind of blurred the stuff in it.
We cut the first section of the boss fight, which is the second level layer, you know, when he was on the balcony and then he jumped down.
So, eventually, it turned out to be just this room with Barrett in it. So it became a one-on-one, mano-a-mano sort of confrontation.
 Yeah, and originally we were supposed to be able to maintain stealth, and depending on how you were playing in the map before getting to the boss fight, it
would influence what kind of tools the boss would have, like let's say, if you went in his room before, you find his room before the boss, you would pick up something.
Then, therefore, it was something that he couldn't use in his...
Exactly, that was something we wanted to do.
We couldn't. We didn't have time to do it with all these sort of constrains we had, but actually we looked back at it, and used that philosophy in The Missing Link later.
Which made sense a lot.
Barrett's a big guy.
Huge.
Jon, do not speak.
 I think we're done.
So, cool room here with all the box guards stacked on the shelves, but before I talk about the room, I want to get a bit into the box guards and what they are, and where the concept comes from.
So, we knew that we would have a robot. Well, different classes of robots, just like in the first Deus Ex, and robots will probably serve somewhat the same purpose as in Deus Ex one.
The box guard would be our biggest one. It wasn't named box guard at the beginning but we knew we wanted a walker, and all that kind of stuff.
And a concept artist, Thierry Doizon or BARONTiERi, you know, he's the kind of guy that comes from industrial design, and so he really thinks art concept through, which is what concept art should be.
And he figured out, you know, we'd designed a world where there's a lot of mercenaries, a lot of private wars, all these themes are really going through…
 Their growing through the world and in different places.
 Exactly, so these are really present themes in the game.
So he figured there's probably lot of like independent weapon manufacturers and they don't just sell to countries, they sell to all sorts of private armies and like Blackwater and all that kind of stuff.
So he said, 'Hey, this robot, that probably lot of people buy, instead of coming disassembled in different boxes or even assembled in one big box, it's like its
own box, it comes folded in and then you receive it, you receive your shipment, one box guard, two, three, a dozen, whatever you ordered, and then there's a password.
It is your retina, it is your fingerprint, and you enter it on the box guard and the box itself just kind of unfolds.' And that was really cool.
 What is cool about that too is the fact that, originally, we were thinking about our biggest robot as a walker like kind of RoboCop style.
 Like two legged, yeah.
 Exactly, two legged.
And when BARONTiERi came up with that idea, we were outside, like it was all fresh and new, something totally different, and we just fully embraced it and we couldn't wait for the real box guard to come to life.
 Come to life. And actually it's been the actual concept, the idea is BARONTiERi's and then it was kind of like upgraded by Jim Murray in the final, final design was...
 It was a collaboration.
 I was a collaboration and stuff like that.
So the room itself that we're seeing here, the idea that now that you know from the first room of the FEMA camp that these boxes transform into robots, the idea was a bit to instill fear into the players.
 Like, 'Will they all open up?'
 'Are they gonna transform, open…?' and stuff like that. So hopefully, you know, we generated a bit of fear in the players through this thing.
 And if not, it still remains a cool room.
 It's a nice room. And you know what I think about it every time I see it? How expensive that room must be?
Because if you think, technologically speaking, these box guards have got to be around, I don't know, like 15 million dollars.
 At least a thousand dollars.
 So there's at least a few grand in that room.
$
So right now we're looking at the FEMA merchant, the gangers who can sell you weapons. This was something that I think we decided to introduce.
Originally we had the plan that you would only get merchants in the areas who would do it, but we wanted to kind of vary things up and so we were asked to write for this merchant.
But sometimes when you're writing for games, you're writing a long time before you know certain details.
Like you don't know how much things cost, you don't even know what in their stockpiles.
But we didn't realize it at first, so this was a real challenge because we had written and we had recorded a whole bunch of lines for this that actually, we're going off of the information we thought at the time was accurate, such as how much things cost and what weapons would be offered to you.
And we'd actually written it using those lines and those words only to discover much later, that when we were doing the balancing, that we couldn't give them those weapons and that things needed to cost more money.
And since we'd already recorded it all, we actually had to kind of do this hack into the system and totally change the lines that we had trying just to use lines that were very neutral and stuff.
So this was quite a headache to create this merchant.
 Didn't I tell you this ahead of time and you just didn't listen to me?
 No.
So here we're on the edge of the FEMA camp map. Outside, on the other side of the fence, we can see that there are some coffins that were alluding to the...
 The real FEMA camp.
 ...The real FEMA camp.
 Well, what people think.
 The conspiracy.
Conspiracy, yeah, with all the coffins.
 The only thing that is unfortunate here,
 They are there...
 We can't see them.
 We can't see them, so it's really hard to really appreciate what it is, but if you didn't realize before, now you know.
 And we try to supplement it with some of the e-mails that you can find to kind of get that sense that this is all about that conspiracy of FEMA having secret concentration camps, preparing for the end of the world.
 Yeah, preparing. Exactly.
So here on this side of the map, what we can see…
We see the train and if you move a little bit further down the road, you will see all the fences or the cages through which people would be transported in case of chaos or a big...
 And it all ties back into the whole conspiracy that, you know, in case of some big, huge event, the federal government has got this emergency thing in which they're gonna start transporting the dissidents by train into this area and bring them
 into these secret prisons that are inside this facility, and so the train is kind of how all these prisoners are being transported and then we see the walkway that goes down into the camp.
 And actually, maybe it was too subtle, but what were trying to imply with this facility and with all those things is that they're still building it.
It's not fully finished and therefore you don't see all the signs. You don't see all the things very clearly, because we were... The map is, not the map, but the camp is still… They're still putting the final touches on it.
So now Jensen is about to enter the FEMA camp In the story, what happens is that when Jensen gets there, the black ops are about to wrap up their operation in
 Detroit and they're supposed to fly away for another mission, and we were supposed to see a lot of black ops wrapping up, like putting back their gear in the trucks and stuff like that.
 You have the cranes on the trucks they cannot crate.
 The cranes, exactly.
 And that's in the cutscene, we see few in the backgrounds at some point, but it's very subtle.
And when we were back in gameplay, we were supposed to have scripted events that were continuing to tell that story, but we ran out of time and we weren't able to pull this off. So in the end, it stayed very shallow.
Okay, so now we're in the elevator. We're going into the actual FEMA facility.
We had a lot of discussions about it, because when you get to the bottom of the elevator ride, you're going to have the reveal of the box guard, because as of now, what you've seen, you've seen some of those weird boxes that stood out in the background but...
 You don't know what they are!
 You don't know what they are, and as you will get at the bottom of this facility, one is going to...
 Unfold.
 Unfold and you'll see what it is. But we were debating if it would be done through a cutscene, through… you will stay like free to move around in the elevator and everything.
And the thing is that we wanted to make sure that players wouldn't miss it. And eventually, what we ended up doing is that it started to unfold as you start to move forward at the bottom of the elevator.
I think in the end, most players, or I would say all players, like saw the unfolding of the box guard. But it was something that we struggled for a while like how to pull this off.
$
Cool thing about FEMA is that we really sat down and tried to figure out how, in the mechanical way, that the place would function into
processing all the arrival of the prisoners, you know, the citizens that are going to be contained there and it's like each room has a purpose for it.
You know what, this first room here, has these big cages, these mass cells which are where we thought we would just kind of all shove them in
there in masses and wait and where they can wait for being taken separately and being interrogated and processed and all that kind of stuff.
So as you go down the elevator you can see their many floors with each of the floors having these big mass containment cells.
So here we have the second part of the FEMA, I guess, processing ways for the prisoners and what not.
And this is where the prisoners would be taken out of the mass cells one by one, and they would be put into these individual cells where they would wait to be processed, and on the
left side of that room, there's all these cubicles, if you want, where officers of the FEMA, you know, slice of the government, would be there to interrogate, question and file each of the prisoners.
And what's interesting is if you enter each one of these cubicles, they're kind of empty.
There's like, you know, the desks have been started to being put together, and there's like construction material and boxes and stuff like that to show that, you know, that this specific FEMA camp is not finished yet.
 And that ties in as well to the backstory that we were having here. It's that this is a secret facility that's under construction, the spec ops are not a part of it.
But what they are is they have come, the Illuminati has basically pulled the strings with their FEMA friends and said, 'We need to use your facility, get everybody out while we get our guys in.'
 Yeah, the construction workers and all that stuff.
 So the construction workers and everyone were pulled out in order to bring the spec ops to let them do their top secret black op in here.
 In Detroit, which was basically storming Sarif HQ.
 Storming Sarif Industries.
So we had a really interesting idea that was brought to us by one of the level designers when we were going through the original iterations of FEMA, and he wanted us to kind of have this puzzle through dialogue.
We had this plan that even though this facility had been used by FEMA and the FEMA officials were all pulled out and the spec ops were there, there were still two FEMA officials who would be present there while the spec ops were there.
And they would not be enemies, they would be civilians who would be...
 Like neutrals.
 Neutral characters.
And we wanted to create this setup where if you stumbled upon these guys, if you played your cards right, you could convince
them that you were one of the black ops and, in doing so, you would be able to get the code for a secret barrack area and get this stuff.
And so we build this entire complex puzzled through dialogue that you could bluff your way through all this stuff.
And it was really fun and it was interesting how it all worked, and the one problem was that we had to go through so many iterations of the development of the levels themselves that their location in the facility kept moving and they ended up being put….
 I remember that.
 …into a location where it wasn't anymore kind of like a pinhole that you could only come in from one direction.
You could actually come from several directions because of the layout. So we kind of lost that forced encounter and because of that...
 If you trigger the alarm or so...
 If you trigger the alarm, the chaos…
So I've played this level and I've been told you still can do it in such a way that you can actually have that conversation, but I've never been able to because every time I've walked into this room, they'd already seen me as an enemy.
 And they attack on sight.
 If you can actually get that puzzle, it might be quite fun to try.
 That's some hardcore civilians!
$
Yeah, we are in front of Wayne Haas, the lobby guy in the police station, and actually, that was the first dialogue system that we nailed for the game. It was really capturing what we had in mind.
 We tried to go for a psychological game play.
 And still the best one, in my opinion.
 Yeah, and in terms of the realization and everything, but it was really with this one that we really tried to make you believe that you are talking to a real person, and that you could really have an influence on what's going on.
 And like you said, Jon, it is from an animation standpoint that this one is brilliant; you really see his expressions…
 Yeah. That one is all portrayed.
 It's all keyframed and it's the one that works; it works the best.
 You just want to slap him. That's how good he is.
 Yeah.
 Just want to like, “Wake up, you wuss!”
 And actually, in the original design of the conversation you can see that behind him there are some pills in a trash can, or on a shelf, I can't remember. But originally you were supposed to… in the game mechanics, to be able to look around, and…
 Ah, yeah!
 If you had the right augmentation, you would spot the blackmail item that you could use in this conversation.
 Forgot about that.
 Yeah, the original design for this special augment was much simpler than what we ended up with in the game, and it was just really like, you could scan the environment and find the
 blackmail item and you could then bring that up if you had the social aug. And so we had written that one specifically to encapsulate that particular weakness in Wayne's background.
 What were they? Like anxiety pills or something?
 Yeah, they were anti-depressants ‘cause, you know…
 Anti-depressants...
 It's Wayne, it's Wayne!
 He's got such a bad life, you know.
 We’ve got to say that the actor... that was the first one, like you said, for the dialogue challenge and obviously we had the pressure to find the right guy who's going to help to bring this to life.
 And again, god bless the stars that were shining on us, because this guy walked in and we fell… I forget his name; we fell in love with him right away. And just over time, the guy really brought Wayne to life, that with the animations we've done, like you said.
 And again, another example of a really good fit of the visuals, with the voice, the acting…
 Yeah, that's really true!
 It all came together and worked out really well, like  I mean, through the whole three years, four years of dev, we were always saying, referring to him as, “Poor Wayne. Poor, poor Wayne.”
 And what's really funny about that the acting was so good is that Wayne was never supposed to be a very important character. I think, in our
 blueprint, we just said, ‘You'll have a discussion with the desk sergeant,’ and it was really no major character that we were having at all.
 And it was so good!
 Yeah, it was so good, and the animation worked so well, and the voice acting did that; he became such a memorable character that we had to bring him back later in the game.
 Yeah, and it's the first one that we presented to the press and to the people, so…
 We knew his lines by heart.
 We saw it so many times that we were, yeah..
 It was like it was a joke in the office, were we would say his lines continuously, you know.
 And one thing that I’m sure people do notice is that, of course the recording and all that went on during like a three year process,
 so when Elias Toufexis, who plays Adam Jensen came in… I mean, there's a certain evolution over time that takes place organically of trying to find the character.
 When an actor gets into his role over time....
 Yeah. Once he found the voice, he, you know we never had to like, bring him back and say, “Oh, listen to this; we think you are a bit different.”
 But, you can tell that he hadn't quite perfectly found it yet, and in fact, there was one line that bugged me for like three years, and finally we did a retake at the
 end, where he really stepped out of his character because he's still… we were still trying to define the box of, 'Okay when you get really angry, this is how angry you get.'
 And we were trying to define that and saying, “Well, think of Jensen more as Clint Eastwood.”
 Clint Eastwood never really yells but you can tell when he is really pissed just through the sort of grimace in the voice, you know, and he really took that to heart. I remember
 he came back and he goes, “I watched ‘Unforgiven’ for like three days,” and he's like, “I know exactly how I want to play it.” It was a very difficult scene for him because he's got to be mad
 and sort of toy with him, and they have a history, but yeah, Jensen has to be, you know, you are the hero so you’ve got to be calm, cool and collective.
 Yeah.
 So it was quite challenging for him early on when he was still trying to find the...
 He wanted to redo it.
  Yeah, and he did actually… this was one of the first things he ever did, and four years later we are finishing our recording; we had to do a retake for the social aug and he heard himself and said, “Oh my god! That's horrible; I'll do it all over for free! I swear!”
But unfortunately we couldn't, too much was on it, so…
 Yeah, it was too late.
 Yeah.
 So now you know, Elias Toufexis will work for free.
Oh yeah, the famous…
 Restricted area.
 Yeah, restricted area.
How do we warn the player? We went through so many iterations about how do we fix this, how do we support the actual difference between the public area inside the lobby and rest
of the police station. If you did not convince Wayne, then the rest of the police station is completely hostile to the player, even though you are the good guy and all those are also good guys…
 It's because in the first play test, we didn't have any of the tricks that we used in the final game, and we just realized that players were just
breezing through the restricted area without noticing it, and after that wondering why they were attacked by the police officers.
 Yeah exactly, so we wanted to… I suggested to have alternate paths inside the lobby to infiltrate the police station, more to have the feeling of infiltration, but
 JF was against it so, then I decided to place a cop closer to the door because our system works so that NPCs automatically open the doors, so the door was always open!
 So we changed that specific door, we added more signs, and thank god for the play testers who gave us really great feedback and just by watching them playing we did many alterations, and then we found the sweet spot.
 Eventually, even with the signs and everything, it was still not clear enough because some players are just like looking super fast everywhere and they just go through the door and you have to reuse the dialogue system.
 I did a tweak by reusing the conversation system itself, and trying to just do a very quick thing by reusing one of the barks of the character by using
 it inside of conversation. That's why the character actually does the hand signal and say, “Hey, you know blah, blah, blah... you are not supposed to be here,” and
 it worked so well that we actually reused the forced conversation system and placed it somewhere else, multiple times throughout the game.
So that's pretty cool.
So, this little interaction, where you see the interrogation going on there, that's actually a remnant of an old side quest. When we were first doing our first passes for the vertical slice we had so many more.
This particular side quest ended up getting cut.
 Yeah.
 But we still felt this part added life, so we kept it.
 It was good flavor for the police station; we didn't want to just have empty offices everywhere. We did cut the side quest, but this was a good remnant to keep that added life and flavor inside of the station.
 That particular occupation actually really fit well inside of the police station, and there's so many, there are multiple traces of that old side quest. We were supposed to have the
crying mother inside of the lobby of the police station, that brother there, and the other brother was kidnapped and left alive but dying, walled inside of the sewers.
 He's like walled inside one of the sewers, and is he still there?
 I think so, oh crap, I forgot about him.
But there's also like an apartment that is completely upside down which was also part of that side quest. We left the apartment just to have
something interesting to see, but yeah, throughout the city there's multiple places you can see some hints about that old side quest.
 So I'd be very curious to see if any fans out there can find all those remnants and piece together what that side quest was supposed to be.
 Da-da-da!!
Someone will do it, I know!
 The challenge has been made.
So Frank, this looks like it might be a very special office, with that sign on the door?
 Yeah, when we worked on the police station, when I designed the bits and pieces of those places, I ended up trying to figure out how to name those places,
all those offices. And we reused some of the names from like, this is McCann's, so that's my name, my last name, McCann's office, and I always wanted to be a cop, an investigator.
And some of my friends, like Jean-Francois Champagne, who worked on the side quest, has also got his name on his desk down on the first floor in the main offices.
So yeah, we tried to have some fun with it.
 And a lot of other names were names of famous… if I remember correctly, they're cyber punk authors and science fiction authors.
But detective McCann in here is actually in charge of some of the missing... an entire investigation, I believe, into the missing people.
And as you go through the office you can see on the walls are the pictures of some of the missing women, and this actually ties into a thread that's very, very
subtle throughout the whole game, in which people have been kidnapped, women have been kidnapped, disappearing, and they end up actually, in Panchaea at the end of the game.
And so the names of all these women ultimately appear a lot in some of the emails that you'll discover later in the game in Panchaea, and it led to the whole ‘Missing Link’ storyline.
 Yeah, exactly. That was I wanted to add as well as, inside the ‘Missing Link’ DLC, inside the cargo, when I designed the cargo as well,
later on we added those pods, those life pods down below, secret life pods, and this kind of reminiscence of those kidnapped people throughout the world.
So, what's interesting about the laser beam in the basement of the police station is that very few players realize that if you take down the
police officer or anyone and then drag them through the laser beam, then you disable the laser beams and you can pass without being detected.
 Yeah, that's one of the system mechanics we have in the game where we didn't go through too much information in our tutorial videos, because we wanted
also to have the player experiment and have some fun with it. But yeah, that definitely, using the NPCs to temporarily disable the laser was one of the things, yeah.
 Yeah, and so if you're playing the game for the first time, then now we just spoiled it for you, and if you already played it and you didn't know, then now you know.
$
So here in the manufacturing plant we get close to the bridge where we have the police forces that are fighting the Purity First terrorists.
 Storming the plant.
 They are storming the plant.
And I wanted so badly to have this piece of 'show-don't-tell' where, now the police are pressing into the facility and everything, but with play test we saw that most players never really saw what was happening, like it was too below them.
 It was under their feet.
 Exactly.
 A lot of ideas during level design itself. We wanted to have windows, we wanted to show… how do we showcase this kind… type of event, but this even was only on
paper so it was very hard to actually make sure every single player was seeing it and, the whole 'AI versus AI' getting very like... right, Pat?
 Yeah, the AI programmer probably have a different story to tell, but we needed to have a faction system when you need to turn like enemies or  NPC; they were neutral and they have to know who they are neutral to and who they can attack.
So by having Jensen like taking control of a turret, and say, 'Now this turret attacks the enemy,' the enemy has to know who used to be his friend, that one was a friend but now has become an enemy. So we had...
 Like Facebook.
 So we had that system, and that's the beauty with 'Deus Ex' where we build systemic features and the AI could fight against each other, even if there we
didn't put too much love, I think it can have a low cost. But the production might not be impressive, like we wish, and like you wish.
 One of the constraint as well is that we didn't want to have to have the player interact with those guys, we really wanted to have AI
versus AI and leave them independent, so just because of that we had to make sure the player was enclosed in a very safe environment.
 In the sky bridge.
 Thus the infamous corridor with the glass.
 With the glass floor that no woman is ever going to want to walk over.
 True.
Well, so that's the end of the mission in the manufacturing plant. Maybe a lot of players didn't know this, but actually you can go back into the plant now that the mission is over; the police officers just took over the plant.
 Yes, they won the battle underneath the bridge.
 Yeah, they won the battle. And if you go back, you can go back to the beginning of the map and meet a lot of the police officers along the way.
You even have one police officer that is taking pictures of the hacker, who killed himself in front of you, and you can talk to all of them and they have their 'barks' and everything.
 That's crazy.
 And most people don't realize they can do that.
 No, and to me it was really important, because it's a game where you can go where you want, whenever you want, and we should maintain the logic of the story, regardless of what you do.
And I remember that what I wanted was giving a lot of headaches to the level designers, but also to the writers as well because they had to write more about these things.
So in a couple of places in the game we didn't do it, and with the storytelling of what was happening, we were sort of justifying that there is no way back.
But as much as possible it was a rule of thumb, like 'Okay, we are at the end of the map; we need to support going back at the beginning.' But this is the one where we did it best.
 And I remember the level designers kept trying to come back to you with, “Well, can we cut him off at the elevator? Maybe we can cut him off here?”
 No, no!
 “But what if we stop him here?”
 No!!
 “But we could put like a barricade from the police.”
 NO!!
 And thanks to JF, you can go back and find all those goodies.
 And again, is it important or not? For me it was more the attention to detail and trying to keep the credibility of the place and stuff, so.
So this particular computer here is one of the important ones, in light of the fact that it is the first computer in the game where you can actually find our first Nigerian email scam.
We had a lot of fun with the emails, trying to make it feel like it's a real part of the world and like the world we know. And so, you can actually find on every map, one Nigerian email somewhere in the map.
And in the Hengsha map there's actually a computer that you can find, where you find the person who originated the Nigerian email scam, and his computer lists every single computer in the game that has it.
So we were actually debating whether we would make it an Achievement to find them, but in the end we kinda cut that one off of the list.
Yeah, so here as you can see in this office building, there is a sea full of computers. And as you also know, we had to write emails for every single computer that existed in the game.
 And more than one.
 And one of the big challenges we had in doing that, was that we never quite knew ahead of time how many computers there would be.
There was level design, coming to us and saying, you know, “We need to know how many emails, how many computers you want,” and we were saying to level design “Well, we need to know how many computers you intent to put in there,” and no one would actually make a decision.
And we were doing it so late in the process as well that, when we actually sat down there to write them, we weren't really sure at that point how many computers there would be.
So it was pretty interesting until we finally got our communication straight and were able to say, “Ok look, can you give me a few more computers?” or “Could you take away a few computers ‘cause we just don't quite have it down”.
So that was a really big challenge and we learned an awful lot through the process, so we got it right with the DLC, ‘The Missing Link’.
 Speaking of computers as well, something that we could add, ‘cause again it’s something that people sometimes don't think about, how something that looks simple but is actually very complicated is that, you know in the game we have the interactive computers, right?
 Uh-huh.
 The ones that you're talking about now. We have the security hubs, the blue ones that are also interactive, and there's the... how do you say, the props computers that were just for…
 Filling the world.
 Just filling the world, like the ones you cannot use.
And actually these things generate very complex problems, because especially with someone like JF as a game director, where he wants everything to be very clear
and systemic, you have to make sure that the visual language is very, very clear between the ones you can use, and the ones you cannot use, and what their purposes are.
And that created a bit of, like a few headaches and everything, to get it done right.
 But you guys, you guys pulled it off.
 Yes, we did.
So we are about to enter the first social boss fight with Zeke Sanders.
And actually, the story here is that early on we decided that for some reasons that I can't remember very well, but we decided that you won't, you wouldn't be able to use the social augmentation against this guy.
And as we were fleshing out the upgrade system, we were mapping out…
I mean, not mapping out but establishing the pacing at which rhythm you would get the praxis kits or the praxis points, and that's why at the beginning of the game I'm not fully happy with how many praxis kits you get as you move forward.
 Well, if I remember correctly, this was the third social boss fight that we wrote, and at the time we wrote it, we didn't even had the concept of praxis kits. You had to go to the limb clinic to get operated on and so we did it.
 We were controlling it.
 We knew that you wouldn't get augmented before that and you'd have no chance to have the social aug, so I think that's why we decided not to have it initially in this conversation, because we knew you wouldn't have had a chance to get it yet.
And later we came in with the idea of the praxis kits and at that point it became this issue of, 'Oh, wait! We have to make sure we don't give you two because you might have it and we don't support it.'
 And what happened is that, like I was just saying, like what happened is that after that, at the beginning of the game, the pacing to get augmentations is too slow, and
it's something that we are aware of and we are not happy with it, because with those decisions and with what you explain we were forced to keep it this way, so.
So, here’s one of the interesting cutscenes where actually I remember us debating about the fact that everybody in this world were thin; there were no fat people, and everything.
And since we did our skeleton and et cetera for all the NPCs in the world, we knew that we couldn't address that thing.
And we said, “Well, at least there might be an opportunity to put something in instances like cut scenes, to cover the fact that not everybody in the world is thin, right?” And...
 Yeah, and we really wanted Josie to be…
 One of them.
 The manager of all this to be slightly heavier than everyone else in the game.
 Exactly, and there was this argument about it, that it would be tough to animate and stuff like that, it's not going to look good and...
 And that was nonsense.
 Yeah, but it was a tough one, and finally we managed to make her slightly more heavy than the other characters.
 Yeah, and I remember there were certain people on the team who really, really were against it.
And they were just saying it would ‘look weird visually,’ and ‘having a really thin terrorist with this heavy woman just won't work,’ and I never quite understood the heart of those things.
But in the end it works out really well, and it makes for a really good hostage situation, which is definitely improved.
 Yeah, for me, I was loving this. This is one of my favorite scenes. Like I said, you know, from a sound point, there was so much to play with. ‘Cause you’ve got the riot, well, the terrorist attack that is sort of happening outside.
But you’ve got the riot police coming in to handle it, you’ve got cops coming in, you've got a hostage situation, so I mean, the tension level is on ten, which is great.
The one thing that was funny when the scene first came to me is, we had almost nothing of Josie crying and whimpering, and I thought, ‘For a situation like this the hostage should definitely be sobbing and whimpering through the whole thing.’
So we started by adding that, which brought a lot of life to her character during the scene, like even when there's nothing going on, you can hear her kind of whimpering and sobbing.
And I remember; I think we worked a week just getting the timing for the sound.
There's the point where a helicopter beam comes right through the room, and I wanted the sound of the helicopter to come with it; to come really close so it sounded like they're just patrolling around and waiting for this guy.
That took almost a week, and again, like JF always says, it's funny how what seems to be the simplest thing can cause so much headache and be so complicated.
You know, like we were just synching a damn light with a sound, but it took forever. But once all the elements came in; this is one of my favorite scenes in the game because I love the actor who played Zeke.
I thought he was so good, and his performance along with Jensen's performance, all the sound, the outside stimuli, her sobbing; it just brought the whole thing together.
$
So this is a very interesting room. This is a room that is very dear to me.
It's one of the, you know, early, early stuff that we design for the game. This goes back to probably fall...
 2008.
 No, no, this is like fall 2007, I think.
 Are you sure? Maybe.
 Yeah, I think so. I mean, it ended up being produced in 2008 for the game.
 But I think if it's 2008, it's really early, like right after Christmas or something, right?
So we weren't really sure where we were going with the game at that point, and the locations and all that kind of stuff, but when you had to do the tech demo, right?
And this is what we did. In this room obviously the concept art, the idea was that it was a tech lab, it was a bio-tech lab. It's Thierry Doizon, his artist name is BARONTiERi, who did it. Superb concept art.
And the idea on 'Deus Ex' is that we wanted to make sure that the style, the visual style was very consistent throughout the entire game, right?
It was really homogeneous, and a good way to do this is you make sure the style that is on the concept art is the style that you want in the game. That there's no like dual standard, you know what I mean?
And then, what the production artist sees on the concept art, they need to reproduce it. I wouldn't say as it is, but they need to make sure the style is the same.
 It needs to stay faithful.
 It needs to stay very faithful, you know.
And what was interesting is that when that room was first designed, sometimes we'd see, you know, an artist working at his desk and we'd see what
we thought was a wallpaper of the concept art, you know, on his computer and suddenly that wallpaper would start moving!
 It was actually 3D.
 It was actually the 3D room! I was like, 'Holy shit, this looks one hundred percent like the concept art, almost,' it was really… it was one of… my first time in all of my... in my entire career where I really saw this 1:1 ratio between concept art and...
 It was impressive.
 Yeah, it was very impressive, you know.
 And actually it was the first part… on the first press tour we ever did with the journalists, that's the tech demo we showed.
 That's the first thing we ever showed to the journalists and they also asked, “What the hell is this engine?” Because there was so much of a flavor.
 There was a flavor, yeah.
 We definitely didn't have the best of engines to do this game. I mean, it's a well-known fact, but because of that style that we put in it, a lot of people were really kinda...
 Made it very attractive.
 Very attractive and special. Anyway, and we ended up... this is one of the few very, very early things that we kept and we recycled, if you want, in the final game, and this is the room that we have here.
Rolling.
So, we are in the hostage room in the manufacturing plant where we have the bomb!
 The bomb.
 And what is interesting with this one is that there are many ways to defuse the bomb. When you get into the room now, it's booby-trapped so the doors are locking behind you, and now you have to figure it out.
 And you have to hack, supposedly.
 Yeah you can hack…
 You can find the code.
 You can also find the code for it. But another way to solve it and a lot of players didn't know that, but you can actually shoot the tank to the left and the tank to the right, and that's it, because they are gas, the toxic substance…
 The toxic, yeah, the toxic mix is when they mix together in the base of the bomb.
 But if they don't mix there is no problem.
 Yes. And I think actually, you can shoot the connector that causes them to mix.
 Yeah.
 And I remember being in Los Angeles for one of the hands-on presentations with journalists the very first time that they got their hands on the game themselves and I remember
about, there may have been like, twenty, thirty reporters and afterwards everyone was talking and one of them said, “I don't know if this was supposed to happen, but I just shot the bomb and it stopped.”
And everyone else was looking at him like, 'You're kidding!' And I'm like, “Well, you win the prize! You found the secret way!”
So now we're entering into the first SAS zone of this map.
 The air lock.
 Yeah, the air lock. Actually it's something that we had to add later as we were producing the maps, to help the streaming.
 Yeah, I think also at that point in the game we weren't mastering our streaming capabilities as well as we were later on in the game.
So basically it's just a common thing that you've seen in a lot of games. While this door is locked, we're actually loading the entire room that's in the back and they were big rooms.
 Yeah, absolutely.
 The huge lab rooms with a lot of stuff to do and a lot of stuff to interact with. But what's good about them, and this is how they should be done, is they're thematically kinda, you know, inserted.
 It fits.
 It fits, it's you're in a lab and this thing looks like it's a place it's gonna... How would say Mary? Decontaminate you? Is that it?
 Yes, yes, it's gonna sterilize you .
 Sterilize you like 'tsssss' like all the streams and all that, so I'm sure for… maybe not for everybody, but for certain people, they didn't even realize what was going on; they were just like, 'Cool, I'm having the steam shower.'
 Then the door.
 Then the door opens.
 Yeah, I just remember me fighting it as long as I could. I was resisting it because I hate those things in general, because it's very artificial and we all know that it's just we have to load the...
 Yeah.
 The other portion of the map. But like you said, it turned out very well.
 Yeah, at least when they're well... thematically incorporated that way, you know, it works. And it works in a good way.
 Agree.
$
So, now we are entering into the hangar shipping zone of the manufacturing plant, and now we can have a look at the Purity First terrorists.
Actually, when they were born, when they were designed, they were looking more like medieval knights, and then we kinda felt that it was not totally in line with what a group of terrorists would be like.
 Right.
 Especially against augmentations, against everything. And in terms of the visual storytelling of them, it was kind of not doing exactly what we wanted.
 Right. Well, I think the original designs came out of the idea of the cyber-renaissance and the templars, and who represented what.
 Yeah they were.. Well, the idea was that we had two contrasts right?
The augmented people; the trans-humanist side with the cyber-renaissance, and the people who were against it; was kind of like the dark ages before the renaissance, more like feudal and more medieval.
And we said... well, the way that I saw it was that these guys were against augmentation, so they weren't augmented and they had to fight against people who were a lot stronger, a lot faster and everything, because they were augmented.
So my idea was to make them super armored, with crazy-ass big weapons, because they needed to - with military hardware technology - compensate for that.
In my early designs they were like, basically these walking tanks. And then JF comes up to me one day he's like, “Well these are like grass root...”
 Terrorists.
 “terrorists,” and what not, and he's like, “This would make no sense.” And this is one of the few times where me and JF kind of head-butted.
Really, like...! 'Cause we are usually always on the same page. I was like, “No, man. These designs are way too fucking awesome!!”, you know?
But then it actually made sense, the grass root and everything, so we made them look like cheap bastards, basically.
 And that's how they were born.
 Yeah, exactly. Hehe.
So here we are entering deeper into the manufacturing plant, and people need to know that it's probably one of the oldest maps that we did; before having final AI, before
really fully understanding the sectorization of the map areas to really take advantage of the systems we had, instead of showing off the limits of the systems we had.
And since we had tons to do, and many maps, we couldn't really revisit this map the way we would have loved to.
This is why it's probably one of the maps that showcase the limitations of our AIs the most.
That's why you see in this map like, some AIs that are going to the door frame and they stop there; they don't cross over to try to get you, and everything.
It's because the sectorization 'back in the day' has been used, and the map has been built with an AI that was not fully implemented.
When everything came together, we were like, 'Oh, it shows the limit of the systems.'
We tried to hide it as much as possible, like with the guys taking cover on the sides of the door, pretending that they are just waiting there, protecting themselves because you are dangerous, but…
 But…
 But it's not really that.
 Because you're augmented, and they're not.
 And therefore…
 Sometimes it looked like that, actually.
 But it's not what was going on, really.
 No, but in other maps that came later; now we had a better understanding of our systems.
Therefore, we were able to build maps in such a way that those limitations wouldn't be that apparent.
Well, the room full of lockers.
 Yeah.
 I hate…yeah…
 It reminds me of the good 80s and 90s.
 I can't get through that room without having to open every single locker that exists in that room.
 It's crazy.
 Well, I'm like you but not for the same reason. It's actually like I hate it. I don't want to do it, but I still do it because I want to get the goodies that are inside, and
I can never remember which ones they are, but if I knew it, I would just go straight to those ones because there's probably almost a hundred lockers in that room.
 I don't know. I never counted them but...
 There's at least sixty.
 But it feels like it's a slot machine, huh? You have to put another quarter, you have to put that, and you always hope that you are going to win something.
 No! Feels like a pain in the butt!
 But me, every time I go in this room I'm like, 'Ah, fuck! I have to open them all!'
 Yes.
 But it was on purpose. It was kind of a joke, and it was a kind of homage to those old school games, where we didn't really care or we didn't really think if we were putting the players through something that was too cumbersome or too overwhelming.
 Right.
 So it's just one room like that in the game. I think that's all.
 I think it's the level designer... I don't remember exactly, but I think one day he just made that room and when I saw this, I started to laugh. It was so ridiculous and for me it was like, 'Yes.'
 Of course we're going in.
 'We have to do this.'
 There's just so many, I mean, even in real life like either… I don't know, at a gym or at… you go to the pool or whatever, I don't think I've ever seen that many lockers in a changing room. It's just insane.
Well this corridor reminds me…
 Looks vaguely familiar.
 Yeah, reminds me of a company I know.
 Yeah, a lot of people when we designed this... and the way we designed this was not inspired by what we’re gonna say at all,
but a lot of people came up to us and mentioned that there's a really big game studio here in Montreal, that we are not gonna mention the name of, but most of us used to work there.
On the production of 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution' people would start to come up and say, “Hey, this kinda feels like it,” this mix of this very old building, kind of lofty looking, you know; the high ceilings, the wooden floor, the old brick walls.
But mixed with new stuff, new technology. And it does look like that studio we are not gonna name, but it was quite funny because a lot of people just would come up to us and mention it, yeah.
 Yeah.
So, here we are in front of the first conspiracy radio that is spread out through the entire game, and I can't remember how the idea came about, and
Steve is going to talk about it, but me, I just remember Steve coming to me really excited about this idea and really wanted to push it in the game.
 Yeah, well, when I get something in my head, I'm usually pretty passionate about it.
We were doing weekly reviews in one of our review rooms, and we were playing it, and what was really starting to bother me was that we needed to be pushing the conspiracy side of the game.
It was very important. And at that time, we were using a lot of the NPCs in the city hubs that you'd talk to.
And it always felt kind of strange and a bit awkward to me that you'd go up to a random person on the street and hit, you know, the talk button and you’d get some kind of line
like, you know, “Isn't it strange that Tai Yong Medical seems to shipping supplies to Panchaea?” And you're like, 'Who says that on a random street when you go up and talk to somebody?'
 Yes, it was very difficult.
 And it was very tough for the writers as well because, you know, you are trying to make it sound natural but… yeah.
So anyway, so I just… I had this idea, I mean, it's not an original idea; it's been done in other games, but, we tried to put our own spin on it.
We said, “Why don't we create a radio DJ who's gonna… his sole purpose in the game will be to push the conspiracy?”
And my inspiration is actually from the movie 'Eight legged freaks,' where they have the conspiracy DJ who lives in his little camper trailer out in the middle of nowhere.
And I thought, 'This is awesome, because it'll cost us a radio for an object that can just be dumped anywhere in the map.
And then we just go in the studio and record these long monologues,' which the writers did have to write, but they did an amazing job on the writing.
They studied Alex Jones and all kinds of conspiracy stuff, and I have to give Mary the credit for, I remember when we were talking about who we were gonna cast and
she looks at me and she goes, “What about Harry Standjofski?” who's this amazing actor that we loved so much, and we wanted to fit him into the game somewhere.
 But every time we kinda cast him as a part, just by chance that part would kinda get scaled down or cut, and we would be left with this great actor that we couldn't
put anywhere, so she gets the credit for the casting on that one saying, “What about him?” And my eyes just lit up. We didn't even cast, we just said, “That's it. It's him.”
 “Let's get him in there and do it.”
 And he did such...
 And he was amazing.
 What an amazing job he did, so…
 I think he did most of them in one take.
 Yeah, he was just… He just nailed it. He really…
 And it's Andrew who wrote the text, right?
 Yes, Andrew, one of our freelance writers.
 Yeah, who's also doing very well right now, as Annakin Slayd.
 Annakin Slayd.
Annakin Slayd, yeah, absolutely, yeah.
 So Annakin Slayd, the hip-hop artist who worked on this game, and he wrote almost all the pirate radio DJ stuff.
 Yeah, and most of the overheard conversations.
 I was just really happy again. It shows, you know, credit to JF's director… game director skills, that he was open to the idea, and he let me build off of it 'cause I was really happy when it went in.
 Yeah, but I had the easy job; I just had to say yes.
 Yeah, but it was good too because after that, Mary's team could actually write lines for the city people that were more in line with what
people would say, and we could actually dump all this conspiracy side onto one DJ and let him push the whole thing. So it really worked out well in the end.
So, here we come next to the first hacking mini-game of the game, actually. The story of hacking, well, it was the first gameplay that we really nailed down.
I remember when we were with the designers and trying to figure out what were our high level intentions with this thing.
It was that we wanted to stay in the real world, so we didn't want a mini-game that pulls you out of the game world and just into another realm or whatsoever.
We really wanted players, when they get invested in that, they will have also to manage their surroundings, because there can be guards, there can be anything happening, and everything.
So that was the high level intention, but if we go back to the hacking itself, Francois Lapikas, our lead game designer, was really thinking about different inspiration for that with table... pen and paper table games and stuff, cyberpunk ones.
And he really wanted to go into this thing of going with cycles of CPUs that you put them into…
 It was amazing!
 It was great. I loved it! He built it on an Excel sheet and he had all those parameters to manage, and it was really... you felt you were really hacking.
 It was a geek's dream, really.
 Absolutely. But the thing is that it was hard to really...
 Grasp it.
 Grasp it and see how visually it would work, and everything.
 But the tension was there. What I remember the most is that it was really, really tense, and you kinda felt pressed by what you were doing, and the danger.
 Yeah, yeah, it was working, but still we were struggling with the visual aspect of it. We tried to be as mass market as possible and make it accessible.
 Yeah.
 And actually, it was one of our artists  one morning that came in, and he came with a drawing with icons and everything, and it was portraying how it could look on screen.
And when I saw that I was like, 'Oh, my god! I think we got it.'  And Frank looked at it…
 He's not happy.
 Frank was not really happy because his pride was like, 'Aw, I can't make it work'-kind of thing, and everything.
But he recognized that it was really the idea that makes the hacking work, and it took him two weeks to take that drawing and readapt his design to fit with that kind of philosophy.
And then we went with the programmers after that, just implemented and iterated with a lot of internal play tests and everything, and that's the first part of the game that was completed a long time ago.
So this is the manufacturing plant. It's the first mission that Adam Jensen goes through after getting fully augmented.
 Once he's… once he's RoboCop.
 Once he's RoboCop. Now he's ready to use his new tools. The thing is that the first final version of the map that we got, actually to just put people in the context, there were supposed to be those terrorists taking over this facility...
 The Purity First guys.
 The Purity First guys trying to find evidence that Sarif Industries was going through unethical work and stuff.
 Exactly, imagine it's like as if Green Peace takes over like a whaling ship or something like that.
 But the first kind of semi-final version of the map; we started it and you wouldn't see anything, everything was pretty, everything was super clean, nothing going on.
And not only that it was clean in terms of like, you didn't get the feeling there was a siege, but also the indication that it was besieged by Purity First was not there.
 There was no sign of break-in.
 There was nothing.
 Yeah, there was nothing at all.
 And it was just the story, telling you this is happening, but as you were walking in the game, you didn't feel it, so we had to go through several iterations.
 So we had to go in and point out that, “We need things here, guys.” Like graffiti and break-in signs and all that.
 And the banners. I know that you've always thought that the banners look way too professionally done for an organization like Purity First.
 Yes, they look like... Yes.
 For a terrorist organization, how they got the money for silk screening of huge banners was always curious.
 Well, I've done silk screening at home myself, so I guess you wouldn't need a really big silk screen to make those banners though, but yeah, no, it's true.
So this is pretty funny. You guys have probably noticed already or will notice there's paint buckets lying around in the entire game and they are all kinda empty.
 All over the place.
 Yeah, all gold.
 All over the place, yeah, and all empty. Yellow or gold paint if you want. And the joke behind that is because there's so much yellow, gold and orange in the game.
 Black and gold.
With the black and gold obviously, the fifty percent of black and gold.
The joke is that it's actually people in the world who actually, you know, took paint buckets of yellow paint and painted the world that way, so it just became a little inside joke, and we started putting these buckets all over the place.
 So now you know how the black and gold was made in the first place.
 Yeah, it is not from us. It is from a very, very advanced AI that started painting the game to their liking, really.
 So as you continue playing the game, keep an eye out to see how many there are.
 Keep an eye out.
 All over the place.
Yeah, this map actually is kind of… It symbolizes the revival of Detroit in some way, and in some ways when we look back at Detroit in the 20th century, it was one of the big cities for the car industry, and everything.
 And this manufacturing plant actually is an old car factory that has been repurposed for Sarif Industries' needs and stuff.
And for us it was using this metaphor to show the reusing of the old power of America of the 20th century and putting it in the 21st century, but into the new field of technology
that makes the city strong again. And as we were brainstorming for the different cities in the game, like Detroit, we were wondering like, 'Why Detroit?' and, 'Why would we go there and...'
 I was one of those, I was like, 'Why? Why the hell would we go to Detroit?', but it ended up making a lot of sense.
 Yeah, it made a lot of sense because when you think about it in the history of America, it was like the... Ford basically revolutionized the way cars are made.
 Probably even part of the economy itself.
 And in Detroit, by introducing the new factories and new technologies and stuff. So why not, when the industry fades, would someone else with new technology come over and take it over?
 Yeah.
 And take over those old plants and basically recycle.
 Yeah, we were actually saying that Sarif did it on purpose, right?
 Yes.
 That he chose to refurbish? Basically, right? Refurbish these factories as a symbolic move, right? It was purposeful, and I think it was a really good idea.
 Yeah. And last week I was…we're in November, as we are recording it… Last week I was reading in the newspaper…
 November 2012.
 Yes. A newspaper story about Detroit, that it was being revived...
 Revitalized?
 Yeah, revitalized through different new companies, and the downtown is becoming more and more interesting. It has nothing to do with bio-tech corporations…
 But it's still the same idea.
 But it's....Yeah, exactly.
There is a funny little thing here. If you notice when Jensen comes in to the VTOL in the cutscene, he is wearing his jacket and then when we start inside the plane, he is not wearing the jacket.
It was kind of a big problem, where between cinematics and in-game they were saying, you know, something fell through the cracks.
So for audio to try and help that out, at the end of the cutscene, you actually hear a cloth rustle, and it is supposed to be Jensen taking his coat off and throwing his coat on the floor, to try and help bridge the gap.
It was too late, we couldn't fix the cutscene, and we couldn't put the coat on, and here it did make sense, so that is how we dealt with that.
 And this is a pretty major scene with David Sarif. It's really the first time you ever get to meet him in person, and I remember the casting for David Sarif; we went through a lot of different ideas about what kind of person this should be.
 Should he be really corporate? Should he be this?
And I remember we had a couple contenders, and when Steve Shellen came in, and the way he played it, it wasn't exactly what I was picturing in my head but I remember going, 'Wait a second, it's like it does kind of… it totally works!'
Because we wanted a very charismatic guy who is a very friendly guy, but we wanted a corporate CEO kind of guy. And I remember walking out of that casting session going, 'Oh, my goodness! What is gonna happen?'
And I think the decision, we did it early enough in the process that the decision to cast him totally affected how we wrote that character from that point on.
$
So now we are facing one of the air vents of the game, actually, the air vents…
 One of the biggest…
 The cleanest air vents in the history of games.
 Yeah, the air vents are definitely the cleanest air vents in the history of games.That's true, and also, this was probably one of the biggest challenges…
 With the lockers.
 …with the lockers, of the entire game of 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution.' You would think it would be like AI or hacking or how to make a story as complex as the one that Mary pulled off or whatever, but no.
 No, the air vents.
 It was the air vent doors.
 And they have to be perfect because they are all over the place.
 Yes.
 All over the place. The thing is that when you design something like that and there's a door that needs to open, and you wanna make
sure of that... and especially the air vents because we would hide them so much, put crates in front of them or put all sorts of crap in front of them.
The way that they open, you wanna make sure it's not gonna obstruct these things, obstruct AI or whatever. But at the same time we wanted it to open in a fairly credible way, you know.
 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
 So we had them that would kind of slide in a spaceship way like on the side like, 'chuuuuu.' You know? We were just like 'nah, you know..', whatever. And eventually what happened is that our lead…
 Philippe Desrosiers.
 Philippe Desrosiers, our lead modeler, who also has studied engineering, and drafting design, and all sorts of the things like that, so he's really competent with mechanisms
and figuring out how things work, and it might seem very simple when you look at it in the game, like, 'Yeah, this is what, you know, should've been done from the beginning.'
But it's not always that easy and that obvious, but he ended up thinking about these hinges that are just kinda pushing the hatch forward and then bringing it upward, and it's that simple.
 And that's the final solution, but when you look at how it was made in games before that, like it just opens really like a door…
 Trap door kinda way.
  …a trap door.
 Yeah.
 But the thing is that we could have done that, but you have physical objects, you have the characters and you always have to think…
 Cover, AI...
 Exactly, you always have to think about if the player is going to get stuck, if it's going to damage the experience and what not, and sometimes trivial things become really important things.
 Yeah, and I remember when he made that thing like how happy I was just for a freaking hatch.
 We were all happy.
 We were just like, 'Oh, my god. This is insane!' It was like we almost went out for a beer or something, you know.
 Hahaha.
Here we are close to the turret, which is one of the robotic enemies that we have in the game.
 It's the first item we see them in the game as well.
 Yeah, I think so.
 We've seen one that's broken before, but on that floor it was a real working one, yeah.
 And one of the things we always said, is we wanted to build the world that is systemic, where all the systems can interact with each other in a very natural way. And one day I remember I was like taking the trash can and throwing it at the turret.
 You didn't even know if it would work, I remember.
 No, I was trying and some people were like, “What are you trying?” “I'm just trying to check if…”
 Taking that trash can and throwing it on it, pick it up again, throwing it on it...
 Some people next to me they were like, “Oh, you are losing your time. It's never going to blow,” or whatever.
 And the trash can does probably like 0.001 point of damage, you know.
 And I continued doing it, doing it.
 Like thirty minutes.
 And then 'BOOM.' It exploded.
 So now you know you can kill a gun turret with a trash can.
$
So here in Adam's office, you can see his computer and you can find emails on it as you can find emails all over the company of Sarif.
But, in particular, here we start off a quest for Jensen to investigate these Neuropozyne thefts that are going on.
And this was actually a mini quest that was proposed by the level designer who created this level, and he came to us and said he really wanted to have this really cool thing, where you could just break into
offices and find the codes to other peoples offices and it would be this whole mystery kind of solving, wrapping it up to the side quest of who is stealing the Neuropozyne.
But his real intention was really just to give players a reason to get inside offices and steal things and find good codes for it. So he never really thought through the actual quest itself, and neither did really me or anyone else.
So when we actually sat down to start writing these emails, we just kind of had this thing as, I am going forward and I am trying to build this whole mystery through this whole quest and eventually, as I am getting to the end, I am realizing, 'There is no payoff.'
 Yeah, there was nothing.
 And there is nothing. Because we can't pay it off because that's part of the side quest that comes later, and we were doing it so late in the production process that we just kind of had no chance.
 It was a bummer because a lot of players came to us after that, because they were really into that quest and everything, and they were asking us like, “How does it end? Where is the conclusion?” and we were like, “There is none...”
 The conclusion is, 'When you steal from your office, it leads nowhere.'
 There is the moral.
 There is the moral?
 Crime doesn't pay.
 I steal pixels, polygons... all the time and I don't know what to do with them. I have no idea, I stack 'em up.
 “Stealing is bad, m’kay?”
So with this one, the ‘Final Fantasy’ poster, it was quite an adventure.
 Yeah, one of the concept artists had this idea and he is like, you know, it was not too long after we were bought by Square Enix, so he had the idea to do this little poster.
And it's ‘Final Fantasy 27’, you see, because the game takes place in 2027, and he just put it like this for the fun of it. And it became something really big, because we wanted to keep it.
But, you know, the way Square Enix works, they are very serious about their licenses and what not. So we actually went all the way to Wada San.
 And asked him.
 And he actually had to show it to some of the artists and some of the art directors of the franchise so they could approve that it, you know, it had something that had to do with the game.
And what is funny as well is, if you look at the poster, the head of the lady is hiding the numbers, and there is actually not enough space for the numbers if you actually try to like... imagine them there, which doesn't work.
But whatever, it's still there.
Yeah, Sarif HQ; when I saw it, I was pretty impressed with it. It was really quite the achievement visually, and just everything you had in there, there was so much exploring to do, all the pillars you could get the history from.
You could get the history of augmentation and the work Sarif had done. So I knew for the exploring type players, they were gonna spend a fair amount of time here. So it was a bit stressful in coming up with a track for this.
I just remember telling Mike I wanted something really cerebral and subtle, something that can easily just slip into your back consciousness while you are playing and you would only notice it if we took it away.
 It is kind of melancholic, right?
 It is, it’s got a very melancholic, almost a bit of a sad feel to it.
 Is that the same track that we ended up putting on the website, in the Sarif Industries website, the viral website that we did?
 I think so, it's the same track that we use as the menu track, because it just...
 Oh yeah, it's that one.
 We were going to compose a menu track,
but in the end we just felt this track was really strong and it represented, I don't know; it sort of encompassed something of the game that was important, and it felt okay to put it as the menu track because it is almost like Sarif HQ.
You visit it three or four times in the game and again, you know, when you are going to revisit an area and you are coming back with the same music you are really hoping people aren't like, 'Ah, not this again!'
 So you know, I was fully aware of that at all time and a bit stressed out about it. But again, credit to Mike and the work he did. He came back with the track that for me,
it fits perfectly. And based on the comments that were positive, that people came back with, we actually said, “Well, let's throw it in as the menu track, because people seem to really like it and it seems to work.”
So as you walk around Sarif HQ, you will see on all the doors near all the offices the names of the employees. We kind of did this all at once, very quickly.
One of the level designers said that we needed to name these people, and we had no idea.
So I assigned it to one of the writers, Mark, and he had the great idea that, since this is a scientific research and a thing in the
renaissance style, 'Why don't we make up names? Why don't we take names of scientists and renaissance thinkers from the past...
 And painters.
 ...and painters, and kind of mix them up?' So a lot of people in here, with the exception of Will Rosellini, are actually these references to ancient... to renaissance thinkers and painters and artists.
Here we have a good example of ‘show-don't-tell’ with this plate on the wall, where we make this building feel much more important and bigger than what is actually playable.
 And I remember the first version of it, when I was playing it. The level artist had slapped up a sign and it basically just had three floors to the whole building, because that is really all you get to explore.
 But when you are outside, it is humongous.
 Yeah, and I am like, “Wait, guys. We’ve got to have more in there. We’ve got to have like more offices and more things to show this.”
So we ended up submitting a list to him, and some of the things we wanted didn't get in there, like we wanted a cafeteria named 'The Swallow's Nest,' named after...
 James.
...one of the writers who worked with us. And the whole part about ‘this is all under construction.’ It ended up helping us to explain why you only go to a few floors, and yet also tie into the story.
So by now, depending on how much time you spend in the Sarif offices, David Sarif contacts you a couple of times to tell you to go to the manufacturing plant.
 “Adam!”
 Yeah, exactly. And that thing, it was in the game for a while, with the dialogue, depending on how much you were spending there or not, popping up several times with different variations in the conversation.
 “Things are going to get much worse,” and everything.  And I was reviewing the build in November...
 1992?
 1992... In November 2010, and we were almost Beta and everything. And I realized, 'Oh, my god!' like, 'It's just smoke and mirrors and we don't carry it through.'
Like there is no real consequences, and it's a game about that, and I was, 'Oh, my god!'
 I think that is one of the best things of the game.
 And we are missing the point. And the next morning I come back in the office and I go to David Anfossi, our producer, and say, “Man, we made a huge mistake and now we
are going in our first hands-on with the journalists and we are totally fucked, basically. We need to have real consequence to that thing, and so we need to re-record lines with...”
 And we basically needed to kill the hostages, if you don't get there in time.
 We needed to re-record lines, new lines for police officers, for David Sarif, for Adam Jensen, for all those beautiful people, and he approved it and I was so happy. And then it was the quest for...
 And what was crazy about it was, first of all, we were so close to like almost having to ship the game that we had released a lot of our actors. We'd already done all the recording of Sarif himself.
So we had to go through it, and we had to kind of indicate which actors would have to be brought back, how many lines they'd have and then we had to find Steve Shellen.
 Yeah, we found him somewhere on a beach in Morocco, doing something with somebody.
 He was on vacation, right?
 Yeah, he was.
 He had been wrapped.
 Yeah, he was done and I mean, you know, anybody who knows Steve Shellen... very talented actor, but very much a free spirit.
 How long it take you to get to him?
 It wasn't that bad actually, because I think he did leave information with his agent saying, “If anybody needs me...” And so it was actually quite surprisingly quick.
But then, it was just the logistics of it, like, 'Okay, I've got to find a studio in Morocco that this guy can go to.' And you know, ‘I have no way of speccing out what their facility is like, what it is gonna sound like.’
But somehow, through the magic of technology and that we had our voice director here, we had Mary here, and we hooked up via Source-Connect, which is a software that allows you to link up in real-time and listen to the studio session.
So we were able to do it that way, and I guess he showed up in Bermuda shorts with coconuts in hand, and he did it and we got through it.
 It was just a few days before the deadline, and Steve came to me and he's like, “Well, hopefully it is going to work and the quality is going to be there, otherwise we might not be able to use it.” And we were super stressed.
But it was a fun ride.
 Yeah, and it worked out, because that's the first thing everyone comments on when  they start playing the game: “Oh, my god! The hostages are dead already. I didn't know that would happen!”
 Yeah, it's one of the few games that really tells you something and...
 It teaches you early on that there is going to be consequences.
 And that really encapsulates what a ‘Deus Ex’ game is all about. It's this theme, that you don't even know that is really happening, depending on what you do...
Some people would arrive there and see them dead, and they didn't pay attention to what David was saying, and they wouldn't know why, and that's what it's all about.
 And it almost didn't happen.
So that's pretty funny;
if you look at that pizza box here, it's ‘Maggio's Pizza,’ and that's actually one of the texture artists. And if you look at the face on it, that is actually his face and throughout, I think it is in Detroit, there might be
one in Hengsha as well. You see the actual restaurant as well, with his name and his face on the window. So that is the kind of stuff we did a lot in the game, and which is...
 Did he become rich with that?
 Well, I haven't seen him for a while, so I think he is probably very rich, yeah.
 He retired.
 Yeah, he retired. Yeah.
So here is the V.T.O.L., the VTOL, Adam's chopper, or Faridah's chopper. This is definitely one of the pieces of hardware that I really prefer in the game, I mean, one of my favorite ones.
I think it's a perfect mix of really almost hardcore sci-fi design, yet with a lot of credibility to it, where we can easily imagine this is where things would go, you know, in twenty or thirty years from now.
I just really love it. I have always wanted to make a little model of it, kind of like a scratch build.
 It looks really good.
 It looks really good. Just buying pieces of model kits from airplanes, and stuff like that and just like, from the pieces, actually build that and… yeah, it has a lot of character and that's it. I really like it.
 Yeah and speaking of character, since the VTOL is also very much associated with Faridah, Faridah Malik… Faridah was actually a character who was not originally thought to be a very important character in the game.
I think it took a long time before we actually gave her a name. In fact, at first we were calling her 'Farinah.' But then everyone here was saying, “Mary, that means ‘wheat’ in French.”
 Flour, it's flour. It's 'farine'.
 “It's ‘flour’ in French. It can't be that,” and everything.
But she really wasn't intended to be this big character at all in the game, and then as we continued developing the game and writing the scripts and starting to add more player choice into dialogues, she ended up becoming…
And it makes sense when you think about it, because she is one of your constant companions.
So she ended up coming within the development process itself, developing into a very big character. And I think our original backstory for her
was that she was supposed to be of Muslim descent, and we originally wanted to have her use Arabic language and swear words, and everything.
 We tried it.
 But then when we cast, we ended up casting the actress who’s one hundred percent American.
 Because, here is the thing, what I remember is, you had a strong affection for the character because it was based on the character in ‘Battlestar Galactica.’ Well, ‘based,’ you were saying, as a reference.
 A little bit.
 It was a reference.
 Yeah, as a reference.
 So we had that, but then she’s got to be Arabic. So we had found the actress and we loved what she brought, and she had that sort of tough, tomboyish sort of way about her and we really loved everything about it.
But every time we would have dialogue where she would have to swear in Arabic to kind of give her that, you know, where she comes from, it just always sounded really forced.
It just never worked. Like she would nail the pronunciation but it's just, it's not natural.
 We pretty much figured the first time that she did that, it was like, “Okay, we're dropping all that right now, and we're just going with the American.”
 Yeah, we very quickly adapted it. We kept the character, we kept her origins. We just removed the swearing from the Arabic language and kept her North American, and it worked well.
 Yeah.
 Also another thing; the thing on her face, above her lip; actually in the game it looks like a beauty mark, but it is supposed to be a Monroe piercing. And it just didn't really come out all that well in the game.
So everybody, like there is a lot of fan art about Faridah and they put a beauty mark, but it is supposed to be a little piercing, really.
 Now you know the truth.
 Now you know the truth.
 I thought it was a piercing.
 Say that again?
 I always thought it was a piercing.
 Cool, so we were two thinking it was a piercing.
So probably, depending here on how you played, you might have gone or not into the ladies' restroom, and eventually if you go meet Pritchard, he will comment on that.
So for the old fans of ‘Deus Ex,’ for us it was just a way to pay homage to this kind of similar scene in ‘DX1’ and...
 And pay homage to perverts.
 Exactly.
 And I think that is why we put the conversation that is going on in there.
 To attract people.
 And I remember watching some of the people here testing jumping to see if they can see the women inside the restroom.
 And you added a sound about that, like if you jump a couple of times like, “Is someone here?” or something.
 Possibly, to be honest, I don't really remember. I just remember that I loved the delivery of the actor Pritchard when he just adds casually, you know, “You might wanna stay out of the women's washrooms.”
It was well written and well delivered.
 Yeah and actually, I remember when we recorded it, they recorded it and they were like, “That was just a joke line, right? I mean, that's not going in the game, is it?” And we were like, “No, that is really what will happen.”
So here we are in front one of Sarif's employees, Will Rosellini.
 Will Rosellini.
 And actually, he was our consultant on augmentations in the game, and what is really cool about this, how it came to be, is that one day we were
working and we received an official letter by this guy presenting himself and the field he was working in.
He said that he could be really an asset to us to work with the augmentations and stuff.
 Because he was a huge fan of ‘Deus Ex’ and he really wanted to make sure that the level of scientific knowledge was accurate and into it, to make that fiction feel even more real.
 Exactly, so we contacted him and therefore we started this collaboration, and he was more into your turf, but...
 Yeah, and he really helped me a lot because we would have just been doing research ourselves, but you're never really sure what's right.
But having an expert in the field who can actually kind of help guide us and correct things and help with a lot of the technical jargon that we were working with was really good.
And then I remember kind of thinking as we were coming up with Sarif's offices and employees and needing names for people, I was like, “We should see if Will wants his name on one of those doors.”
So I sent him an email and I said, “Hey, would it be okay if we gave you an office?” and he was like, “Oh, my god! That would be so cool!”
 It makes total sense 'cause it's a biotech company, you know, so like that's what he does.
 Exactly, and then it actually worked out that he was involved in some of the mystery of the thefts and I said, “We are actually probably going to accuse you at one point and make you a suspect at one point, is that okay?”
And he is like, “Oh, my god! That would be so amazing!” So it worked out really well for us.
 He is a very interesting guy. Didn’t he use to play baseball or something?
 Yeah, he was in the MLB at some point. With Arizona, I think. I can't remember exactly.
 What is that? I am not really familiar with this. Is that like the league right before the big league?
 No, it's the big league.
 It's the big league?
 MLB.
 MLB, Major League.
 Oh, like he was in the real thing.
 You know, like with the ball and the baseball bat.
 Like Sarif has in his office.
 Ah yeah, that thing that like lasts forever and nothing happens?
 No, that's soccer.
So once again we are back in offices with emails on computers. That was for me one of the biggest triumphs and biggest tragedies of the game. Basically, there are so many emails in this game, and...
 I don't know what you are talking about.
 ...it was really about trying to bring the flavor and the life and hiding things.
But in terms of the actual creation of them, everybody kind of kept pushing the writing of the emails off to the end of the game because it is very easy to implement text. That was the philosophy.
 But at the same time, as we were building the levels at first for the level designers, it was hard to know exactly how many computers they would have and stuff.
 Yeah, and so no one actually really sat down and thought about the e-mails or how they should be done, and we just were figuring, 'Ah, it will be a simple thing to do.'
But by the time we actually got to the writing of them, we only had like a week or two left on our writing schedule, and I had already lost most of my writers and it was like, 'Okay, time to come in!'
And so I came in on a Saturday and started with Sarif HQ and I basically wrote… I basically worked 20 hours over the weekend. Ten hours straight on Saturday, ten hours straight on Sunday. No lunch, nothing, to try and do this.
And I didn't even finish Sarif HQ and I remember saying, 'Oh, my goodness! I have to go in tomorrow and go to JF, and go to David the producer and say, “We are never gonna be able to do this.”’
Because one of the things we hadn't actually realized was that the level designers had told us at this point certain computers and given ideas, but
everybody was thinking about it from the standpoint that, it's your computer, so you are reading the mails that I wrote on my computer to someone else.
And it wasn't until I actually sat down and started working on it that I was like, 'Wait a minute, it is my computer but I am not reading the emails I write; I am reading the emails people write to me.'
 I read my emails all the time.
 So suddenly, I had to create...
 But you are one of a kind.
...not just one character...
 Oh yeah, they are so well written.
...who is receiving the mail, I had to create all... If every computer has three e-mails on it, I have to basically come up with three other people who wrote those e-mails and address them to me, and it suddenly became wrapping your head around it.
You were like, 'Oh, my goodness!' It was a huge thing.
 It became much more complicated than it sounded because even me, at first I was telling you Mary, like, “It won't be a big thing. It won't be tough.”
 And I made it harder on myself because I was the one who insisted there had to be at least three on every computer. Whereas I think in the original ‘Deus Ex’ there was maybe one on a computer at times, but...
 No, there were more than one but...
 But it was a really great challenge and, in the end, we pulled it off and I remember everybody reading the reviews and talking to reporters and everybody talking about the emails and how much they love them.
So that's why it was my worst and yet my best moment.
$
So now we are in Megan's room.
 Yeah, this is Megan's Office. Obviously, pretty much the first in-game part of the entire game.
This was a pretty important room for us because, since the clutter is really important in the game, we wanted to make sure that it was there straight from the get-go, so this is one of the really good rooms in the entire game where it's extremely cluttered.
That pillar of the art direction was quite well executed.
 And the cyber-renaissance is... you can already feel it.
 Yeah, you can really start feeling it and all that.
 It's not the biggest one but...
 It's not, for cyber-renaissance, it is not the biggest one. But definitely for the clutter, it's one of the good ones.
Now, I have no idea why everybody is so messy in this game though, and that nobody cleans or, you know, puts their stuff
in order, but it doesn't really matter anyway.
 When the end of the world is coming, you have other priorities.
 That's true.
 Like living your life.
 Like living your life, leaving pieces of paper everywhere and stuff like that... They probably don't even know what paper is anymore anyway, because there are phones and stuff; that's why the paper is all over. They are like...
 We don't know what this is.
 We don't know what that is.
 And now, if we look at Megan, I like her idle stance. It is quite awesome.
 Yeah, I have always hated that.
 She is a sexy kitten.
 A sexy kitten that wants to go to the bathroom.
 Exactly. And I have always hated that, and quite frankly, when I play the game, I like to explore and find the different items even though I know where everything is. And so, I purposely don't look at her the entire time.
 Yeah, I think it's almost like borderline sexist, really. Just the way she is standing there.
 I think she is out of character.
 It's out of character, but it's also like a woman waiting for a man and she is like... You know, like it's just... I don't know.
 Yeah, sometimes we know it but we realize it too late.
 And in this room too, like Mary alluded to, we have several pieces of information that actually were kind of selling in advance a little bit, the conspiracy and the story twist and everything. And actually that was a huge debate among the team.
 Like, among the people in the team, whether we should hide those...
 Yeah, how obvious should they be.
 Yeah, should they be obvious or not?
 Should they be like... and in fact, I think that the achievement you get from getting all of them is old school gamer or something like that.
 Really?
 Yeah.
 I didn't even know about that achievement.
 It's the point-and-click kind of...
 We're thinking that it's like the point-and-click mentality because it's really something that is up to you to decide and find.
 It's the king quest achievement.
 But for me, it was really important that we hide them. But some thought it was maybe too hardcore and we went into, 'Okay, when you get close, you have the icon that you can press so now you have the information about that.'
 Yeah, you need that at least.
 So, I think it was kind of a fair ground.
 I agree.
So, this section where the attack takes place, originally what we had wanted to have was that you would actually go back through the area that you saw through the 'Walk and Talk,' and kind of do that whole ‘Half Life’- thing,
where you take the descent down and then you fight your way back through everything you saw earlier. But apparently the... Remind me again JF, I think the original 'Walk and Talk' was not designed for a level?
 Yeah, the layout was built...
 The level design, yeah.
...in such way that it was just made to be controlled, not to let a player have total freedom.
 We would have had to change it a lot to make it gameplay acceptable, and then we wouldn't have recognized it as the 'Walk and Talk.'
 Because even there were some places we didn't put in any collision or...
 Exactly, so in that sense then, we had to kind of re-figure a bit of the story in terms of...
Actually, it came in better for us because, then, when you come later into the Sarif Industries and you see the signs, you see parts that are under construction and it's because it is where Megan went to in the elevator ride.
So it ended up working out pretty good for us.
 True.
So, here we are just right before the scripted event with Barrett, where he kills the scientist.
What is funny is that, originally, in the map layout, as you were walking down this corridor, there was a window in front of you with fire and smoke, and what's funny is that when you were getting there, it was triggering the scripted event.
But players were attracted to the window to look outside, and they were totally missing the scene with Barrett. At some point I asked the artist to remove it and just put...
I would say a bland wall, to make sure that players are attracted in the direction of Barrett. And after that change, like in the playtest and everything, it was working super fine.
 Damn artists!
So here in this room, we see for the first time the two black ops killing a scientist, that he falls off the guard, and that has been a crazy ride, just to get this thing working.
We were on the verge of cutting it, because it was really hard to have those scripted events working with the environment and with the physics and everything.
It has been a nightmare and I fought until the last minute to make sure that we get this in, and finally it worked.
 It worked really well. I don't think most people realize, most gamers, how hard it is just to put things like this in. I mean, depending on the engine that is being used, but how hard it can be to have those scripted events going on.
 It's just one guy being pushed over railings, but it can be a freaking nightmare.
 Especially if you don't have the tools.
 And if you don't have the tools.
 And on the audio side, we worked really hard. Like for me, it was a huge thing to try and really sense the 'show, don't tell,' the terrorist attack happening.
 So as you are walking and you are coming across dead bodies in there, I thought it would be cool if we could hear the sort of the...
 The violence.
...the violence and the killings and all that, before you see it. And then when you come around the corner, you would see the bodies lying there, and it would kind of put it in context.
It didn't come out as hot and sexy as I hoped and wanted. But it came out really cool and again, there were certain limitations we had to deal with that were behind it.
But the team came together and pulled out something that was really close to what we wanted.
So here we are just before the corner where Fedorova is introduced and she kills some guards.
That was a lot of work and everything. But that sequence came quite late during the development and we realized too late that it wasn't working, because we foreshadowed it with the two guards being killed at the other end of the corridor,
and we thought players would be attracted and go see what's lurking beyond the corner. But actually what happened is that most players were scared and they were just taking cover and waiting.
 Because they just saw people getting gunned down and everything. So obviously, your first reflex is just to kind of hide or whatever.
 And then when they were getting to the corner, when they realize nothing was happening, the door was already opened, the scientist on the other side of the door was already killed.
So like, it was kind... and most players... It was like that and we were like, 'Ah, no.'
 And they never got to see Fedorova, and it was so important to try and set her up. I remember that first animation that they had…
 Yeah, it was a little outside of what we wanted, I think, Fedorova to be, because she... it's a bit of a clumsy sort of scene how it came together,
and she sort of dematerializes and then materializes on the other side of the door and we even thought to try and help that.
We put in the sound. If you listen, you can hear almost the footsteps in the vent of her traveling to the other side but then, she'd kill the scientist
and she'd look at the player and do this kind of almost like ‘Betty Boop’ sort of blowing you a kiss and we are like, “Yeah... it's not really working for us.”
 And then, everybody was kind of like, 'That's not this killer, this silent killer; that's certainly not what she is like.'
 But in the end, it came out pretty well when you have the opportunity to see it, right?
 Yeah, they changed the animation.
 Yeah, but we changed it.
 But we had to see it for a long time.
 I gave up at one point. I thought, 'This is it, this is what's going to stay.'
 I think every single one of us went to the animation team and said, “You have to change it.”
 But now, she just hops over the fence, right? That's what we got in.
 Yes, and the other problem we had was with the visuals, because she was jumping through the roof air vent. But the hole was so small like, 'How can you fit in that, it makes no sense!'
  It needs to be at least...
 Three times bigger!
 Twice as big. What is this, an air vent for ants? But did we make it bigger? In the end?
 Yes.
 We made it a little bit bigger.
 A tiny bit.
 Tiny bit, for more ants.
So the goal of this cutscene was really to surprise the player and get him in. I have always hated that shot of Megan because it makes it look like, 'What the heck is she doing while this terrorist attack is going on? It's supposed to be... is she a part of it?'
Whatever. She should have been cowering in fear. But for the most part, I think this cutscene did a pretty good job of conveying the horror of what happens to Adam in this scene.
 Yeah, I remember feeling bad for him.
 Yeah, it's almost gruesome, poor guy.
 And you can really understand all those augmentations.
That, I really hated, I really don't like the green acid. It's so like Saturday morning cartoons. Like, 'Hey look, it's all green!'
 Like Ghostbusters.
 Yeah.
 And here, Namir is going to come to us and, originally, it was supposed to be in gameplay and actually...
 You could move the camera.
 Yeah, we had a working prototype but, hey...
So yeah, with the opening credits, actually, it seems like people really liked it. Our original inspiration was the ‘James Bond’ movies, ‘The Six Million Dollar Man,’
trying to showcase this augmented character and everything. But we wanted it to be really stylish, really like a ‘James Bond’ movie. Sometimes they go beyond; they go into the abstract.
 It's very stylized.
 Exactly.
 It's actually more stylized than what we did, almost. But it works really well and I think, Steve, eh? The sound, the track that's on is just completely insane.
By the way, that's a pig, sorry to cut you. But when we see the thing cutting the flesh, it's actually a real piece of pig that was bought.
 When I saw the visuals, I was really impressed. It looked really cool and I thought it was going to be really important to nail it with the right music tone.
Because I think something that wouldn't have worked as well might have undersold the power of the scene.
But it was really powerful when I put the music to it, with the visuals. I was just kind of like, ‘Yeah, this couldn't work any better.’ Mike McCann, the composer, really
hit this one out of the park, and the reaction we got when people saw it and heard it, they loved it right away. Even, I think Goldtooth, the people who produced the...
 Yeah, who actually put it together.
 They came back right away saying the music track is just, you know, selling this whole thing, bringing it all together.
 And I remember the dialogue in this. It's so funny, because the dialogue is so short and so simple. But you needed it to convey, basically, some of the hinting of what's going on with Sarif forcing the augmentations.
But also we wanted it to sound like a real surgery and that kind of thing, so I remember giving it to one of the writers on staff and saying, “Could you, you know, kind of write these opening lines?”
And he was going on in researching all about operations and CCT scans and all these things and in the end, those little details are so important just to make it and pop it. Even if you can't hear it, it works.
So internally, we have always referred to this section of the game as the 'Walk and Talk' and it actually wasn't the original opening for the game.
We had a completely different idea for the opening to be more of a training mission where you are infiltrating your own company as part of a security test.
But there was a lot of discussion among the team, and a lot of people didn't think we couldn't pull that one off and ultimately, we ended up kind of taking a new direction on it and working in this kind of vein.
 It became the 'Walk and Talk' and actually, it was a nice way to have a good 'show, don't tell' moment, establishing the world and the characters.
 Exactly, and at first I was, because I really liked the original idea, so I wasn't really keen for this direction. But then, as I started working on the script, I really did kind of start to like how it shows off the world.
 But I remember the first draft of this script, I think it was Joe who pointed out that we were putting a lot of 'techno-babble' in there and it sounded much more Star Trek.
 Yeah, it sounded like it was like a big space ship they were running, you know?
 So we had to kind of go through extra passes to fix that and to lengthen it.
 And here to the right, it's cool; we had one of our artists, and he wanted to have homage to ‘The Six Million Dollar Man,’ which was really cool, and shows off that we are not that young.
 That girl is such a bitch.
 Well, we had to establish all of our characters right off the bat as fast as we could.
 And there was another nice addition about having the Versalife logo.
 Yes, and the arm. I remember a lot of discussions about this arm because it plays a very important part later in the game, and we really needed to showcase it.
 And that's why he has one sleeve, and on the other side he doesn't have anything.
 Yeah, and I remember also with the artist, thinking about what the arm should look like, because it needed to be recognizable for when Tong would have it, but at the same time, we didn't want it to be like, I don't know, just like purple or something.
You know what I mean? It needed the subtlety and at the same time something we would remember.
 That's true. And that scene with the claymore explosion…
 Yeah, that's cool.
 It's really cool. But it took so long before it worked, like the dolls were always staying in the air or not moving, or just falling on the ground. It takes time.
 Pleasures of physics.
 And if I remember correctly, they are going to get into the elevator now. And there was, I think, a lot of technical issues first of all with the elevator, but one of the things that we also wanted to do was we wanted to focus… as they get into the
 elevator, you will see suddenly, we get the camera shot. And we wanted to have this theme running through the game that this is Eliza, who is controlling the cameras and watching Jensen all the way from the start...
 Spying.
...and spying on you. So here, this was a good moment, and my one regret was that it was such a great idea, and I think the cinematic director brought it up, but then just unfortunately never carried it through with many of the rest of it.
 It was a very good idea that...
 We ended up not really carrying through. You know, we’ve got so much to do.
 When you’ve got a project this big, yeah.
 And now they talk about the dog, right? The famous dog, right?
 Oh, that's right, the dog! The dog was Adam's dog, yes. That was something when, we were working on one of our earliest demos of the game, and we had to fill the world.
One of the script writers said, “We should have this email about Adam's dog and it should be dead.” And I was, you know, at first my reaction to that was, “Oh, that's terrible. But as long as it's not a cat, it's okay.”
 Dogs are fine, they can die.
 And then, we were able to take that and carry it through much more.
 Now we get one of our favorite characters.
 Yes!
 And this here, what is really cool is that just like a real guy, he just looks very not too subtly to Megan's ass.
 Quick glance at her butt.
 Exactly, and I think it adds authenticity to...
 The fact that he also did it in front of her ex-boyfriend.
 It definitely tells you a lot about the character right off the top, like he hasn't even spoken a word yet and just that action speaks volumes about his relationship with Adam.
 It's Andreas?
 Andreas Aspergis.
 And actually, it was quite fun because I think from a writing perspective, we really wanted Pritchard to be this dick. And Andreas was so good, he would come in and he would do this, and after every take, he would finish and then go, “God, I hate that guy!”
 And now we hear...
 The UNATCO theme.
  The UNATCO theme.
 I really thought, when I heard what Mike had done, there was a chance right there to kind of bring a little homage to the UNATCO theme, and we felt like this was sort
of our new UNATCO, and we wanted to just give a little nod to it and I found it was a great way to showcase the beautiful room that Jon and his team designed here.
 Yeah, and it worked really well, because we just passed that point now, but when we first walk into the corridor that leads to David's office is really one of my favorite parts of the game, just where you reach a crescendo with the music at that point.
And this is one of my favorite rooms in the game as well, and everything just comes together and it's just like...
 Yeah, it's very emotional.
 It's so emotional.
 It's really strong.
 Yeah, I think for the story, but also for what we tried to put together as a team; it's all there and I think very emotional for us as well. Just as in relation to the project.
 Yeah, absolutely.
So now, if you look at the sky by the window, like one of...
 The city.
...the city. One of the early versions of the sky was filled with so many aircrafts.
 Like little flying cars, or whatever they were.
 It felt like it was Coruscant in ‘Star Wars’, and we were like, “No, no, no. Okay, it's in 2027 but like it's still a normal world.”
 Well, the thing is that there are not even flying cars. There are no flying cars in our game.
In the world that we created, there is supposed to be choppers or personal airplanes or private jets, or whatever but it's, even now, I think there is too much. But it used to be columns like in Coruscant.
 Yeah, it's much better but it could have been better.
 It's much better, but it could have been... Adam has his chopper, but we never intended this to be a world where there were particularly, suddenly people just flying around.
 Like TIE fighters everywhere.
 Yeah, to go shopping or whatever, you know?
 And then on Sarif's desk, there is the chessboard.
 Yeah, the chessboard is pretty funny, because I had a thing with one of the guys at Square Enix in L.A. where he gave me this really great idea once.
He wanted the chessboard pieces to be placed as the winning move of Kasparov against Big Blue, and... Yeah, I was about to say Bobby Fischer, but no, it was Kasparov.
And I kept telling him, “Yeah, it's a great idea! We will totally do it.” And I was always forgetting, you know?
And every time that they would get a new build down in L.A., he would play it and he would send me an email, “Man, the pieces are still like there is no game going on.” You know?
And I was like, “Yeah, I'll do it, I'll do it,” and I just kept forgetting and we ended up not doing it. But it was a great idea because I am sure with the kind of fans that we have, they totally would have picked it up, that it's the last move.
 And now, If you go to the elevator now, there is the code, like in the pure tradition of Looking Glass and Ion Storm games.
 Yeah, I mean 451 has been in all of their games, a reference to Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors; may he rest in peace.
And so we knew it had to be the first code in the game and one of the funny things was that actually, when we were creating the demo, I think
it was for E3, one of the... which happens much later in the game, one of the level designers without even thinking it put in the code 0415…
 He switched the numbers.
 He switched them around.
 Yeah, he switched the numbers and everybody was like, '”Look, is that what it’s supposed to be?”
 Is that the code for the bomb?
 No, it was for getting into the contact office.
 It was in the Hive.
 But we basically just knew we had to get that in for the first code.
 And it was funny because I had a flight once during... while we were making the game, I don't know, I was flying where... probably for some marketing, or whatever, something.
And I am in the plane, I am looking at my flight number and it's 0451 and am like, 'No.' Then I took a picture... Actually no, I actually tweeted it first and then people were like, “No way.”
And then I am like, “Yeah!” And I took a picture of it and then posted it and people were like, “Oh, my god! It's a premonition,” and like, “Walk out of that plane. It is going to crash or something.”
 On a remote island.
Hi, welcome to the 'Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut' commentary. Here is Jean-Francois Dugas, the Game Director on the game, and I am with...
  Mary DeMarle, I am the Lead Writer on the game.
 And I am Jonathan Jacques-Belletete and I am the Art Director.
 And I am Steve Szczepkowski and I am the Audio Director.
 And we will have probably some guests with us today. So, with the first cutscene, when we started this project, we were kind of like...
It was important to us to have links to 'Deus Ex' one, but we wanted it to be subtle, we didn't want it to be totally 'in your face' even though the first character you see is Bob Page.
 But you're not supposed to know that!
 But we wanted it to be subtle. So the first thing we did was to do just that.
 But what is strange, even with the die hard fans, when they saw it for the first time, most of them didn't recognize him, even though we tracked back the real actor.
 Yeah, we went out of our way to find the real actor. We thought it was important to keep the continuity and to use him and we thought the hardcore fans would really like it. And I think the plan was to keep the guy really in the shadows.
 Yeah. And I remember I was with Dominic Demers, the Lighting guy, and I was, "Darker, put it darker", and it was constantly a debate of how much of his face we should see or not, and that was fun.
Yeah, so now it's the cutscene where we are introducing Adam Jensen. Actually, this TV news is probably the only TV news that has some animated 3D in it, which was the original plan with those TV news.
But as we figured out the scope of what we had to produce and we had so much to do and with all the other cutscenes and stuff, we quickly realized that we wouldn't be able to make it.
 We wanted them all to be 3D, actually.
 I know that when I was writing it, I wanted it to be like... First you wouldn't even know you’re watching the news; you were actually seeing the stuff going on at the capital building and then slowly you realize, 'Oh, it’s news.'
But what we envision doesn't always work.
 And then with Megan and her necklace; that was another very important part for us because from a story perspective, we wanted to establish something that was a part of her, something that made
her human. And that would have on this relevance, because eventually we had all these plans that, like you might find it in the FEMA facility where she had been taken, and stuff.
 So, it was a very important thing. But I think that we didn't necessarily communicate that on the way.
 No, this is one of the few little times that me and you didn't talk about it. Because usually things went pretty well in terms of what you wanted or what I wanted.
But yeah, so at one point it was like, ‘Where is...?’ you know, we had her design down and everything; Megan was pretty much finished in terms of what she would look like and I think it was you or JF that
came up, and he is like, “Where is her necklace?” I was, “What necklace?” “She is supposed to have a pearl necklace!” I am like, “Really?” But I'm like, “The whole thing is done.” She has this big collar, she is all
zipped up and I'm like, “Where am I gonna put it?” He's like, “Well, just put it over her clothes.” I am like, “You don't put a necklace over clothes.” And we ended up doing it, which I think looks...
 And it worked out, it works.
 No, I personally think that it looks tacky but it works, I mean, it works in the sense that it did the purpose that it had to do.
$
Okay, so you're out of the boat right now and you see this storm in front of your eyes. And this is where we display the full extent of the new shader development we did for the DLC. This was all content-driven, without  programmers.
It's what we could do with our tools. It's not a new engine per se, like people tend to say, it's just new shaders that we used.
You have better lighting, you have better shading everywhere, you have better contrast; you have the full-frame glow, which kind of gives this extra edge of lighting everywhere.
And actually the full-frame glow is probably the cheapest thing we added and the most rewarding technology we added as far as ramping up the graphics in there. And you see how we cheated the storm.
Basically you can feel the boat is moving, but it's actually just the sky around you moving. You have this enormous mesh with water, all the vortices of the water are kind of moving back and forth, particles are being emitted.
All this mesh, all the water around you, all the ocean and the sky are swaying left and right, but the boat is actually entirely stationary. It just gives the illusion that the boat is moving because everything else around it moves.
 And the sound really helps to solve that as well. All that storm, noise and etc.
 Yeah, so this is all that setup here.
Even the rain. You have this rain in front of you which, for most of the development, we didn't want to put in there, we weren't sure if we were able to pull it off in time, but the FX guy made a jump for it toward the end and it was really great once it was in.
Yeah, so you see this fisherman kit somewhere on the deck of the boat. That's one of the Easter eggs that Thomas, one of the artists who did the infamous 'Demolition Man shells' Easter egg in Hengsha.
He does those kind of jokes once in a while. And this is kind of out of context, as though there were fishermen during the storm just fishing there! There's no reason for it. Just the guy found that funny and we left that here.
 And we supported it I think with a pocket secretary.
 Yeah, there are some mails somewhere saying, 'Hey! There is a guy leaving this free stuff out here.'
 'Clean up the mess before Burke gets here.'
 Typical example of an artist having fun with the stuff.
We actually rolled on it and try to include it in the story as well but now you're telling me because in Detroit 1, we had this huge hotdog somewhere in the back alleys and we said, 'Hey, you know what, it's not really appropriate so let's remove it.'
 Yup, so this one got to stay.
$
So right now we're looking at our lovely little secondary objective where we have… someone is locked inside the life pod, and their life support, because of the accident with the containers, has…
All their life support is slowly failing and we kind of wanted to encourage the player to basically try and save this person so we could have a later payoff for your good deeds, and also for the rest of the story.
This was a lot of fun to try and draw players' attention to and help them understand what was going on.
 Well, we went back to it one or two times during the project where we had new stuff, like there's red lighting in the broken pod, there's sparks, everything
is disorganized; we try the player there and for some reason, this particular area came out in the playtest where we needed to make sure the player noticed that.
 And every single one of those life pods that are in this area, that has somebody who's been kidnapped or arrested in there, has a lovely little e-reader on it and how many did you have us write for you there, Frank?
 Something like 72. Mark was the writer who helped me on the cargo. I actually came to him and then I said, “You know, I'll need all those info books, I need them to be specific for those characters because I want to have more background.”
And after he stopped crying, he actually did it, and it's pretty cool. We had some fun with it.
 On the writing team, we thought it was a great idea until we knew there were 72 of them, but Mark was super creative.
If you go through and read them you'll find all sort of little hidden jokes, in fact, you'll actually discover that some of the people from 'Gilligan's Island' are locked in some of those pods.
 Yeah, exactly.
 But the whole point was ultimately to let you know that this person was hurt and if you saved this person, we had trouble trying to figure out what
the reward would be back once you got further on in the game; and we ended up basically, the reward that we end up giving you is through a dialogue.
 Yeah, with Quinn.
 With Quinn, who is a merchant.
 The most challenging part was not to tell the player who's helping the player; that sort of, you know, is supposed to be a secret at that point, and then the reward needed to be something kind of casual.
It’s a good deed that you are supposed to feel good about, but you know I'm not going to help you too much.
So if you do save the person in the pod, then Quinn, who you do meet later in ‘The Missing Link’, turns out to be helping you giving you a bit of a discount at his little side store sort of thing.
 So everything has a payoff somehow in this game.
 Everything has a purpose.
 Choice and consequences.
 Cue ‘Deus Ex’ music.
Yeah, from the playtest, those alternative paths inside the corridor itself came out very strongly, very good.
And I'm pretty proud of those because I tried to add alternatives to just walking down the corridor based on the timing of the patrol or adding the infamous air vents, which I didn't want to do, even though we do have some air vents in the cargo as it is obvious.
But those worked very well, so I'm pretty proud of trying to put the player and trying to figure out using his observations and still using the ability of looking out the patrol still in the same environment, like inside the corridor itself but still slightly off and being safe.
But you're not fully safe, so you have to time yourself between those openings. And it worked very well, I'm pretty glad.
So, the white hallway. At the beginning, this hallway was the same set of corridors as the other ones that you saw at the beginning of the cargo.
But because we're out of the storm and we just got back in, the art director wanted to have a stark change of visual pacing.
So this white corridor is very calm, which is a stark contrast to the storm that you have outside. It was something we did at the end of the DLC. We scrambled this set of assets for about five days, which was really fast actually.
I think it's a great call from the art director, that's the kind of thing an art director is made for. Just changing the pace of the scene and it makes sense in the context of the storm.
So one of the challenges is we wanted the cargo ship, we wanted to really make this be very Deus Ex, and react to how you played earlier in the game. So you had a lot of fun setting up the setups for the enemies in here, didn't you?
 Definitely! Playing around with the scenarios, having different types of sets of characters, of combatants waiting for you or not is basically tied up with your
actions, your previous actions, both in the first part when you exit your holding cell, all the way to the CIC, to the control room, including also the control, how you played it, etc.
Both actually have a… how do I say this... cumulative effect on how you see this scene, which is basically either a scenario where everybody, all those
guys, are actually just very relaxed because they are about to dock at the sea base, or they actually learned that there's someone trying to escape, etc.
So they are basically waiting for you. We added mines. We had a lot of fun when we got the setup.
 And it goes even further, because depending on how you play this, then that will affect the opening of the base and the conversation you're going to have with Netanya when you're getting there.
 Exactly, a lot of ripple effect.
 Very Deus Ex.
Alright, here we get some kind of a setup for a hazard. One of the things that we should have done better in the whole Deus Ex: Human Revolution, is trying to play around more with the gas effect, the electric types of challenges against some of the emission of the player.
And directly in the cargo, I wanted to play around with it, at least with the gas, to enforce the player to use the rebreather.
I basically just close up this whole section with gas, and tried to add also some elements of storytelling in the environment itself, like one of the characters was cut off-guard by that leaking gas, and he tried to fix it.
We even got emails hinting about it, so there is a lot of stuff that you could play around with to have a sense of context in just a gas hazard and not do like typical games do just, 'Here's a challenge trying to figure out to pass it,' without sense of context.
So we had some fun with it.
Yeah, over here we have the first cargo room. The first big environment where I wanted the player actually to play around with the environment how-to.
You can actually see the exit of that room towards the bridge, towards your actual next objective: trying to contact Pritchard and get help.
But the thing is because you came from a very tight corridor-ish, a very narrow type of environment with very heavy intentions, I wanted to change the pace a bit, so I focused more on the environmental puzzle.
And the thing is since we just did the whole production of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, we were pretty good with our tools and the editor itself, and we were able to actually do more complex type of interactive objects.
 Like that one here. You're standing on a container that can move to different areas. To a player, it looks like a simple object.
You just press a button and it moves, but it requires certain scripting and this is one object we could do only because we mastered our tools after the development of DX: Human Revolution.
So we were able to do those more complicated objects. Well, to us they are more complicated. Little fees actually, so that's one of the added perks of doing the DLC, mastering your tools.
 And the thing is because the container is very in our face, we wanted to play around with it.
It's very Deus Ex, you can actually explore the environment or find open containers and find your own way towards the exit, not necessarily needing to use the container itself, so trying to use the augmentation jumping or whatnot.
 That's pretty cool.
So right now, if you go to the corner just in front of you, you'll notice an open container sprayed with bullets which was a request from the story team to start off the big legend of Jensen, who got captured.
 Yes, we figured the way this was segueing from the Human Revolution. Jensen had gotten inside a life pod and the next thing you know when you're playing The Missing Link is that he's beat up, he's been captured but you never got to see that capture.
So we really wanted to have a place in the boat where you actually could find where he had been captured, discovered, and show that he was not taken down easily.
 Yeah! So we crooked the containers and spent a bit of time making blood and bullet impacts.
And we spent like two days on that, just modifying that setup a bit so that it looks... for some reason the guards cleaned the bodies there, but they left some sniper rifles in there.
I think it's a combat rifle. There are weapons that are lying around for you to take.
 And if you pay attention to the overheard, you'll notice that Jensen's acts of bravery got bigger and bigger in terms of the number of people that he took out in order to do this, as normally happens with rumors that are going around.
 You know, you got to be so cool on production that we decided to make an achievement out of it. So it's more like a... it's not an Easter egg, like she said, but more like a nice little reward for the players who stick to it. It's a really interesting story.
So you have those surface tables in front of us. If you walk through one of these tables, you'll see a bunch of assets brought up out of the table.
 It's like a holographic table.
 Kind of a holographic table. This is the most advance shader we've done on those current generation hardware. You have… All of this in front of you is some meshes and mostly a shader that gives this 3D volumes.
It's something we don't quite see on consoles, so we kind of went over head with that. It was a party of shaders. The main thing about that is to try and... If you give attention to what's on the table, it's showing the boat's getting ready to dock.
 Yeah, because we were basically in an enclosed room and we wanted to give the sense that we are approaching a base. You saw the base out on the deck.
But we couldn't really show you any of that because we don't have any technology to show that you're moving forward and all that stuff. So we…
 Yeah, the boat doesn't actually advance.
 Yeah, so we kind of put the surface tables on to A: give a sense that, 'Okay, now I see that we are supposedly docking at a base,' and B: also to give a sense that this is a military boat.
And a lot of the designs in this room were kind of trying to show that this is a military base boat.
So this was a very crucial story moment for us because this was the moment when we revealed that Jensen's getting help from someone. And we wanted to, from a story purpose, we wanted this to be a very pivotal and important moment.
You want the player to focus on it. But we were limited in our cutscene budget for this, so we couldn't really do it as a cutscene and make sure of that. We had to actually make it more of what we call a forced conversation.
And the conversation itself also reacts to what the player has done earlier, whether he's played stealthy or not. So we had a lot of challenges in pulling this one off from both the writing standpoint, but also the technical standpoint.
 Yeah, it was a very complex conversation to do technically because, like we did with the first conversation with Netanya, where depending on how you role-play in the conversation, we have different gear, and from then, how you
 play the first section, trying to exit the environment and getting to the control room to call Pritchard for letting him know that you're held hostage somewhere, etc.
And then, as you said, it is revealed that the player also gets help from a mysterious contact with that character from the screen, but also he's still isolated from the world because he cannot contact externally his buddies.
But yeah, technically the conversation also tracks the actions of the player. Did you get seen by NPCs, by combatants and all? Very good Deus Ex type of mission scripting, so I'm pretty proud of this one.
 It was very reminiscent of the first Deus Ex because we wanted this mysterious contact, like in the original Deus Ex, to help you get free as  well.
 Exactly, and also we had a lot of discussion trying to... How do we show that character on the screen?
And at some point, we wanted to have a character hidden somewhere outside of the world in an empty space, and actually have a camera on
his face and see an actual character, but we couldn't technically do it properly, so we basically just did this animated texture with fake robotic voice behind.
So it ended up pretty good.
So you may have just heard a voice over the PA, someone doing something. That was supposed to be a very subtle hint that Jensen has a secret helper onboard, doesn't he?
 Yeah, we were supposed to have so many elements playing in favor of the player but without actually telling too much that someone was trying to help Jensen.
We had monitors that were monitoring the the ship status because the ship was automated in the design. And the monitors, we just changed their visual to indicate the player 'you can go now.'
And all this based on the timing of the patrolling guards in the immediate surrounding of the player. And we also had the camera shutting down just at the right moment, the lasers being shut down right at the proper moment.
But all this trying to support as well the multi pad, multi options of a typical Deus Ex game. Actually it felt more like there were bugs or badly communicated stuff happening to the players that they didn't understand.
So I strongly suggested to just rip them out. At least we kept the PA announcement with the over guys who were just being changed to a new patrol. But that worked well, but the rest we just scrapped it.
So one of the things that was important for us is we wanted… We had this whole discussion at the beginning, because you start out in a boat and, since this wasn't a part of Human Revolution and it was supposed to be
 downloadable content, we wanted to kind of start the player off not necessarily knowing they were in a boat, but giving these subtle details.
 Yeah, we were trying to convey that. We didn't tell you, at least at first, we didn't want to tell you outright you were in the boat.
But we had to convey the impression that, 'Okay, you are in a boat,' so it moves and it sways from left to right. You have everything rocking.
And the thing is we had very little tech development for the DLC because it was an expansion, it wasn't a new game per say.
So we tried faking stuff just shaking the camera, but it would look a bit weird because the character wouldn't react to the swaying of the boat.
So you'd have this impression that people are magically standing perpendicular to the swaying floor.
So we only had stuff like if you look at the ceiling right now the nets are moving slightly, we had a few animated objects to try and convey it, and of course sound
ambience mostly gave away the idea that it was a boat, but we were limited in how we could convey the feeling that it's a rocking boat and there is a storm outside.
So you're about to experience the beginning of a side quest that was totally secondary, when there's a crash in one of the cargo holds that happens out of sight.
 Yup.
 This was a real fun one to try and work out.
 It's the typical issue where we already have the level design pretty much nailed and produced, and we're trying to polish the experience but we are still waiting for the actual script development itself and how to push it further.
And we had all the ideas on paper, but trying to have everything done specifically during the time frame we had was very difficult.
And basically what I wanted to do is, in addition to the actual objective of the mission itself, I wanted to add some extras to the player. And since we were in hostile territory, trying to add a side quest inside the cargo was basically a no-go. Impossible.
 Story-wise, we wanted to kind of foreshadow some very important events that are going to happen later on in the game.
 Yeah, exactly. So that's why I added all those live pods. And the original idea is as soon as you enter the room, you see this huge container the storm outside was just crashing.
Everything exploded and it actually created a hole in the ground where you see this secret area of live pods. But it didn't work out as pretty as I wanted it because of technical issues.
And like I said, the level design was really pretty far ahead and we still didn't know how exactly we would crash the container and the amount of time we had to actually create this type of scripting.
So basically, very at the end, Steve Szczepkowski, the audio designer, helped us working on the audio part. And then with the effects we added the very tiny container just falling. So if you go very quickly, you can see the container itself.
But we had to make sure the physical space between that event and the player didn't screw up anything where the player is trying to interact with it and whatnot.
Right now we are about to watch the opening cutscene for The Missing Link, the DLC that came out after the main game was produced.
A lot of people, a lot of fans thought that we'd actually cut this from the story, from the game, and then just delivered it as a DLC later.
But the truth was that we absolutely did not do that. We had written the entire game story and finished it. We were in production just closing up the beta when suddenly we realized we had to release downloadable content afterwards, and it had to be story-based.
It was a real challenge for us because we had to figure out how we could tell a story that took place after Jensen had been augmented and yet before the end of the game, because we didn't want to make it a sequel to the main game.
So we actually had a very difficult time trying to figure it out, and we settled on the part when he gets into the boat and heads to an unknown destination. And we figured at that point, we could actually add a new storyline here.
And the other challenge we had to face was that we had to make Jensen be vulnerable at the start of this, so that gave us the whole scenario for the kidnapping, the escape and his being a prisoner.
Hey, so here you see that shadow, which is very obvious if you look at the ladder here.
It was one of the first times in the game that we did this kind of staging where the following event, even though left at your hands, would be rather obvious to do.
 Yeah, the thing is that I suggested to Dominic Demers, who was the lead lighter on the game and also on the DLC, to help me on staging a few elements but also to keep the player's attention on the environment.
 And the whole cargo, at least this first part, is very about Jensen being weakened, trying to use his natural skills to find his way towards his gear and the next objective to communicate with the outside world, to Pritchard.
So here's one of the good examples trying to use the lighting and the staging on the character ready to be taken down, but everything was...
 And it was one of the only times we really did that in the entire Human Revolution game.
 Exactly! Because the cargo was so small we could actually push up a bit more about the visual details, that type of details that we couldn't do in the city hub that I also designed. So pretty cool stuff.
So we are joined right now by some special guests. These three gentlemen were very instrumental in helping to create The Missing Link.
 Hi! I'm Hubert Corriveau. I was the Environment Director on the DLC, which was mainly coordinating environment, the production of environment.
 My name is Frank McCann. I was the Senior Level Designer working on the whole cargo, so the ship was mine at some point.
 And Antoine Thisdale. I was the Game Designer on The Missing Link.
 One of the first things, one of the first challenges we faced when we did The Missing Link was having to basically create that chair and find a reason that we could take away Jensen's augmentations.
 Yeah, removing the augmentations to weaken the character of Jensen and introducing as well the main bad guy, Burke, was such a challenge. At the beginning we wanted to have Jensen almost held on the
 ceiling through chains, and once he gets free from his constraints, actually falling from the ceiling, they're weakened.
 To really stress that vulnerability.
 Just technically trying to do that was very difficult, so we said, 'You know what?' Just reusing Jensen sitting in the chair was much easier, and then we went from a very conceptual type of design.
 Basically, the most overall assets in the DLC. We spent around ten days just doing the chair to try and convey that it's an impressive chair that could disable Jensen.
 And could shut down all his augmentations.
 Augmentations, that's right. There was actually an early decision in the design to strip the player from all augmentations and equipment. We sort of wanted to make a bit of a statement that the game is not just action, it's also
  stealth. And get the player into a position where you can actually figure out how to get out of this chair, this constraint, this whole environment that is very alien to him.
 And we actually had a lot of problems with making sure the multi paths were obvious, didn't we?
 Yup! Because just starting from the chair and then moving on to the corridors and the next steps was pretty difficult, yup.
 But we did it.
So the secret stash was an interesting thing because we wanted to make sure that the players' choices early on in the game would determine what kind of equipment they got here.
 Yeah, exactly. And through the initial conversation we had with Nadi... Nat...
 Netanya.
 Netanya, Nadia, I always confuse it. Anyway, so during the conversation I suggested we had some kind of a branching
moment, not necessarily just role playing for the player, which from time to time we wanted to support in some moment.
Not always just a debate conversation, but having those little moments behind the scenes, the player without knowing, we are
doing some checks and depending on how you answer Netanya, you actually have different gear that we give to you.
So I basically have four scenarios that I triggered based on how you portrayed the conversation, how you did the conversation itself, and I just swap the proper scenarios with the proper gear inside.
 And we were always curious 'cause we didn't want to make it super obvious that you're picking stealthy and not stealthy when we are writing the dialogues, but we had to…
And then the whole setup of it, of this stuff, because we had to get across the idea that it had been left behind by the secret helper.
 More importantly, what we created as people kind of realized, 'Yeah, but Jensen's all bloodied up and once he gets his suit, he's all clean.'
And we basically did, if you notice, after you take the stash, you notice a bunch of little medical pads bloodied and stuff, as though Jensen had washed himself with…
He'd cleaned himself with the medicament, the medical supplies that someone provided there.
It was the first time basically that we had a swap of characters during the gameplay so that was one of the rare technical developments that was done for the DLC.
$
So what we called the SAS, that type of...
 The security airlock system.
 …kind of in-between door that you wait to load. When you see those types of things in games, typically it's because they're trying to load data at the other end of the door.
This is what we are doing here, basically we made that compromise of no hard loading, so there's no hard loading in DLC. You've probably noticed that. But there are those SAS, and that's the compromise.
When the SAS is animating and doing all its fluffy stuff, it's actually loading the next room depending on the direction you go, which was tons of little technical development we had to do to make it work properly.
 And we needed them for a couple of reasons. I mean, we needed them for the loading, but we also needed them for story purposes.
They kind of often serve as gates, because we wanted to make sure that you achieve certain objectives like, for example, you have to go see Netanya before you can get access to the prison.
So there were kind of necessary for story purposes.
I think this particular one that we're seeing first was very difficult because we also had to have the mysterious contact, contact you in the midst of loading, which was a big challenge, and a big debate was whether we would be able to pull that off or not.
 I think it's actually interesting that we could emerge story elements into this type of typically, technically required thing as this SAS...
 But they do take a long time, because unfortunately there is a lot of backtracking that has to be done in this. They do get quite annoying after a while and for that we're really, really sorry.
 Sorry guys.
$
This is it. This is the last room. This is the main offense from Jensen getting back to Burke and all that stuff in the story, and everything is unraveling at this point.
We really studied and we listened to everybody about boss fights in general, and we wanted to do it somewhat differently.
First of all, it was really important that we support all pillars of gameplay, and I mean all of them, so there's Burke talking to you, taunting you and everything as you get to that big number three door.
And another thing that we didn’t do in ‘Human Revolution’ that was important to us, and it was a bit of a technical issue at one point, but we actually managed
to do it very well - is to actually give you an overview camera that basically quickly shows you the whole room, what it’s about and everything, all the way to Burke.
And he gives you that really 'mano-a-mano'-speech about just kicking your ass and everything.
These are all things that we didn't really do in ‘Human Revolution,’ but make the whole ending of ‘The Missing Link’ so interesting at the same time.
Signage. In every game you always have those arrows with directions. You have the command room there so that the player can orient himself.
In the Deus Ex world and with our art direction, we already have tons of numbers and decals all over the place on the walls. You see on the door, there is a ‘4’ on there.
The problem we have is when we have actual important signage for you guys; you need to go this way to get to your next objective.
Well, it's hard for us make it meaningful, to make it stand out from the other signage, so we end up using those glowy signs hoping that you...
Well, during playtest they worked that way, people tended to look at them a bit more.
I guess it would never be done that way in a base, really, but there so much noise with this signage all over the place that it is the only way we have of talking to you.
 But it ended up working really well in the playtest, people could find their way. Before we put it in, they were just totally lost in the base.
 I'm always lost in the base.
 You're always lost.
Yeah.
So here you are standing inside Burke's office, the villain of the game, and there's an awful lot of stuff going on inside this office that relates to Burke and relates to a bunch of stuff that's going on later in the game with consequences.
So, for instance, we have some new secret stashes that are here.
 Secret stashes, indeed. One of the things we tried that we didn't have time to actually play with in Human Revolution, is consequences of finding or gathering information from a boss fight or from a very important villain character.
And actually, depending on what you do with that information or those items, it would affect the confrontation later.
So for The Missing Link, we tried that and one of the things that were brought up really early on by the level designers is to make some kind of a safe but a secret safe.
And so we really went with that idea, that it's actually so hidden that you need to find a button for it.
You can completely bypass it and it's not going to affect the game, but it would change a bit of your gameplay at the final confrontation.
And what we did is that Burke's got a very special weapon; it's a golden revolver and the story...
 You can actually read about it in the emails that are on his computer.
 Exactly, there's emails and there's a description that tells you a little bit more about where it comes from and why it is there.
So if the player takes it, then Burke doesn't have it later, but if you don't take it then Burke uses it against you later so it's a very interesting twist that happened and we tried, and it was very popular.
 Another funny thing is if you look under the desk, that's where the button is, I'm just going to tell you guys, but a funny story about that button is the button
is actually our debug button that we've used throughout the game that none of you guys should be really seeing but we didn't have a button at the time.
So we were like, 'We got to put a button and we don't have enough time to make one.' So we just put the debug button and it worked so...
 And there something else in this room.
 You can probably notice there's a picture of a guy on the wall.
It's actually the art director J.J.B., Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, who actually painted all of those things and he placed his own picture there, and he really wanted it to be only a placeholder and he wanted us to replace it at some point.
But we were kind of lazy so it never happened. So his picture is there and that's probably our fault.
Here we are standing inside Netanya Keitner's office, our secret helper in the base.
One of the things that we do from a story standpoint is we really build these immense back stories for our characters and then we can use, a lot of times
that back story never gets revealed directly in the game and a lot of times people won’t understand, but we can use a lot of that for fuel for the art for the creation.
And the Netanya back story was created by one of the narrative designers, Bruce Kelly, and he had created this whole story about her and her twin brother who died when she was 13.
So if you look very closely on the desk, you’ll see some pictures that are supposed to be of her and her twin brother when they were young.
And some of the… and I think as a matter of fact, he even made the password on her computer her brother’s name.
Although at the moment I’m forgetting what that name was, otherwise I would tell you so you didn’t have to hack it.
So a lot of those kind of simple little details get put into the game and possibly never picked up on, but here’s a few you can look at.
 Hopefully.
This very moment is basically the end of the cargo mission where you actually finally get out of the boat.
Originally, in the script in the game, we didn't really have any moment, anything specific or special, so we had a lot of discussions about the story, the level design and everything to make it like a bit of an event for the player.
So instead of just having this corridor or this bridge or something, we decided to put a button. Basically, you trigger something and then the cargo doors open very slowly and reveal the main base.
The secret base, the secret environment that you're gonna have to negotiate for the next few hours of the game. So it was a very, very important moment and it actually took a long time to develop, to make it work, make it fit.
And music-wise, the sound and the whole environment, the lighting and everything... But I think it turned out very well.
So we mentioned before that we had a very limited cutscene budget for ‘The Missing Link.’
We only had 3 minutes that we could use for cutscenes, and this cutscene that you're watching right now was one that we knew right from the get go,
we absolutely had to have it as a cutscene because of several things that were happening. First of all we're showing you Gary Savage, who’s a Deus Ex character, so we can't let you kill him.
We also don’t want you to kill the villain, Burke, so we had to make sure that he was a part of this scene and that the player could not interrupt it in any way, shape or form.
We also needed to show you at the end, that you had to see a hidden panel and a secret wall that is going to be key for your next objective.
But I think another main reason that we did it, was simply because our dialogue system in the game was not made to support more than two characters at any one time; Jensen and another.
So in this instance, we actually absolutely had to make this as a cutscene because of all the reasons. From a technical aspect, from
the story point that we were trying to get across, from the fact that we know that players like to kill people and we couldn’t allow you to do that.
So all of that came into making this the most important cutscene for us.
So, right in front of you is the entrance to the detention center, and if you open those doors, you're about to come into another SAS and we had to create, at this point in the game, a choke point.
We wanted to open up the gameplay from the linear aspect of the cargo ship and yet, we needed to ensure that you didn’t get inside the prison before you meet Netanya.
So, this created a lot of story issues for us, especially since when we were working on the story, we thought you wouldn't even be able to get into the base before you saw Netanya.
But, in actuality, you could get through the base, you can get all in through this area that you’ve been exploring, and get all the way to this door and not have seen Netanya.
So, a lot of the decisions that get made when we're creating the game and creating the levels is, ‘how can we create these choke points, and how can we make them make sense with this story?’
And in this instance, we were able to make this SAS make sense, because obviously Netanya has to give you some kind
of a key, or program your DNA into the SAS so that you can get into there, but you won’t be able to do that until you've seen her.
But some of these things were a lot of the difficulties we had, in trying to maintain the freedom and flexibility of a ‘Deus Ex’ experience and yet, still keep a tightly controlled story.
So, the air vents; you’re about to go into the cable ducts, which is a new variant of the air vent.
You had the same air vents throughout the entire game in DXHR and we certainly realized that this is kind of annoying.
There’s this manufacturer which does the air vents for the entire planet.
 I don’t know, I like hanging out in air vents.
 Yeah, so we did this new version, which is kind of the 'IT guys’ version of the air vents with cables and computers all the way in there. It was from a gameplay request at first, that you have this hackable air vent.
Kind of makes sense. But yeah, from now on we’re going to try to have way more variety in narrow passageways for new players.
Here, if you look at the environment, you’re seeing… it's a good example of our new way of modeling environments after HR. After HR, all the artists were kind of sick of doing it the old ways.
It was kind of an annoying way to work. So we have this environment, which has a lot more polygons in it instead of textures.
And if you look at the floor, you see that everything is kind of modeled a bit instead of mapping individual mechanical lines; we're giving a lot more volume to the environment.
We can actually push off a lot of polygons in this engine and we didn't use that enough in the original game; really used polygons to the max in that game.
It enabled us to work much faster and create more interesting environments. The volume is there; it's just more interesting. And mail me if you think it's ugly; I don’t really care.
No, I do care, but it’s an interesting way of working.
 It’s not ugly.
 And it's not really ugly.
 It's beautiful.
 Thanks.
 I think it's beautiful.
 Thanks, I have my own complex.
So, noticing the two guards that are just at the bottom of the ramp; one thing we do very well in ‘Deus Ex’, is that the environment reacts to past actions.
In this case, if you have created chaos on the boat, these guards would be alert and already expecting somebody to come out of this environment right now.
And if you didn’t, well, obviously they’re just talking and are just going on their patrol and everything, and that was a good lead for the player getting out of an environment and into another one, which is beautiful by the way.
 Yeah, we had only thirteen weeks to do the DLC ,which means that we had plenty of cuts to do environment-wise.
At first we didn’t want to do the exterior of the base that you’re standing in right now, but basically the level artist just saw the mandate and just said, “You know what? I can do this.”
And he basically added it upon himself to just do this exterior of the board, exterior of the base.
And that really created quite a seamless switch from the boat to the base, which is much more interesting than what we had planned, which was crummy at best.
 And it works really well too, because we also wanted to get that change of scale from inside the boat. You’re inside those real tight corridors and locations and then you get into this base and... Wow!
Suddenly it’s big and open, and so the addition of that was a really nice plus for us.
The security hub that you have in front of you is another first for the DLC. It’s not something very special but it’s a little trick that we sort of learned to do.
If you look at the turrets, if you access the turrets, you can get a vision, like a camera from it, but we faked it by putting a security camera inside the turret model.
So if you look at the turret outside, like in the corridor, you won’t see it.
But that was a way for us to actually tell the player where the turret is looking, so we sort of made the point of view from the turrets move at the same time as the camera.
That was the only way we could figure how to make the security system in this room very challenging for the player in the constraints we had.
So, one of the other challenges we faced in creating the DLC with our tight time frame, is that we really couldn’t create a lot of new AI or new enemies, and we really wanted to make a better and a different experience for players.
So we had to get really creative, didn’t we, as to how to get around that.
 That’s right, we looked into different archetypes and all sort of new characters and it was very difficult for us to just get on with it and mismatch it with the story and the environment.
So we decided since it’s a military base and supposed to be secret, it’s off the grid. So it’s should be more defensive in nature than offensive. So no need for missile launchers and lots of satellite connection nukes and stuff.
So we wanted to make it more like it’s easy for you to get in, but then it’s kind of hard to get out.
So these typhoon turrets that you see turning are based on the design that you also see at the very beginning of Human Revolution that’s used on dummies inside of Sarif's Industries.
So we decided that since it makes sense that the Tyrants were there before and stole some technology, they probably took that technology and used it for their own use and that’s defensive in nature, so you’ll see them in different corridors.
If the alarms are triggered it’s like one of those mechanics that we figured out would make something interesting, and all of that.
 And there we go.
So you've just have a very long conversation with Netanya Keitner, a choice conversation.
One of the interesting things for us as we approached the writing for the DLC was we realized that, A: we were limited on our cutscene budget; I think we had 3 minutes total for the whole DLC.
And, we wanted to actually put more of the storytelling into conversations, where the player would actually have choices. We called these ‘forced conversations’.
It made it for a lot more fun for the player, I think, to experience the story through these dialogues and it also made it a lot more fun and challenging for the writers
because we had so many different variables that we had to react to; with how you play the cargo, whether you were being sneaky, whether you were killing people.
And we had… so these conversations in the DLC ended up to be so much longer than anything we’d written for any of the conversations in HR, with the exception maybe of the boss fights.
But they were a lot more fun. But the interesting thing about this one was the room that we had to put her in.
 If you look around, you’ll notice something weird. There is no door in that room and that doesn’t make sense and we actually discussed about that during the project.
‘Should we put doors?’ but then if we put a door that means there’s something on the other side of that door and the player may want to try and figure out how to get there.
So, even though Netanya is there, you have to assume that she came in there crawling as Jensen does because there is no door, so it creates this fake environment.
 And that’s why we couldn't get her out either. We actually wanted her to leave before the player does but we just kind of couldn’t do that. So that's why she’s left standing there working on the computer.
 And that's why you can't have your gun in this room.
 Yes, because we don’t want you to shoot your only ally.
So, earlier I talked about how complex the dialogues were to write for ‘The Missing Link,’ because they had to react to a lot of variables.
The conversation with Quinn is by far the most complex of all the conversation we had to write, because there were many things
going on, because we gave the player access to the base, because we allowed you to play the objectives in the order you want.
First we had to realize that if you did not talk to Netanya, he couldn’t be here, so we have to put up like a 'gone fishing' sign which also hint that he was actually on the boat waiting with you earlier.
But then we also had to basically, for his dialogue, include all of these possible reactions to how you treated people in the base; whether you killed a lot of people in the base or not.
We had to actually add to it a side quest, because Quinn gives you this optional side quest. So, we had to have all these strings of dialogue that react to whether you found the pieces, whether you accept the dialogue.
We also had to make allowances for if the player gets the social aug. Then you can use the social aug against Quinn to...
I forget exactly what the point was for that, but maybe you get cheaper prices or something like that.
 It's pretty much that.
 And we also had for Quinn, the fact that if you did the optional secondary objective inside the cargo boat, he would have to react to that. And also again, we had all the ways that you could complete this.
You could actually see Netanya, go into the base, and do a lot of the missions for her without ever seeing Quinn.
And so, we had to kind of take into account for that, and we had to take into account whether you get an objective later on with this eye and
come back, so this was one of those conversations that really had to be fully graphed out long before we even started writing it.
And then add to that, the character of Quinn himself and the flavor, so this one was a lot of fun and a challenge to write, and to act out as well.
 Do you need some water at this point?
So, you'll notice as you go through the base, that every single room has a purpose and it's been outfitted with a lot of the visual storytelling.
This was… a lot of forethought had to be put into this and one of the things we did in the process of creating the DLC, was we would write
an environmental storytelling that basically we kind of decided, 'Ok, what is the purpose of the base, what are the purpose of every single room?'
And we described a lot of the things that we felt would be appropriate in a military base like this, and then we handed that off to the art team and said, “Here you go, have fun with it.”
 And then the environment guys, after a bout of crying, they had all these little extra tidbits to do in every single room.
Well, we did manage that, and just tried to do stuff as cheap as possible so that we could convey that you have this operation map here, and their stuff.
And if you read the post-its, sometimes they make sense and they relate to the story. You have some offices where you have pictures of people and there’s actually a backstory written for them. It’s really for the explorer.
 And the ‘show, don’t tell’ of the environment.
 Yeah, the type of player that wants to revel in those details; they're going to have their money’s worth with ‘Deus Ex’, typically.
$
So, now you've made it inside the secret detention camp of the DLC, ‘The Missing Link,’ and this was level designed by Steven Ciciola.
 Yes, thank you, Mary and for saying that correctly. I was the level designer of the prison and it was a lot of fun to do. One of the things that was really interesting in this level was that I had a lot of limitations in just
the way it looked, and we had to redesign it completely from the ground up at least three or four times. At the start it used to be sort of this long, angular prison cell with just cells all along the wall; very old fashioned style-looking references
that were used for this. Eventually this got changed into a more open-ended… similar, but just had prisons on both side of the wall with a larger space in the opening in the middle. And that got changed again, and then finally reached this conclusion
to have this sort of tube. This turbine, almost, that I would call it; a ‘silo’ is what we actually called it, of all these prison cells...
 And the reason for that was that we needed to create this sense of a very massive prison that extended on beyond the areas you would get to explore.
 Yes, so when I got this request it was kind of like, 'Oh geez, how am I going to show this?' Because we can’t have the player going to 50-some odd floors, right? It would be a little ridiculous, so in the end, what I figured out
would be kind of a clever idea, was to have this entire floor in the center where this cube is rested upon. It’s actually a mechanical floor that lifts and lowers depending on where the guards want to go inspect, I suppose. And you...
 You can actually see this in the four tall pillars on the corners of that floor. There is this huge machine in them which is basically a kind of mechanical system, that is the elevator system in there with a design that makes
sense. And I guess that’s the only thing we have that really says, ‘this is motorized.’
 And another interesting tidbit was the entrance to this area; the positioning of the entrance to this large silo was something that changed also very often...
 It was important to us, because as soon as you get there, it's a very nice beauty shot of the prison and the redesign of the thing; one of the big aspects of redesigning it. We had much better ‘Deus Ex’ style environment with this
kind of sci-fi environment here, which I think is really cool. I'd like a movie in that prison actually.
 It's a nice reveal.
 Yeah, and I had to place all the NPCs as well in every single prison cell. Again, same problem I had in the Alice Garden Pods earlier in HR, is that you’re trying to make a very populated area but you have limitations on
how many NPCs you can use. And so I managed to place NPCs in each pod, every so often, each doing different things, and you can talk to them. So that was a lot of fun. Hope you enjoy this area.
If you look across the gap in the middle of the hole, you’ll see a Praxis point over there, on top of the rooftop of the giant cube in the middle of the room.
Actually, I had a lot of fun with this because there isn’t many places in the game, in HR really, where we actually abuse running and jumping as sort of a way to get to a new location, because it’s usually kind of messy.
But here you need to actually have the jump augment and you need to make a sprinting jump, and you’ll be able to get on to the cube and get the Praxis point. Just a neat little tidbit.
 How do you get that?
 You just go inside; you break the window on top, and you drop in safely. Safe and sound. All situations are accounted for.
 Really?
 Yes!
 Always!
 Always!
Look up. Something that gamers don’t usually do when entering an area is look directly upwards, and what I actually tried to do with this little vent passageway with a goody down low, is to hide what I put above.
For the DLC, I really wanted to put a secret in a secret, is how I call it. And it’s kind of the thing where you finally move the box, you find the vent, you’re like 'Ah! I found it,' you go in and get the loot.
Normally in your gamer sense you will just leave, you will backtrack out; ‘I succeeded, next objective.’
But in this case I wanted to hide another secret on top of this, and this came from the entire thought process of being able to choose who to save.
 This is a very important room, because this gives you access to a very hidden third option, that you can save everybody in the game.
 Yeah, that was my fault. I’m sorry. It’s just that ‘Deus Ex’ is all about choices and consequence, and from very early on, there was the idea of you can save
someone specific, very important to the story, or you could save the prisoners because it’s, well it’s mass murder at that point; you’ll figure out later when you play.
But as a ‘Deus Ex’ thing, I really wanted to… on the game design perspective and on the gameplay perspective, it was important that we offer a very unique choice for the player who really
wants to work to succeed in doing something special, and it was to save everyone. Find a way; there’s always a way to save everyone, and so Steven sort off looked at me weird, like, ‘Really?’
 But I love that stuff.
 We all love that stuff.
 I really do, and I thought that, I didn’t want to just give it away, you know.
Something as important as that; I wanted it to be really something for the true searchers and explorers. So if you look up, go there when the time comes.
 So you made it super, super hard to save everyone.
 Exactly.
So, now we're joined once again with a voice you’ve heard several times in this Director's Cut, Steve Szczepkowski, our audio guy.
 Yeah, so we're here to talk about the new device that we introduced in the DLC, which was basically the audio logs.
Which I was really happy about; I thought it’s a great way to add back story at a very low cost, because it's just an object that we put in a room and then you just plug in all the story stuff that you want the player to get.
So for me it's always a great cheap way to introduce lots of back story, and it was fun doing it because you get to put it together and you make your little ambiences and make it sound…
You're really trying to sell it like it’s a story. We had an operation scene in this which was really fun to do and I'm a big fan of audio logs.
I think they are a lot fun to do and for sure on the production level you get a lot of payout for the cost of putting one little object in the game. So yeah, it was great, I was happy we did it.
So right now you're looking at Nina, our poor prisoner. It was very important from a story standpoint that we could put some weight on saving these prisoners.
You're going to have a very important choice and it's a moral dilemma, and we really wanted to stress that moral dilemma.
So that reasoning lead to the creation of this character, Nina.
We wanted to have a chance to have a conversation with the prisoners and to basically understand them as individuals and that's why we have this one character who came in.
We wanted actually to offer the possibility that you could rescue her individually because she was someone you have a face to face conversation with, but
unfortunately, we knew we wouldn't be able to pull that off, because we didn’t have any kind of mechanics for saving someone, for having them becoming a follower etc...
So unfortunately, we had to leave her in this cell and leave you with that moral choice and because we knew that, we basically decided that we needed to use her
presence here to really make that choice stronger, and when the choice comes up you’ll see her again in some of the cameras that are focusing on the prisoners.
So the restricted area here, we had to design environment in a way that made it obvious that you were not supposed to be there. Something bad is happening here.
We had a bit of trying to figuring out what looks this could have to look ominous and at some point when the environment was mostly
done, we look at it in a conference room in a review meeting and we just all realized at the same time, 'Oh my gosh, this looks like Star Wars!'
 And we kept it that way in the end but we really felt like, 'Wow! We are so going be sued…'
 But it wasn’t intentional.
 But it wasn't intentional, it's just we got there, and yeah.
So, now we've just had the cutscene, and we've seen that you now have a new objective where you have to go back and get Burke’s eye.
 Backtracking!
 Backtracking, it's something we really wanted to avoid, but we did want to have this cool element where you couldn’t get in and we had a reason for it. We couldn’t let you follow them immediately.
 Yeah, we needed to make it so that Burke flees the scene of the crime, so to speak. So when you go down you don't actually get to meet Bob Page because he's gone and you won’t meet Gary Savage because...
 Yeah, it was Gary. You can’t meet Gary, because he’s left.
 Exactly.
 And we had to get Burke out of there and we have to give them time so that forced us to send you back to the base to retrieve the only key that will let you in.
But we did want to make it initially a lot shorter of a backtrack, we actually wanted to find a way that we could connect the morgue almost more quickly to Quinn.
 Vents aren't that long you guys, I’m really sorry.
 So we couldn’t do that, so instead what we had to do is we had to then take the time to make it that when you get into the base, we had to create new enemy setups surrounding the objective.
 So basically there, just we did were very small tweaks to the patrol depending on how you had acted in the prior area. So, just a little bit of variation to the whole formula.
 But we do apologize for the backtrack.
 Yeah, backtracking is...
 It kind of sucks.
 ...it's stinky .
This is an elevator of course, that is going down, and it is one of the few times that we could actually make this very directed flow of whatever happens outside of the elevator.
So, when you go down you see all of this animated stuff going on. There's that base, there's that submarine going; it's all planned to be awesome-looking at that point.
We had a similar thing planned in the first game when you were supposed to go from upper Hengsha to lower Hengsha.
But it turned out we had to cut upper Hengsha, so that awesome elevator ride got cut off in the process.
So it was fun this time around to try to do it again here, which we think, even though it takes a bit of time to do those things, is such a nice visual moment, just to see this big thing and then have the important story reveal down there.
It's really a nice way of pacing.
 Of really showcasing what we wanted to do. Because we did want that whole feel of you're descending into the depths of this dark secret that's happening, and that enables us to do it.
And I just like to point out, in case you weren't noticing, when that sub left, that was Gary Savage inside that sub. So that kind of explains why you don't find him down in the lab.
So now you've just survived the lockdown by climbing the ladder outside of the elevator, and what we just want to let you know is that this elevator was actually really complicated for us to do, given our tools.
One thing to keep in mind is that elevators throughout Deus Ex, the programming behind it, was that it could go from one floor to another and you really could not do anything else.
So we had to cheat a lot in that the elevator you take down and the elevator you take up are both different.
 Even though you think you’re getting into the same one, its two different ones.
 Exactly, you think you’re getting into the same one but behind the scenes you’re really not, and the way we did this was by unloading and loading the elevator depending on where you were in the story with Kavanagh down below.
Afterwards, the other problem that came up was the elevator stopping abruptly.
Automatically the way it was done in our programming, is that elevators come into a smooth, slow stop to the floor that they need to go on and that wouldn't make any sense in a lockdown.
So special thanks to our technical level designer Sylvain Douce at that time.
He took care of that, and he managed to fake a camera shake and fake the abrupt stopping and the lights turns on, and everything just felt right with the lockdown.
After this, you have to climb up this whole segment in the elevator and it was a little bit of platforming, and the complications that arise with that is usually first person, and platforming isn't always the smoothest of transitions.
So I had to get a lot of help from the lighting artists to light the scene, so that you see every little platform to go up.
And I tried to make it kind of simple even though it's really should be a lot more complex. But in the end, you should get out fine.
$
On the other side of that window, you'll see this robot arm trying to do something with those cells that need to be cool down, or something like that. We don't quite know what it is exactly, but it’s something technical and cool.
 Something to do with the secret lab.
 Probably something to do with this entire installation. Now, this robot arm actually took a long time to do but it was made by Philippe Desrosiers, the lead modeler, in his own time actually, not in work time.
It’s something that he wanted to do. He spent probably the equivalent of 20 entire days on that thing.
It’s actually a robot that is not animated; it's actually a robot that plans what it’s doing with our internal interactive system.
It's like a robot done in the most complicated way possible, but it's cool, like it does stuff and you could look at it trying to do things with those batteries.
 Trying to figure what it’s doing.
 And it's doing, not something really interesting in the end. But it's a really cool robot arm, and it’s cool that we could manage to do this, this animated stuff, the way they are.
So the one issue for me in this lab was, this was where we had to put our Kavanagh, the doctor Kavanagh; Tiffany Kavanagh who's a very important character for the story and when we were originally looking at it, I really kind of wanted her off
separated in her own room, because we needed to have it make sense from a story perspective, how you can come in into this room and do whatever the heck you want, and she doesn't pay any attention.
So it was a bit of a challenge because we had such a small space that we could work with.
  Yeah, one of the things that ended up happening was we ended up having art constrains a little bit, just on size we couldn't make two huge storage rooms. We could only really have one.
 Yeah, there were also the glass. We were supposed to enclose it in glass but transparency costs a lot to the current generation graphic cards and we couldn’t.
There was so much stuff going on in that room and we had to get rid of that glass.
 Yeah, and another problem was the generation of chaos from the player. We couldn't have them shooting a machine gun all over the place and then you could maybe possibly kill Kavanagh, which was also a really big no-no.
So we ended up taking away the holster and force holster on the weapons. So that's a little bit annoying.
 And then we try to sell the fact that she doesn’t see you by having her position her back to you and have her absorbed in her work. I always wanted her to have headphones on, like she’s trying to listen to music or something.
But we hopefully sold it a bit in terms of the custom animation that we created for her so that when you actually go, she kind of jumps like she’s really scared and was absorbed in her work.
 Yeah. I think it worked out.
 And it's interesting how much focus you have to put on something like that, just to try and sell it when you know the player can do anything they want.
So here we are inside a very, very important story room.
This entire room was basically created to help convey the real story we wanted, and we had so much we wanted to express here; that this is a top secret research base tied with VersaLife.
If you look very carefully, you might find some clues about that here, and it was really to just kind of show off a lot of what we were unable to show off in HR, in the Omega Ranch facility.
So we wanted to really get across a lot of that idea, of the experimentation that's going on here, on human experimentation.
We wanted to put in all the ties to the Hyron Project; in the corner you can see parts of the boss that you're actually going to fight later.
And one of the really cool things is what we called the surface tables, these holographic tables, and every single one of them, if you have the right device that will activate them, they even in themselves tell even more story.
I think one is talking about a secret moon base that's going on; one of them is showing the locations of all the Hyron projects that exist in our universe and all the Panchaea projects, because there is more than one.
But all of that secret stuff that's hidden throughout this is all just to basically tell this depth of story, if you just spend the time looking at it.
 Artistically, this is by far the most expensive room we've made because of all of these details we probably have…
there's an artist who worked exclusively on this room and the elevator ride just before for the entirety of the project, which means around thirteen weeks to do all of this.
$
So, that’s the big elevator scene where we actually go technically at the bottom of the ocean and...
 That was something quite important to us.
 Yeah, and what we wanted to do at first was to put the flags of the countries today fighting for the Arctic pole, and everything.
 Oh! At the bottom?
 At the bottom, which we didn’t do.
 Because that’s the idea that the cylinder literally goes to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and there is a real thing where Canada…
 Yeah... and Russia
 Canada and Russia were actually in the real world fighting to know, that place belongs to who, and actually put their flags there.
 Exactly, yeah. And we wanted to put that there.
 We wanted to be like that, exactly, where the thing is, is where the flags are at.
 But if we come back to the elevator itself, what we wanted to do was this massive thing where you just absorb this whole infrastructure as you go down.
 Yeah.
 It was tough to...
 Yeah, we had some trouble with this elevator, in fact, because we have to be sure the timing during the descent is not too long and during this descent, the visibility of the round itself of...
 The structure?
 Yeah, the structure must be artistically correct.
 Yeah.
 And finally we did more, we did some tests for this.
We had very quickly a solution for the rendering part, but we encountered some trouble with the physics system itself, because when we found the speed of the elevator we had trouble, for example, with the jump.
When you jump during the descent of the elevator, when you touch down after that on the elevator itself, you were killed.
 Because it had to move quite fast, actually.
 Yeah, it was going down so fast that basically, if you jumped it ended up like being a huge drop back to the thing, yeah.
So it was after that the decision with the game director etc... ‘To be sure, can we just lock the character…
 The character.
 …during the descent?’ The answer was yes, so...
 We can move around.
 We move around, but we killed the jump feature for that, for that elevator.
 Yeah, exactly.
 Yes, exactly.
 And I remember one of our big challenges was making sure that it feels big. That it goes down for quite a long time.
But at the same time, not too long you know, ‘cause if it went down too fast it would be, it would feel like that the tube was really short, and it was quite tricky.
 And the second issue with that finally, it was the bounding areas, because the elevator was...
 Opened.
 Yeah, it’s true.
 So, If you jumped, you could jump over the wall, so you’d be killed again.
 It was, yeah.
 So, and because there are no gameplay really in this, it’s just a big showcase.
 It’s a big feeling.
 Yeah, it was just to absorb something.
 Yes, exactly. So this was a good decision for it, so we could focus only on the art part, finally.
 Yeah, and I remember we wanted to have a lot more things exploding because, you know, of all the stuff that happened in Panchaea, and smoke; there was a bit.
But I remember we wanted to have those big pipes like falling and like...
 Yeah, exactly. And finally all the stuff was at the original scale. For this part was the... or original scale is not really… yes. It was in effect.
 Yeah, it's one on one.
 We had a few compromises to do, but we managed to pull it off for the feeling we wanted for that scene.
 Yeah.
 Yeah, some part was matte-painted directly on the structure to manage correctly the feeling of the structure, and some close up afterwards. Classic model and texture.
 Models and stuff.
$
This Panchaea map actually, the first part of the map our intention was to have an eerie feeling when you get there. There is nothing happening, there’s no life; there’s just you.
 It’s empty.
 It's empty; you just wonder what’s going on.
 Yup.
 And the goal was to make it very uncomfortable and make you on your toes.
 Yeah, creepy...
 Not knowing what to expect.
 A bit like the beginning of ‘Aliens’. The second ‘Alien’ movie when, you know, they get to the base and…
 There’s nobody there.
 And they don’t know what happened there. There’s supposed to be all those terraformers, all those employees and it’s just totally empty in there. They don’t know what happened; it’s as if they disappeared.
 Yeah, it’s a good reference. It’s exactly what we were... for us on the audio side, it was obviously a really fun, rich palette because you’re like, 'Ok, eerie.’ I’m a huge horror fan, so that was great.
And what we did is we knew we had the crazies in the map, so even though there's nothing going on, we added a lot of like little whispers and just that whole, you know, 'Cha... cha... cha...'. It’s that type of thing in the ambiences...
 Yeah, exactly. So that was great because you know what, it alluded to the crazies that we would soon be encountering and you would
hear them and you’re like, as JF said, 'Where is everybody?’ first and ‘what is that I’m hearing?' and ‘Obviously I’m gonna be finding out soon,’ so...
It was all about just creating and adding as much tension as we could because we really wanted the player to feel very uncomfortable here. As in, you’ve got this huge complex; where is everybody?
 Yeah.
 And it was… we are big fans of ‘Resident Evil 4’ and for us it was kind of our opportunity to have our little ‘Resident Evil’ moment.
 Little ‘Resident Evil 4’ moment.
 Pay homage.
 ‘Resident Evil 4’ might, could be my best game of all time after ‘Zelda - Link to the Past’ probably, but enough with the plugs.
 And the three thousands other games that you said that were the best.
 That are the best ones ever made. But then it’s cool, because then you go at the top of the tower and then whatever happens with our friend...
 Darrow?
 Darrow, and then everything gets triggered and that’s where the zombies come out.
 Yeah.
$
So, this is the very final room of the game. So, it’s very important for us to have a memorable room, something that would kind of stay in your mind after you're done playing the game.
So, we wanted to bring back a lot of the visual themes of the game; the black and the gold, the weirdness of some of the architecture and the art installation and all that.
And it started as a very... might I say, basic kind of control room at the beginning.
It was like this technical kind of grayish computer room and then we just said, ‘you know, that’s going to be just way too ordinary,’ and we transformed it into this crazy, Tetris-like thing that I think worked out pretty well.
 It works really well, and like we alluded to in our last comment, our goal has never been to just simply be pushing buttons here.
It was all about working when Sarif was asking something, when Taggart was asking for something else and doing those things would open and trigger those endings.
But like we said earlier, we had to cut and make things simpler. So, we knew that by pushing the buttons, it would feel cheap and some players would be disappointed.
But it was that or not having endings at all so... We had to make those kind of, I would say, necessary decisions that were not the creative ideas behind...
 Our original intentions.
 Exactly. And also, as you go into the final cutscenes, you might like them, you might not like them, but actually, for us it was
more to give the ending in the player’s hands in the sense that: what do you really think is going to happen with your decision?
How do you believe that humankind is going to be able to pull that off? And the cutscenes themselves are there to illustrate the pattern of human beings.
Like, what they did in the past, what they’re doing today and where do you think they’re going and if it fits with what you envisioned for the ending.
 And it’s kind of there, just to show you that you know, science fiction is always commenting on reality in the safe place.
 Exactly.
 But it’s actually reflecting reality.
 The reality.
 We wanted at this point with these ending cutscenes to say: 'Hey! All this time you’ve been playing a game but the issues are very real and look, it’s in our own history.'
 And that’s exactly why we chose to go with live footage because it’s almost as if you can see a bit of the game as almost like a dream, in a sense, as it’s a stylized version of reality.
Yet dealing with very real themes like you’re saying, Mary. But then at the end, we thought about it. Do we go with CGI?
And then we said ‘Hey! How about we go with real live footage? Because now we’re showing you the results of what you experience in the game but what it does in real life. So let’s go with live footage.’
And I know some people weren’t too keen on that once the game came out, but this is something that I’m adamant about, that I really think was the right choice and I’m really happy with it. Yeah.
 Exactly, yeah. Because to me too, it was like those endings are going to be, 'you’ll love them' or 'you’ll hate them.’
 Yeah and I’m fine with that.
 But they won’t leave you indifferent.
 Yeah.
 And that was our goal. So, those endings are very polarizing and I think in the end, it achieved what we wanted.
But I want to add one more thing, as you’ll watch them probably in couple of seconds. In the original footage we had more shocking… imagery...
 Imagery
 …that was included, and for some editorial reasons, we had to rearrange them to make them, I would say, more politically correct.
And I’m happy, like, I wasn’t happy when I had to do that. But I was happy how we manage to maintain...
 The essence.
 the heart and the essence of the message. We didn’t compromise on that. Hope you enjoy this commentary; it’s probably the last comment you will hear or like...
 Not!
 Not. Because, yeah, if you go into the room on the other side, there’s another comment.
 Yes.
 That’s true.
 Regardless, I hope you enjoyed it and you had fun learning a little bit more about ‘Deus Ex: Human Revolution.’
 Peace!
 See you.
Well, if you remember the comment I added with the hacker scene, where I was telling the cinematic director that he couldn’t use guns, actually this
is the only cutscene in the game where he managed to convince me to make Jensen use a gun, because he was able to justify it with the dead people.
It was taken from the ground and he throws it away before the end of the cutscene. So that’s...
 So, we actually had to write into the cutscene that he would find the dead body, find the gun and etc...
 Exactly, yeah.
 And what I remember about this particular room is the concept for the Hyron Project was originally much bigger, it was supposed to be men and women who were
being attached to this computer, and that this entire room would be something reminiscent for me of ‘The Matrix,’ with all the pods and all that.
But in the end, I think for production reasons, it ended up getting cut down to just being the three women at the base, and I’m sure there are other Hyron Projects within the...
 Right.
...confines of the station as well, but here’s the central core.
 And from the audio side, this was probably the most challenging map that we had to work with. Numerous reasons, I still...
There’s a lot of things I love about it; I remember giving the guys the request saying  for the drones, I really wanted what I called the Poltergeist effect.
If you go back to the movie ‘Poltergeist,’ where she’s trapped in the TV and it’s almost, they called it a ‘reverse delay’, where you hear this voice coming in and then the real voice comes in.
I knew right away I wanted that type of effect for the drones.
And managing one of the guys on my team, Yohann Boudreault, I think he lost like a year of sleep just trying to get this scene to work because there were so many technical problems with the way it had been constructed.
It was constructed so it would work but with that audio in mind, and then he had to find about a hundred different workarounds and there are so many sounds going on.
Zhao talking, the turrets going around, pretty much just so much sound to manage.
He had a really hard time and I’ve got to give him a lot of credit.
Getting this map to kind of work and not sound like just a huge mess, was amazing.
 And the other interesting audio trick we did was the women’s voices.
We actually had two different women doing the Hyron voices, one of whom does all the computers in the game, and the other one actually plays Megan Reed.
So, with this cutscene, we spent a lot of time, because we really wanted to make sure that in the explosion, Jensen gets hurt.
Because we had a different idea for the ending.
We wanted to actually have it be more playable, with the player feeling Jensen being hurt and struggling, and affecting emotion.
 Not just pressing buttons, yeah.
 And not just pressing buttons.
So, we really had to make him get hurt in this cutscene.
But all for naught, because ultimately we ended up kind of cutting that ending plan.
 Exactly.
 Didn’t we? Oh, well...
Here in this corridor, this is where you can go for the player choice where you just try to sink the Panchaea facility.
Like we said in the earlier comment, like in the outro of the Hyron Project cutscenes where you see Jensen being thrown to the wall, it was our way to make sure that Jensen would be injured.
Still alive, but really struggling because our original intention was to have the player play Jensen crawling on the...
 Wounded.
 Yeah, wounded on the floor and getting there, and as he would go there, if the other characters like Sarif, Taggart, and Darrow
would be alive, they would go in the info link and go like: “Jensen, what are you doing?” like: “No! Don’t do this!”
And also Eliza as a hologram was supposed to walk with you and then accompany you through that choice, and the goal was to make it so that
deciding to put an end to all of this and maybe eluding to, ‘will Jensen survive this as well or not,’ was something that was super important.
It’s a big decision, and we wanted to make it last and have this feeling of the other people trying to pull you in the other direction to make that choice even more weighty, more substantial etc. But in the end…
 All good intentions.
 Yeah.
 It would have been amazing to see Jensen walk; to see him, to see the camera struggling so much, like feeling that he is struggling, and seeing Eliza, all kind of calm, walking.
It would have been a really nice contrast.
 Yeah. But...
 Maybe they will get it right in the movie!
 So again, if this is the last comment you listen to, hope you enjoyed this commentary. See you soon.
 Yes, thank you for listening to us chat.
 And now go watch the movie!
$
Well, this is the arrival to Panchaea and actually now, we’re starting on the platform. But our original intent was to...
Like, you see the shuttle go into the sea and we thought that Jensen would go on some ice spots on the ocean and get closer to the facility and climb up.
 It would have been our jumping puzzle.
 Exactly, it would have been awesome.
 But then we were struggling with time and everything. So we cut it short and we did an ellipse here.
 Yeah, and there were actually quite a few ideas for how this should open.
At one point we were even thinking that we wanted to have Megan come to Panchaea with you and be in the helicopter and we would have been able to resolve some of that Megan story line.
 Which we never did.
 Which we never ended up doing. We never ended up having her being with you and never ended up resolving her story line in the game.
So, I forget exactly how it would have worked out if she had come, but we were... I remember several discussions about doing that.
 Yeah, and then Panchaea, visually speaking - not the interior, but the exterior; I know it was just a fantasy of mine…
I’ve always imagined this big hole in the middle of the ocean which kind of looks weird, and every game I’ve worked on, I always try to plug it in somewhere, and it would never work out.
 You know what I mean, and then suddenly when we had this idea of going to the Arctic for this, and then when we start talking about the ocean, I’m like: 'This is it!' you know. It’s just like....
 That’s my chance!
 That is, yeah. It is my chance. I can finally have this hole in the ocean, you know, so...
 And it makes sense because where would the idea of seeding the iron at the bottom of the ocean for global warning...
 I would have forgotten about that, but the idea was that… We first had the idea of the hole and then it’s a cylinder and then we’re like, well what is its purpose?
 Yeah, we had to justify it.
 We had to justify it, and then we started making research and we found out about this kind of eco-forming  thing
they have of seeding iron in the ocean, so that it would absorb, if I remember properly, the heat of the greenhouse effect.
 Yeah, it would have caused algae to grow at the bottom of the ocean.
 That would have then start keeping the oxygen...
 And believe it or not, just the other day I heard a radio report about if it’s a good idea to seed the sea here.
 Oh yeah, but there was a guy, even back then there was a guy who had started a company and his goal was buying big boats.
 Becoming more and more...
 Yeah, but back then, there was already a guy who had like those… He bought a whole bunch a huge ships and he was filling them with rust, with iron rust to go seethe the ocean with it.
So that was a bit of history behind it.
 Because I tried to go on the ocean shore with a filter and I lost patience after 5 minutes.
 A filter?
 To filter the ocean.
 Oh! Ok! Bye-bye!
$
So, here we are with some of the final dialogues in the game and I think I mentioned earlier that when we first started the project, the approach that we were coming
from was to make the story mostly told through cutscenes and through these dialogues that reacted and didn’t give you much opportunity to actually interact with them.
And we had made the decision much later into production that, 'Oh my goodness, we're missing an opportunity.'
So, I really wanted to make these conversations with Sarif and with Taggart more interactive and give the player more choices.
 Yeah.
 ...at the end here, I did what I could to kind of make it.
 At least we had to have the philosophy in place, but it was not involving the player as much.
 Yeah, so that was kind of one of my disappointments.
 And also another thing, with this Sarif room, and as we’ll talk about Taggart's room too, if you don't visit them, they don’t appear in the final choices.
And we debated it for a while within the team whether we should go in that direction or not.
If it was too punitive or not and me, I was really going for the fact that: no, you need to go and talk to them and if you don’t, then those opportunities are just not there.
 You mean at the end of the game when you have to make a choice?
 After the end, when you have to make your choice in the end so instead of having four options available, you would end up having just two with the players' choice and Darrow’s choice.
So but yeah, we had a lot of long discussions about that.
$
So, I actually had an awful lot of fun writing the Hyron Project e-mails that you find in here, because the concept that we had was, of course, that any kind of e-mail
that's been generated about a security code, we should have it be generated by this Hyron computer that's in the basement, in the very depths of this facility.
And so, the whole concept is that this computer was actually part human and these poor women had been attached to this against their will.
It was actually fun every time I did that, to write e-mails that kind of sound very computer-esque, and yet at the very end have this eerie human statement about 'remember me?' or 'Life is sad' or all this stuff.
And for me, I had a lot of fun doing it, and it added a lot.
And all of the codes for all the computers had to generate were often the codes for the names of the women who had been kidnapped and their dying statements as the passwords.
 That is so sad.
 So that’s kind of 'Wow,' as you sit there and look through all those computers.
One of the other things that we wanted to do with the endings, as JF mentions in another one of our discussions here, is that by not going to see
Sarif or not seeing Taggart, you wouldn’t actually get their end choices, but we also intended that the endings would play out a lot differently.
We didn’t want it to be that you just go to the room and they give you a dialogue and then you get the ending.
We actually wanted them at one point to give you actions you had to do.
At the end they’re asking you to change the message and we had all these ideas. If I could remember correctly we had ideas...
 That's the suitcase?
 In order to actually change the message, you had to compile evidence that you could actually insert into it and so we were going to send you all over the place, and the only
thing I vaguely remember with Taggart, is that he wanted you to go get his briefcase somewhere because there would be some tapes and evidence in there that you could do.
 Right.
 So it was supposed to be a lot more involved than just getting to talk to them and then getting to push a button at the end. But we didn’t quite make it.
 But the schedule was tight when we were at that point where we couldn’t figure this out and we had to take some shortcuts and get to the essential.
 Yes.
$
Here’s what we call the Star Wars bridge, because it’s kind of reminiscent of these huge environments that you see in Star Wars, especially in the...
 The Death Star.
 In the early ones, yeah, the Death Star and probably also the Cloud City and stuff like that,  there’s huge cylinders with little bridges and stuff like that.
 The idea here, I think could have been implemented a bit better, but the idea is that we’re actually between the walls of Panchaea; the actual rim of the cylinders.
We are inside this rim; it’s almost as if the early parts of the level were on the exterior part of the walls, and then we need to take a bridge that crosses that wall, that brings us into the hollow part of the cylinder to take the big elevator.
It's going to brings us down. So the idea is to understand that with every gigantic engineering feat, such as Panchaea or like a big dam or something like that, you can actually go inside the structure, like literally.
It’s hollow inside; it’s not just pure concrete. And there are major installations: bridges, stairs, pipes for maintenance, and that’s kind of where you’re at in that section.
So, it’s pretty cool. If you look left, if you look right, it keeps going really far and it starts curving because it follows obviously the curve of the circle so... yeah. It’s a pretty neat place.
 And that bridge also, a lot of players went into it, like, 'Oh! I cannot continue to play stealth'. But actually you can continue to play stealth even thought a throng of crazies, sorry Mary, That are out there.
If you are really patient and you think it through and use all the tools you have, you can really go past them without being noticed.
 You can go under the bridge, right?
 Yup.
 Yeah, so you can go down and on the side or something like that.
$
Here, if you look by the window, you can see all the icebergs in the ocean and what’s funny about that...
As we develop a game, we always go with layers as you build the geometry, then you can move around and then eventually, a first pass of visuals.
But it takes a long time before you get to the end. And probably my fear came back from conception time, when in the first concept art for Panchaea, we said were in 2027.
The global warming would have increased much more, so there's a lot of melt down of the icebergs, and stuff.
And in the first conception about Panchaea, there was no iceberg on it and I went to Jon and said, “Yes it's melting down, but we need to have a bit more.”
And he added, but after that, as we were building the map, the icebergs were still not there. But because we were not there yet…
 Well, cause they had melted in the meantime.
 Yeah and in the meantime...
 Yeah.
 Because it took us 4 years so... But I was constantly reviewing the map, like looking by the window: “I want my icebergs; I want the icebergs there,” and everything.
And after a while the guys, especially Jon, were tired of me, like, with my icebergs, and as soon as I was coming into the room for this they were: “Yes, there's going to be icebergs!” even before I mentioned it.
And eventually they got there, and I could really relax and be happy.
 But it was just the tip of the iceberg.
Here we’re very close by the first crazy that you can encounter if you’re an early explorer.
 And if I could just say...
 Yes?
 I’ve always hated the name ‘crazies’.
 Yeah.
 They shouldn’t be. We unfortunately made the mistake of calling them crazies in the production, because they weren’t supposed to be zombies. They weren’t supposed to be crazy.
The storyline is that they were supposed to have been in a of state of terror, they’re suffering terrible hallucinations and everybody is acting out of fear, and when your gut instinct kicks in when you’re that terrified…
 It’s fight or flight.
 And many of the people are supposed to be these trained soldiers who are going to fight, and it's going to be very dangerous. But we made a mistake of calling them crazies.
 And when we called them crazies, everything just started going from there.
 Yeah, so actually when we thought about them and everything, because of the story, the AI that would be needed for them could be different from the rest of the game.
 Definitely.
 But since it was the only part of the game where you actually see them, and a little bit at the Omega Ranch, we couldn’t put it as a priority.
You have to have the AI for the rest of the game to be working super well before we get into that.
 Yeah, you need the AI that you’re going to be seeing 98% of the time good.
 Exactly. So it was the last thing that we really focused on, and like Mary said, just because we were calling them crazies, it put everybody in a state of mind that they are crazy.
 That they’re just insane.
 Exactly.
 Zombie-like crazy.
 And it informed the animation and all to go in that direction. And the thing is that back in the days when we were thinking about them, we didn’t really have good references to base them on.
And as they were done and everything, I saw an episode of ‘Fringe’, season 2 where, I can’t really remember which episode it is, but you have
these people who just go and hallucinate some stuff and it makes them kill people just because they are in this ‘fight or flight’ kind of…
 Moment.
 Moment, and I was like, 'Gosh, if I had seen it or if it had existed when we were talking about them, the crazies - the way they are, they wouldn't exist.’
Here’s the last social boss fight; our last encounter with a madman.
 Actually, it’s the one that we acknowledge ourselves…
It’s the silliest one in the sense that the chip went off, people are dying all over the world and you have Adam Jensen that goes into this lengthy conversation with this guy while people are dying.
 Yeah, but at the same time, they do this in movies and everything, you know. It’s a bit like before the big guy wants to kill the hero; the mad guy who wants to kill the hero. It fits into this whole thing.
 So, it was ridiculous, but at the same time it was needed, to hammer...
 Yes.
 ...the philosophy once more before we make your final choice.
 What I’m saying is that we’re not the first ones to use that means.
 No...
 Exactly .
 And actually I think our original intentions with it were to kind of shake up and say, you know, why not have a boss fight at the end of the game where
it’s a conversation and you have to try and convince this madman of the rationale behind it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the last one we wrote…
 Hehehe
 But it was a switch of writers.
Many of the boss fights were written by one writer on the project, Taras, who was fantastic, and then unfortunately he ended up leaving the project and so we had to kind of train other writers on staff to do it.
So it was a bit of a… and it’s quite a difficult thing to write. So I think that kind of came into it.
I think the fact that we had to get this actor to perform and gradually over the course of the conversation get angrier and
angrier and yet, you can’t really get too angry in these conversations because they all have to bleed back in to all the multiple choices.
So a lot of that lead to, I think, a lot of issues on the creation of this one.
 Even with the body acting. At first he uses his cane like he has a hard time moving around, and eventually gets passionate about what he’s talking about...
 It’s all over the place.
 And he forgets that he has trouble with his leg.
 It’s because the adrenaline kicks in and he forgets about the pain, you know what I mean?
 Yeah, but I think we actually had two different mocap actors, because I think we mocapped it once and we weren’t happy with it.
 We had to redo it, yeah.
 And we had to redo it with someone else. So that might also contribute to all that. So, this one was not by any means my favorite.
 But at least we had good visuals in the background, right?
 Yeah! That is totally true, thank you!
 With our small birds that are animated like…
 That saved the day, is that what you’re saying?  No, but to be… Yeah, the room itself is, visually speaking, is definitely again…
I guess it goes with the whole Darrow thing what we’ve been talking about; the room itself is really not one of the best visuals of the game.
But in the background, the matte painting that we have of Panchaea and that big, gaping hole that goes into the ocean is...
 It’s impressive!
  It’s quite impressive, you know; I think pretty much movie quality. It’s Jim Murray who did it, one of our concept artists, and it turned out very well.
 I can’t remember if in this shot we can see icebergs?
 I hope not!
$
Actually that's one of the really cool scenes in the game that we really like.
I really like it!
I think all of us, yeah.
I love the way Eliza is played and portrayed. The fact that… I remember I was really surprised when I first saw it.
It really works well when you don't… it takes you by surprise where she's gonna be positioned.
Right.
You know, as the camera moves around and what not, and the fact that at one point there's two of her.
She appears from different angles.
From different angles and all that kind of stuff, and then we're gonna see at one point Fedorova...
The entrance of Fedorova. It was really cool the way that we set up that this stealthy invisible predator is there.
So that was one of the really cool aspects that we wanted to bring in, to just kind of show her there.
 Yeah.
 Other than the fact that Fedorova's design is quite interesting.
 And this is one of the places in the game where we see it really well; she's still very silent and she just makes that little smirk...
I don't remember exactly what she does with her face, but there's a little something with her lips and, yeah, I quite like it.
There was a little bit of controversy over this, how we ended this fight.
The script kind of implies that she's not dead yet, and are you going to save her?
And the reason that it was written in that way was because initially we had wanted to have the final blow for the bosses with the exception of Barrett, who blows himself up.
It was up to the player to decide whether he was going to do it or not.
And so we kind of wanted to leave this question here as to whether or not she actually was dead.
And when the cutscene is over, the player could end up killing her.
But, in truth, we kind of lost that in the process of our production.
And we never really went back to this script and try to make sure that it didn’t leave that impression with people.
And we never did change the lines and instead we ended up hoping that just from the amount of blood that she was slowly losing, it would end up...
People would get that she's dead.
People would get that she was dead and there was nothing you could do about it.
So the interesting thing with the Fedorova boss fight in my opinion was that she was a character who was mute.
Yeah, mute.
And it made it very interesting because normally you need what we call 'the barks' to give the player feedback.
But I was very insistent that she shouldn't be able to shout anything or maybe she could grunt and stuff like that, but nothing else.
So I think it was interesting because it enabled us to bring Eliza into the fight and kind of have Eliza give you the feedback that you needed, and thus make her a participant in this fight.
But we weren't really sure if it was gonna work out at first.
I think it worked out well. Eliza's sort of that joker character in the story.
Either she wants to help you, and you don't know if she's good or bad or what is going on.
So at that moment, it sort of becomes clear that she's got her own agenda. She's got a thing that…
You need to survive, Jensen needs to survive and Eliza is sort of a pawn at that point. She's, you know, she's disposable.
So that's one thing that was played out in the gameplay as well, while she's sort of telling you where she is, what she's thinking, what she's doing...
It was a clever way to compensate for the fact that Fedorova...
For the mute part...
Fedorova was mute, yeah.
...that led on to all of the problems, that Fedorova was supposed to be so stealthy and everything.
She uses cloak, she uses a different type of claymore than the player, the typhoon system…
And it came out of the idea that if the player has the x-ray vision, basically smart vision, when he sees through walls and surfaces, that you could always see Fedorova walking around.
So that's very easy. So I went to the artists and asked them to do some kind of internal servers thing that you can't see and block the view a bit, so it makes it harder.
And that came on to the idea that we emphasized more on the her footsteps and the water, 'cause it's supposed to be like this huge room with cooling liquids on the floor and everything.
So that came out as well, like that kind of feedback, yeah. If you look really closely, you can actually tell where she is.
And you mentioned the typhoon, and that was one of the big things too, because she shouldn't have the typhoon because that was proprietary cutting-edge technology that was created...
From Sarif.
...by Sarif.
So how could she have the typhoon?
It actually worked out well story-wise, because we were able to sit there and say that they were able to download
some of the data but not all of it so that gave us the opportunity to give her a typhoon, but it was subtly different.
 It's actually the big introduction, when you start fighting her; she comes straight at you and uses it, and 'what the hell's going on...'
 And it's different.
$
So now we're getting close to Eliza's room 404 and eventually, as you move through the facility, you'll go to the room 802.11.
And when Mary came to me with that proposal and everything, at first I was kind of reluctant because I felt it was a little bit too much.
Too much, but people...
Too on the nose, but...
But people might not realize.
I mean, Eliza is of course named after the first AI that was somewhat showing signs of intelligence and that's why we wanted that name; and 404 is a failure, an internet failure warning message that says, 'File not found.'
And so we kind of found that to be good, and then of course the room 802.11 is the universal wireless transmission, and so I really wanted to tie all that into subtle hints about the truth of Eliza.
But to me it was that like… I was like, 'Oh, is that too on the nose?'
But I thought like, because we work in the computer industry and everything and we're more familiar with all those things, for us it's a little bit, 'Eh, it's obvious!' but for most...
See me, I knew about the 404. The other one I didn't know what it was.
But for most people that are not into these things and everything, it's like they don't know those things.
So in the end, I thought it was a really good idea even though maybe for the more I would say computer savvy people, it was like, 'Oh! It's so obvious!'
 Yeah, and I figured for computer savvy it would be obvious and a little chuckle, and other people might learn something by us talking about it.
And even if they do think that's what it is, they still don't have a firm answer of that.
Absolutely.
So it's not the end of the world.
Okay, here in Picus, actually that's a funny anecdote, because here what you see are the only lockers that open up like in the real world.
 Normally.
 And that's a strange thing because I remember with Patrick Garon, we had a lot of debates and fights about why we have to do the lockers...
 The sliding doors.
 The sliding doors instead of the doors opening.
 Like when we started to work on 'Deus Ex,' we had great ideas of objects, and the problem when you do objects that are interactive is that they can break game systems, and I remember it's
 probably the first object that we had to deal, Jon and I, in terms of like how crazy I can be or we can be about not breaking the game and not giving more work to other people just because we want to have doors opening.
So we knew that lockers would be important for the looting and in terms of immersion, you open something and it's like a surprise box and you see the objects.
It's much more interesting than a 2D menu. So the idea is good, but if you open the door, it breaks the cover for the player and the NPC, so I hope...
 And Patrick... People need to know that Patrick doesn't like to break systems.
 It's my job, I'm paid for that. So I hope I would not be remembered as the person that made Jon create the most sci-fi lockers.
 No, to be honest, I think JF took it a lot worse than I did. I mean, you know me, I see a problem, if it makes sense, I agree with it and I sit down and I design what needs to be designed with it.
So I gave you nice lockers that make no sense at all. But I think JF really wanted to...
 No, I recovered. After two sessions with a psychologist I was super well.
 But it's true. It was a big issue with this whole locker thing.
 Yeah, today I laugh about it, it's so funny, but back in the day it was like a tough decision to make.
 We learned to work together.
 Absolutely!
So here we are inside the funicular, which was one of the goals that I had.
I was going to teach everyone who plays this game what a funicular is, which is really funny 'cause I couldn’t think of another name.
But we had some actual plans for this funicular, as this ride that never actually ended up happening.
One of which was we wanted to have a conversation gameplay with Eliza, and have the elevator stop halfway down and end up having Eliza
inside of it and appear and you would have to actually have this conversation to convince her that you were going...
that she should let you get to the bottom and actually help you get to her because she was very afraid about how that would work.
And we actually had written something, and we'd tested it, and we'd almost gotten it but we ended up being…
It took so long to do these things that we ended up having to cut that, so…
Cut a few, and since it was not necessarily the most important one in the game, then we chose to remove that one.
And the funicular, if I remember correctly, it actually really exists in the Olympic Stadium.
Oh, yeah, it exists.
Actually it's a place. It's in the Olympic Stadium and you take the funicular to get to the end of the tower on the top and you can have a beautiful sight of the entire city and beyond.
It's really spectacular.
You can see all of 450.
Exactly, which is the suburbs around Montreal, because the 514 are so cool.
Yeah!
Those are Montrealers!
Yes we are!
So I mentioned already that, you know, we're coming into the headquarters of one of the world biggest news broadcasting.
And it was kind of fun for us to come up with the name for Picus.
We wanted something that tied into Greek mythology or Roman mythology.
I can't remember which one.
 What does it mean again?
 And actually Picus is a god, he's one of the lower gods, and he's associated with Ares, the god of war, but his particular specialty is he is the god of manure.
 Of manure?
 Of manure, otherwise known as bull shit!
 I remember this, it was manipulation or something.
 No! But manure is bull shit!
 And we figured that a corporation that's manipulating news...
 How great is that!
 And for the sake of the Illuminati who are trying to cultivate that war kind of thing, he would be perfect.
So that's where the name Picus comes from.
 That is awesome.
So we've got tons and tons of e-mails throughout Picus.
And what was real fun about these ones is, first of all, I basically assigned the entire thing to Jean-Francois Champagne, one of our narrative designers on the game, and he really had a lot of fun with it.
And I think a lot of the e-mails that you read are actually based on similar things to what actually happens here in Eidos Montreal.
Real situations in the studio, yeah.
Real situations in the studio. And they're all slightly twisted and slightly hidden to some of the human resources type stuff that goes on here.
And the other thing that's really cool about them is because Picus is in Montreal, and Montreal is French Canadian, and there it's a bilingual city, we really wanted to have French e-mails in here.
The only thing that would, that… like I mention in Hengsha, like I wanted to have the players to feel the flavor of the place by being exposed to the local language.
I do feel that we could have gone a little bit further with the French e-mails because, even though it's a bilingual city, it's mostly a...
A French.
…a French-speaking city. So I thought that we were a little bit too conservative.
We should have pushed it more, but in the end the ones which are there… it's kind of cool for the French Canadians out there.
And it should have been more than the e-mails, like the signs and everything.
There's a few French things, but it should have been pushed quite a bit more.
And the other thing we tried to really get across here is the sense that, because you're coming into this and it's supposed to be a 24-hour news
broadcast center, there should be people in here and yet there aren't and the reason there aren't is of course because a trap has been laid for Adam Jensen.
And so one of the things that was important was to really show that people had left in a hurry.
And that didn't work out too well.
No, I mean you get the sense, but we could have pushed it a little bit more.
I think it did, you get the sense of it.
Well, basically the sense is just coffee cups that are turned over everywhere, and that's pretty much what it is.
I mean we wanted to push it a bit more than that, but, yeah, whatever... I guess it's there, yeah.
So Picus actually is the... if you're a Montrealer or you know a little bit about Canada...
 You don't know what Picus is!
 No, but you know what the Olympic Stadium is.
 And actually, like it's the actual real design of the Olympic Stadium.
I mean, we did some modifications but the...
 No, but for the exterior view is quite...
 It's quite there.
 It's quite accurate.
 Exactly. Actually, originally there was... Montreal was playing a bigger part in the game.
 Yeah, we planned to actually explore a certain area of Montreal called the Plateau, and we wanted to, actually, originally put the hacker in Montreal.
 Yeah, van Bruggen!
 Van Bruggen. But he wasn't van Bruggen at the time.
He was a young kid that was working with a group of hackers, all in Montreal.
And it would all take place in this part of the city that's the really nice old Plateau area, and it was supposed to be a house and all that...
 Yeah, it was a house and the parents were away and the kid was alone and you were getting to meet him, and all the spec ops were surrounding the...
 We're slowly coming in and trapping you in there. It was a big trap to rescue him and get him out.
But we ended up having to cut that and instead we stuck with the Olympic Stadium, which has quite a history here in Montreal as well.
 The Expos used to play there. Now they're the Washington Nationals.
 Yes, and there's been a lot of controversy in this city as to what the history of this would be, what will end up happening to Montreal...
So we decided that in 2027, it would have been sold and become the corporate headquarters of the world biggest broadcasting center, kind of going off of the idea that Montreal is becoming a very big city that's very big in technology and in entertainment such as video games.
 So that's kind of how we ended up with the Olympic Stadium.
 And if you remember, a lot of people actually think that the city hub was made and that we ended up cutting it out of the game.
But that's not true. We never actually got to the point where the city hub was made. It was cut way before that.
 No, we had the concept art that was referring to Montreal downtown and after that the furthest we went...
 We had made a few tech in-game tests.
Like it was more like a tech demo...
 But for the modules of the building and stuff like that, yeah.
So now we're in the TV newsroom and actually it was the place, the center were we wanted to have many televisions that were covering
about all the events going on in the world at that point, and it would have been a very strong place for the 'show-don't-tell' of the world but we...
Yeah, and if… I mean, it makes a lot of sense since this is a TV corporation, of course they'll be showing tons of news stories and
everything, but when we got down to it, there were only so many news stories that we could produce for this game, so we kind of had to find a way to cheat.
Especially we had to… and we had to cut for television news, and originally we thought they were all being 3D like the rest of the beginning of the game and we couldn't, so...
We did everything we could to support it as much as possible, but… Yeah.
 Yeah, so we tried. And actually, I am quite happy with the TV news that we did have.
I love all the little ticker tapes running across the bottom and have a lot of references to 'Deus Ex' and upcoming future earthquakes and things like that.
So in the end, we did what we could and some of it works and some of it doesn't.
$
So here we are inside the room that we call 'the Compositing Room.'
This is kind of our show-don't-tell moment to show how much news is faked by Picus.
I think it's the George Orwell's 1984 kind of room.
Yeah , it's that 1984 kind of feeling, where they're actually changing the news stories that...
I think that shit goes on today, man.
...they're doing . They're putting in extra stuff to highlight the news that they want to tell, like 'the war in Australia is going fine' when it might not be.
So with this room what is interesting is that,  which part of the news is real? And which part is a lie?
Truth and lies, baby!
So here we see part of our big homage to Deus Ex 1. It's, you know, kind of like the Illuminati thing, that hand that's controlling the world or wants to control it globally, eventually.
And here it is. It's a new spin on it. It's in this secret part of the Picus building, which is obviously controlled by the Illuminati, and I think it looks pretty good.
It really looks like a real sculpture.
And in our game it's that the Picus is controlling the news and, therefore, it controls what the public know and that represents it very well.
Totally.
Interesting room here. We can see on the screen some images of the moon and a moon landing and all that.
And it kind of like, maybe, entices the player to think that the landing might have been faked or what not, and 'Did it really happen or not?,' and 'Is it Picus who helped doing this?'
Like in mini conspiracy theories out there.
Yeah, but in truth, I mean that was the original idea, it was we'll show that the landing on the moon was fake.
But then we realized this is 2027, and so 'How can we make it work with that?'
With that.
So we actually made it a reverse, which is that they're trying to show that there isn't as much building going on on the moon as there was.
And that was one idea but we kind of crossed signals here with everything, because that was the idea we wanted to get across, but we put it in a room that it shouldn't have been in.
Yeah, it's exactly what happened, because this room was supposed to be a mocap room.
The device that's in the middle, this kind of hemisphere thing, it exists today.
It's a very advance kind of mocap, especially for facial expressions and all that kind of stuff.
And I don't know what happened, I probably went to grab a coffee or something and someone put a hologram in the middle of that mocap thing.
I have to admit it, it still makes for a pretty visual, yet this is...
Just not what it was at all.
This is just not at all what it was supposed to be.
$
In the room right in front of you there's basically a security office, and there's a guard there sitting, typing on the computer.
He’s having a conversation with a patrolling guard and if you listen to the whole conversation, well it's funny, but it also reveals the guy trying and trying and keeps on being interrupted, to send an email, an update.
So whether you interrupt the conversation or not, there will be an outcome on the computer as to whether he sends the emails or not.
So, if you let the conversations go completely and the guy just keeps on doing his thing, you go take him out and then you read the emails. You get like a new password and everything for the room.
There's also some information like that and we tried to create some of those little moments in ‘The Missing Link’ and it creates lots of life and believability to the game.
 And this one is especially important because if you let him send that email and then you read it, you get to uncover what you need to know to do the hidden choice at the end of the game.
 That's true.
 So let him send the email.
 Yeah do. Or kill him.
$
Instead of doing it the proper way, I suppose, trying to do it differently, that you’re at the end of the game basically, and just running towards Burke who we just talked about.
It was hard for us to actually make him appear to the player, have a sort of a connection to him, and as the player progress towards the end room that we called it, at the very end of The Missing Link, we had to make some new challenges.
And the idea was brought up, to make the whole progress from the SAS all the way to the end room the actual boss fight. So it would evolve and get harder with more patrols and everything.
So Julien, our level designer, worked really hard to create new patrolling paths, new puzzles in the environment.
And all the enemies are different, all the way through the rooms, through the hangars, all the way to the end, and that's what you’re experiencing right now.
It’s like a whole new concept in the same level. So it almost feels like it's a new game, it's a new part of the game. It was really hard.
We took almost a month to make it work properly, but I think it's really badass, actually.
As you get to the room…which is basically Quinn's room, where he has all his secret stash and where he sells you stuff and gives you information.
The idea was that just prior to getting here, you had to save the prisoners or the doctor, or possibly both or just no one.
Since Quinn helped you before, by saving or not somebody in a pod on a boat, and everything, he is sort of that guy who helps you secretly because he doesn’t want anybody to know.
We had the idea of picturing this the same way, where he's got safes, and he puts stuff in there. So if you saved the prisoners or if you saved the doctor, there would be like a different safe open for you.
He leaves it open for you to… because he gets you on his info link and says, “I left stuff for you,” so go there if you want. The idea behind it was that the more you do, the more you get.
So if you save the prisoners, you get more weapons and ammo and stuff like that, and if you save the doctor, you get more medicine and medical supplies.
If you saved both, you get everything. There was also this thing about the secret in a secret.
 The secret in a secret, yeah. Because we wanted to, we really wanted to give you an opportunity to get behind here and to try and find out more about Quinn himself.
And so we have a secret room within a secret room where we have another computer and it's the computer that he's using to communicate with his secret group, The Janice Collective.
So all of that directing you into this room which you could bypass completely, and if you didn't want to do it you could just go straight to the boss fight, but then you’d miss all that wonderful story and reward.
Right, with regards to the casting of Burke, it was pretty interesting because we had written the character, and we knew going in he was going to be the villain and he was military.
So I guess just by default we kind of expected someone over the top, someone very… barking commands and this sort of thing; very loud, strong.
And probably 9 out of 10 actors who came in did it that way, and we were just looking at each other like, ‘yeah, it’s all working but nothing is really making my head spin.’
And then this one guy walked in and he did the role completely 180 degrees from everybody else. He did it very quiet, very withdrawn but it almost sounded like a seething rage was hiding just underneath.
And to be honest we were almost intimidated by the actor…
 Yeah, I remember.
 …in the booth, because he would literately just walk in, he wouldn’t even say hi to anybody and he would just look at the window and he be like, “Are we ready?”
And you would be like, “Yeah! We’re ready, we're very sorry,” so he was a great actor.
He really brought the role to life, because prior to that we were sort of like, 'Yeah, I guess it will just be like your sort of generic over the top military guy.'
But I thought he really brought something unique to that role. We’re really happy with his casting.
 Yeah, and because he brought something unique, we really wanted to kind of focus on him.
But here’s where we ran into dilemmas because we wanted to have him reacting, Burke, we wanted Burke to be very present in the game unlike some of our other villains.
And we wanted him to really kind of be there. You’d have to know him and you’d have to see him and we knew you didn’t have a lot of screen time with him.
So we kind of planned this whole thing were you’re locked inside this SAS for yet another time and we would have him, holographically appear in front of you so that we see him, and then it was like,
'No, we can’t have a hologram in there. We have to have him on monitors. But then can we have him on the monitors? Can we not have him?’
I remember this big, long debate about all that. And in the end...
 The short answer was, 'We can’t.'
 So in the end, at first we thought, ‘Well, we can’t have him on the monitors at all, we can’t have him in the SAS at all...’
So then we started talking about, 'Well, are the monitor outside this SAS in the hallway? Are they there? Do we do this?’
And it was just this big, long headache to try, but in the end we did get them in the SAS, so at least that worked.
$
So, this is a corner of the street where there are several prostitutes, and I can't remember what their names were. Working girls?
Working girls, yes.
 And one of them is called Charlotte, and actually it's...
 The only prostitute in the game with a name.
 That has a name, exactly!
 And it refers to ‘Charlotte the Harlot’ on the first Iron Maiden album, and actually even though I'm the biggest Iron Maiden fan on the team, it was not coming from me. One of the programmers
 came to me with that idea, and we were late in the development, everybody was tired, everybody was over their heads, and I was like, ‘Gosh it's so exciting and it would be nice,’
 And I said, “Okay, I'll take my courage and I'll go see Frank McCann with that.”
 And I asked, “Can we change the name of a character like that for Charlotte?” Frank looked at me super seriously like, “Why?” Yeah, but it's…
 But he always looks super serious at that time...
 I'm a very funny guy! Why do you say that?
 And he looks at me very seriously like, “Why the hell do you want me to do that?” That kind of attitude.
 And I said, “Yeah, it's kind of homage to Iron Maiden.” And since Frank used to like Iron Maiden quite a bit…
 Used to?
 Or still? He was very sensitive to my case and he took five minutes to do it.
 And I promise that there will be no reference to Iron Maiden in our next game.
$
Ok, so the return of Wayne Hass, one of my favorite characters.
I was so happy we were bringing him back and I thought this is awesome.
We get to do a follow up and really close the ring on his story and put an end to it.
But, and as much as I love Mary and I don't know how it happened, because, actually I do, it's just time, pressure, these things come up and we react quickly and then we move on to the next fire.
For me again it's subjective, I always really wanted to keep the sort of anger in the conflict between Jensen and Wayne...
 Animosity?
 Yeah, animosity, and it always felt a bit rushed and sort of like we did it quick, where Wayne's just sort of like... Jensen's like, “Well look, you know what, just give my name at Sarif Industries and somebody will get you a job,” and he's like,
 “Really? That would be awesome! Maybe we can do a beer sometime and hangout.” And I'm like, 'What? He wouldn’t say that!'
Come on! Let's get some attitude back into Wayne. He's always crying. Give him some attitude!
 But he says that in the police station when you talk to him. The old one, he was...
 Yeah.
 ...and he's like, “Let's have a beer sometime...”. But you are right, it did feel like it was rushed.
 It's just it always felt to me like, for him to be waiting and stalking the guy in his apartment...
 Yeah.
 …and to so quickly and easily just go, “Aww, ok thanks.” I was like, 'That didn't feel like Wayne'. But I still love the character, still love what we did with him.
Again, it's one of those things we probably, in hindsight, if we went back, we would do it a bit different.
 And again, it only shows depending on how you dealt with him at the police station.
 Yes.
 That's true and that's fair.
 Yeah probably, when you get out in the lobby, maybe he's not there at all, depending.
That's right.
 And originally he was supposed to be near the basketball hoop in the back alleys...
 Yes.
 ...but because it was optional, because in this city you can go through the back alleys or the streets and tram station, and we wanted to have him in a critical path, so that's why as soon as you open the elevator door...
 He's right there.
 Boom! He's there.
$
Yeah, the subway dancer.
 Yeah! My favorite!
 Me too!
 Actually, it looks like it's the ‘The Prodigy’ singer. That he's kind of trying to look cool on stage.
 That is one of the things I hate the most in the entire game.
 And you know, I'm going to tell you, I remember I had one of my guys on the team, Kevin Dion was working on it. And I came in to see how
 it was going, because when I saw the animation, I wasn't all that excited because well, it's going to be hard to sell, because...
 Yeah.
 one, the guy's dressed kind of like futuristic, but yet he's doing his bad 80's moves.
 But he isn't even dressed futuristic, like...
 Well he's wearing like shorts, or whatever.
 I don't even know why that kid would...
 The point being that he's doing 80's moves, but he's not dressed as an 80's guy, so it was kind of like, what do we do?
 When I walked in, Kevin had gone with that 80's, you know, like a boom box…
 Yeah.
 And it just didn't work, like I'm looking at it, I'm like, ‘man...this is just, it's emphasizing everything that's wrong with it.’ And I said, “You know what it needs?”
 And I was just… and he shares a booth with Yohann and I said, I was talking out loud, I said, “This needs some messed up track that makes no sense, it's just chaos.”
 I agree.
 That's a very good point, because that's the thing, in video games, when you want to represent something that is extremely
cultural, like culturally based hip-hop or break dance or anything like that, these things are so precise, you know what I mean?
So you are right, to have turned into a really weird chaotic, that would have being a great solution.
 Well, that's what we did, to end it quickly is that, the other engineer in the room goes, “Well, I have this piece of music that I did with this drummer,” … friend of his.
And he called the guy up, he played it for me, and I said, “That's perfect! That's what I want!”
 But you did it with the track, but the dance is still lame.
 No, I couldn't change the animation.
 But I needed to get the music that try to make it look like… we are trying to make this look crazy, as opposed to...
 I think one of the key aspects is that, for it to really work in the theme of the game, it should've been kind of this augmented freak...
 Oh, I agree!
 Yeah, totally! Yeah!
 ...dancing and using his augmentations in a very uncanny way, and that would be awesome.
 I agree completely.
 That was the power of our game, and we didn't use it. And as far as it's really hip-hop culture, there's one game they did that really well with the break dancing in the metro. It's ‘The Darkness,’ the first 'Darkness,’ in the metro...
 But to do this, like you really need to know what you are talking about.
 But with ‘The Darkness,’ we are talking about mocap too. But the last thing I'll say is that the fun thing
 about being in audio, is that it arrives at your desk and it's finished, and you are looking at it going, 'What am I going to do with this?'
 Because if I just do the bare minimum of making it functional, it's going to fall flat because it's already half failed. So that's why...
 Right.
 And at that point, that's where we are partying...
 Everybody's like moved on to other things, which I understand, but it usually falls to us to find a way to spin it and make it at least feel a bit better.
 For me, I was happy with where we ended up with it, considering the state it came to me in. I figured we did a pretty good compromise.
$
So for a lot of people I think this is one of the best cutscenes in the game, because it really shows the switch in dynamic between Jensen and Sarif.
Up until now, Jensen has really been treating Sarif as his boss and following his orders, but having just
found out what he found out in Montreal, he's no longer trusting him. I think the cutscene shows it in a very visual way.
 It shows that tension with this part right here, where he refuses to pour the cup, and it really does kind of communicate, and we had the actors recording it together in the studio.
A lot of times in games you usually only get one actor in a booth at a time and they are just doing half of the lines.
But for us it was really important to get the dynamic that happens when two actors are together, and I think they had a really good time doing it together because they could feed off of each other.
And the other thing that was interesting for me as a writer in this, is that I really wanted to make that point, and to never have from this point on, Jensen refer to Sarif as 'boss' again. A lot of times in the
beginning, he's always like, “Boss, boss, boss,” and I never, never  wanted him to do it again. Unfortunately, it slipped in just once and I can still kill myself for that. It was the rush of doing it,
we had just cut Utah or something like that, and we needed to rewrite something and I was just rushing, and it's like, 'Eh, eh, uh!!'.
And so it didn't happen. But the cutscene does an excellent job of showing that break.
 Yeah, and what I like about that is that it's all in subtlety.
It's like, it's not too much in your face and that's why I think that one works also, in a very good way.
And also the fact that as we were building in the Illuminati in that we tried to have a fresh spin, to not go into the old cliche. 'Oh, look at that...'
 Cliche.
 Exactly.
 Yeah, it's true and actually, that's what we did because when the first 'Deus Ex' came out, the Illuminati was hot topic, but since then, you know, it's so old.
So, the way we dealt with it, was just to have, when Sarif brings it up and fully believing it, Jensen is just like, “Are you talking about the Illuminati...?!”, like.
And basically feeling the same way I'm sure a lot of people today feel when you bring up the Illuminati.
Yeah, so the glitch.
 Yeah, the glitch.
 That lovely little thing that happens. It was such an important part of the story, and…
 Actually, it was to build up the recall of the chip. The LIMB clinic in Hengsha two.
 Yes it was! It really was.
We had all these plans about how we wanted it to first be not noticeable in the game and you'd think that it was actually something that had happened on your own computer and stuff, but it didn't quite work out the way we were hoping.
 It's funny when you bring it up that way; I'll tell you, my first time I came across it was going up the convention center stairs and there
was nothing really on-screen, or maybe just a second where the camera shakes and the sound kind of cuts out a bit, and everything. And I was like, 'What the hell was that?'
 It feels more like a bug.
 Yeah, I was asking JS, the sound guy on my team, and he was like, “No no, it's suppose to be there.
There's an envelope there. It's for the glitch.” And I was like, “Really? That's the glitch?!” And I went off into an explosion of rage, like, “What the hell is this?”
 I love Steve and his explosions of rage.
 I remember you came to me like...
 Yeah. “Have you seen this? You know what's going on? Are you aware of this?”
I'm all mad, 'cause for me, I'm just so offended because I know how important it’s supposed to be in the story, and I'm like “This is crap!”. So a bit of barking, asking for a bit of love
from people, then we did get a bit more of the glitch working and I was able to at least get a little bit of sound in, a bit of HUD reaction, so that helped. But I think it never became as big as we wanted it to be.
 No.
 And the closest we came was, there's a scene when he comes out of Alice Garden and he's in an alley, and you see the glitch
and there's a guy who falls off the top and a girl, and later on there's another one in the cavern of the Harvesters downstairs, those guys.
And believe me, technically it was very hard to get it working, a simple thing like that; I busted my balls on it.
 But the thing is that we were over our heads with a lot of features in the game, and we were always coming back:
“We need to have the glitch in. We need to have the glitch in. But yes, it's not priority number one because we have many other things to do.”
And eventually like, “Ok, we have five minutes to do the glitch.” And then you saw it and then... you took over.
 Yeah.
 Yeah well, you know, sometimes we all do our part and this time I was just like, I wanted to see it better than that, because I knew in the story it played a much bigger role.
 And in hindsight, we probably would have given it more attention but like you said, in a game like this where there's a hundred million things to do, a hundred million features, it's tough.
 So to finish it, you're my glitch hero.
 The Glitch Hero, kind of like a jukebox hero, but different.
Yeah, so that's the first... the second time sorry, that we go back to Detroit and actually now, Detroit is in flames.
There's a riot ongoing and everything. And at that moment in time when we planned out for that cutscene and everything, it
was our way to cover the fact that the tension was rising and we were pretty sure at that point we wouldn't be able to have a
riot happening as you play and therefore, we built that cutscene to support that kind of feeling that probably wouldn't be in the game.
 I remember when I was writing the scene, I was nervous right from the start because my experience in games is like, you are just never going to be able to do
that, so I was writing as though we weren't even seeing it, all we were @MD:doing was hearing a radio news report over it because I was pretty sure we couldn't do it.
So when the cutscene director brought forward all that, I was like 'Wow, that's going to be impressive.'
$
Yeah, so here's one of the examples where, one of the things I always liked about in the story is a lot of times in games you have to cut late, and that kind of ruins your whole story.
But we actually did a really good job of keeping things intact.
However, we did have to cut several locations.
 Yeah.
 This part, going into the Purity First sewers, they were originally supposed to be Utah, there was supposed to be an entire center that you go to...
 A huge compound.
 …in Utah it was quite big.
 It was a nice one too.
 It was a rehab for...
 Yeah for people got their augmentations are removed, yeah.
 Yeah, but unfortunately, I think it ended up being way too big and we had decided suddenly to cut it.
I think Frank, you were the one who came up with the solution.
Where could we put the rehabilitation center?
 Yeah, I went to my lead level designer and I said
'You know, I know that we need to cut some stuff, Humanity First seems to be the best solution, so I have an apartment that I'm
not really using in the Detroit... city hub. So maybe we could place all the objectives inside, I could tweak it and have some fun with it.'
 It's because what we need to say is that the rehab center was hiding a Purity First terrorist training camp.
 Yes, training camp.
 Oh yeah, in the basement.
 And we lost the Humanity First rehab center.
But what you proposed was to keep the Purity First kind of...
 Yeah.
 ...HQ.
 Exactly.
 And we lost the Humanity Front center.
Remember we had to rename it.
 Yeah, exactly.
So we reused the sewer system, the modules that we used.
I reused one of the apartments and we played around with the trap.
I always wanted to have some traps in the game and that's why I ended up with my own ideas of having beforehand encountering Zeke...
 The dead body.
 Yeah, the dead body with a mine underneath it and…
 You know that the first time I played your map I got caught because I was like 'Oh dead body I'm going to loot,’ and Boom! Then it blows.
 I did it just for you. Just for you, JF.
 It was surprising.
 But you have to move it right?
 Yes.
 Or pick up something.
 Yes, exactly.
$
So with this second city hub, I mean, the second visit to Detroit, was our way to... We had to cut some of the city hubs that we had planned,
but we wanted to maintain a good pace between the hubs, the compounds, and to make that pace happen we had to reuse some of the existing maps.
 Yeah, and also production-wise; I had already designed a whole section of the city hub with a freeway, with a bridge crossing
over it and there were apartments on the other side. But it was cut because also production-wise, we could not just do that. And basically...
 Ah, that was a long time ago.
 Yeah, we just trimmed it all the way to the convention center itself.
 Yeah, and we were debating how we needed this highway because it would feel like the city is bigger, and you would feel that it's alive.
Yeah. That was pretty fun.
$
The beginning with the riot cutscene, it was there to cover our fear that we wouldn't be able to pull off a riot in-game.
And now we are here and we managed to do it, actually, with Frank's team. He did it in a very short amount of time.
 Yeah, we basically created a full on ninja team, except for the costume and all.
But it was me, the artist, the lead of lighting, FX guys, animators. And we basically just did meetings, and every two to three days we would just meet, look at the game, look
at the environment, just try to create most of the assets. And also technically, we couldn't do things like swapping materials on billboards, and we wanted to focus on that;
having a light on the middle of the chopper; how do we do that and etc...
How to create it, because the whole place is basically the same architecture, the same geometry as in
Detroit 1, but how do we create scenarios, and adding geometry inside scenarios we were going to do…
So there were a lot of technical questions and huge flags that we tried to sort out.
 It's an excellent example of creative problem solving, with this entire thing.
 Exactly.
 For example, we knew that if we could see the entire street that leads towards Sarif Industries, we would have to fill all the
streets with all sorts of action going on, so we had this idea that the cops have this wall that they use...
 Exactly.
...because they literally, when there's a riot, they block places right?
But then it's like, ‘What about they have a wall, and then there's just these little slits to see,’ and it was like,
'Wow that's going to work because it's going to block so much of the visibility, right?' and all these little things.
 And in the end, it works really well.
 I think it works amazingly well.
 And with the wall, we wanted to hide some stuff, but if you actually use the X-ray you can see...
 Yeah.
... a bit further, so we played with that. There’s this one guy running around and if you don't use the X-ray, you'd never see that guy, but when in X-ray you get to see.
 I didn't know about that.
 Yeah. It's all there.
 I love the fact that you changed the skin of a lot of the stuff, like you have obviously the ‘cop’ box guards and there's also one of the mechanical things that we have in the sea port.
Now they also have the cop textures on them, and that's great work.
$
So yeah, Jensen is coming back from the dead and now he is going to come... Well, we see now that Eliza is still watching him, and now we will see him close his shades for the first time. Now he’s closing in on himself...
 Exactly, that was the idea, right? That he is kind of like... now he doesn't really like what has happened to him and he is a bit kind of...
 Self-conscious.
 Self-conscious, and making a little shield around him from the world.
 And the eyes are the windows to the soul.
 The eyes are the windows to the soul, exactly.
 But he covers them up...
 He protects himself.
So yeah, the cutscenes are pre-rendered, but originally we were planning them out to be totally in-game. And as we were progressing and realizing what it would demand,
and the tools and everything that we didn't have set up properly, we kind of realized that we would never ship the game like that.
So we had to rely on the pre-rendered cutscenes.
$
So on a whole different subject, if you look at the window there, it says 'vision' on it, and what's interesting is that when you are in the lobby and you are looking up at Adam's office and the people don't actually know it's Adam's office.
They are just coming into Sarif Industries to see, I don't know, whatever, to inquire about stuff or whatever you do when you go to Sarif Industries.
And it says 'vision' and it's kind of part of the decoration, and it means the company is looking to the future, it's got vision and all that kind of stuff, but what's interesting as well is that it is kind
of like an all seeing eye, it's Adam Jensen's office, he is a security officer and this is where he's kind of perched, and looking at what's happening in the company. So that was kind of interesting.
So now we are returning to Sarif HQ and we have a conversation with Faridah where she asks you how you feel about your augmentations and everything.
But it is one thing that when we reached Alpha with the critical path and everything playable, we kind of realized that there were not
many interaction possibilities with some of the main characters and therefore, the personal touch, the emotional touch was kind of missing.
 Well, I think it was also like, up until that point we kind of approached the writing of the dialogues from
a cutscene mentality; we had a lot of cutscenes that would convey the main story, we had dialogues that would react to things that the player had done.
So we would have these conversations with Sarif for instance, where he would say, “Why did you kill them all?” or “Why did you not?” etc.
But we hadn't actually looked at it from the standpoint of allowing the player to decide what he wanted Adam to say unless it was, you know, “Do you want this weapon or that weapon?”
So when we reached the Alpha phase, we started to realize, 'Wait a minute, we need to bring more of that in.'
So we ended up doing a major overhaul of a lot of the scenes and it enabled us to get the scene like with Faridah, where suddenly she becomes a much more
important character and she is also bringing in a lot of the questions that we wanted to raise about augmentations and how do you feel, to pull that player experience.
So we were able to succeed in many levels, and allowing the player to choose how he wanted to be Adam, and to get him to reflect more on his own experience with Adam.
And I think this particular scene, it ended up resonating with a lot of different players for it as well.
So what I love about this cutscene is the baseball. It was an element in the backstory of Sarif's character, and it became such an important part of so much of the game itself.
 And the way that the ball falls and reveals Adam Jensen in the back, it really shows that Adam Jensen is Sarif's puppet.
 And what's funny is when we did the audition session, it was a monologue scene, actually dialogue, with Mary playing the role of Megan and Steve Shellen just sold it
so much speaking about augmented pitchers using a baseball, so again the baseball comes into play and it really had a big part of him getting the role.
$
So, right now we're looking at Pritchard standing in Jensen's office, because he has something very important to tell you.
And what this does is this kicks off the possibility of the social boss fight with Sarif; with your boss.
That leads to a potential side quest.
That leads to a potential side quest. And we wanted to make this so super complicated on ourselves, because we wanted to make sure that we had these complete non-linear paths.
So, there are so many different ways you can approach this.
You can go to your office before you see Sarif, in which case, if you do, as soon as you get to Sarif's office, we spring the social boss fight on you first rather than your next objective.
But if you wanted to go see Sarif before Pritchard, then you would get there and you'd get your objective, and then you'd have to go down and see him.
So there were all these many twists and turns that had to be all accounted for.
Yeah, that you might end up having the boss fight or not. The social boss fight.
Yeah! The social boss fight, because we had to give you the chance, but we didn't want to, I think it was your rule JF, that it can be totally optional whether you do the fight or not.
Yeah, for me it was really important that discovering more about Jensen's past was really up to the players in the sense of how they manage to move forward in the game, what they decide to do and I think
it makes for interesting replay value, and especially also that the background of Jensen, even though it's tied into the story, knowing this information was not totally critical but it added layers of depth to it.
So it was a lot of fun to track all those challenges.
So, the Taggart dialogue, where we wanted you to meet Taggart for the first time, was yet another one of our challenges, because we wanted to put it on the critical path and make sure that you would be forced
 to meet Taggart for this conversation, and originally we had planned that it would be down in the cafeteria, pretty much right when you walked into Sarif from the heliport.
But it had to get moved and it had to be put into Athena's office.
 Yeah, because with the cafeteria, you can come from different angles, and we weren't sure if you would be stumbling into him, so there were
some complications associated to that, and also back in the day when that decision was made, we were still supporting the chaos in Sarif Industries.
You could pull out your gun and everything.
And we made the decision to put him on the choke point at the end of the elevator to get to Sarif's office, because you have an objective to get there.
So, as soon as the doors open, you start the conversation with Taggart.
 And we also originally wrote the conversation when we were told that our dialogue system could support three characters, that could support the player, or the Jensen character, Taggart and another character.
So we'd actually written, because we wanted this conversation to not just introduce Taggart, but to introduce
Isaias Sandoval.
Isaias Sandoval, and so it was written and recorded so that's what happened.
And unfortunately, we ended up discovering that our conversation system could only, for some reason support, two characters.
So we had to kind of hack into the whole system, which is why we ended up separating Taggart and Sandoval, and why the two bodyguards, who
are there to protect Taggart, are actually standing around Sandoval instead, and why Sandoval is kind of yelling from across the room his lines.
 'Sir! Sir!'
 'Sir! We have to hurry.'
 But in the end, we were still able to maintain most of the integrity of that dialogue, and really present Taggart as a very memorable person.
Okay, here you actually have the social boss fight with David Sarif. I think it's one of my favorite ones with Wayne Haas, not for the same reasons.
I mean, with Wayne Haas there's a big history between the two characters and stuff, but also it was the fact that it was super well animated, etc.
With David Sarif, it's not on the same level of quality in terms of technicality but, in terms of the experience, what I liked about it is that you have to go and face your boss, and depending
on how you play this out, he's going to say, 'I'm your boss, shut up and do your job,' or like he's going to open to you and eventually reveal this side quest.
 He was a very fun character to write, and the whole point of this was to kind of show that duplicity in his character, how
he's a caring, charismatic guy but at the same time he's got secrets and he's very sly, he can slip right out of your grasp.
And we had this whole process for building these things, and the first would be to write it, and then we would test it with the team. We had a little version and I remember...
 It was playable on the excel sheet.
 It was playable on an excel sheet.
And I remember sending it out to the team, and I remember people giving us their feedback to let us know, and
I remember someone writing back saying, 'Am I supposed to want to punch him in the teeth when I'm done with this?'
And that was when we kind of knew that we were being successful with this, where you can get so frustrated with this guy and yet…
 I mean, he's your boss.
 He's your boss.
 That's it.
 And how do you stand up to your boss, it's a very interesting thing. And if you win, you get the side quest to find out more about yourself.
 To explore your past. Yeah, absolutely.
 But you have to go back to your office and read the emails to do it. So there are all these things on top of it that need to happen.
 That need to be achieved.
$
Welcome back to Sarif HQ for the 4th time. It was interesting how we kept bringing you back here, but there’s one thing you might notice this time around.
This time is the only time that you have free access to be able to hack Pritchard’s computer, I believe, because he’s not there.
And I think you can hack… at some point in the game you can also hack Sarif’s computer, but it’s a bit difficult to get those computers, to get to them.
They’re high level hacking. But my favorite, absolute favorite e-mail in the entire game happens to be on Pritchard’s computer.
It provides a great deal of back story for his character and who he is and what he’s about, and I remember thinking at the time that we had to get some interesting computer mails on there.
And it just came to me one morning and I walked in and I said, “he has to have tried to submit a screenplay to Picus.”
So if you get a chance, go to Pritchard's computer, hack it and read the e-mail. Hopefully you will be delighted.
 But one of the challenge that we had is that we wanted to have those kind of e-mails on Pritchard's and Sarif's computers, but it had to make sense when you could go there and hack them.
 Because if they are in front of their screens, it totally breaks the immersion.
And we had to see in the blueprints of our game where we were at, and where it would make sense that those guys are not at their desks and therefore opening the opportunity for you to get there and hack the computers.
So actually, now we see a guard in front of the camera. It’s actually one of the first concept art we did as we were researching for the cyber renaissance.
 This design goes back to a real long time, probably something like September or October  2007; before story, before everything, and I think that’s the only place we ended up figuring out that we could fit them in there.
 Yeah, because we thought they were really cool and then we were like, ‘you know what, they don’t fit in the story, they don’t fit in the world we’ve created.’
But we were like, ‘Hugh Darrow would have some guards with him,’ and stuff like that and we were like, 'Hey!’ We thought about those guys and, ‘let’s bring them back.'
 And they do fit, they do fit visually...
 And you know, it works really well  because they also kind of helped establish the presence of Darrow, which was something that we were struggling with a lot in the game. We knew we wanted to feature him more.
We do put him down; you can go to one of the pillars and you can hear about Hugh Darrow but you don’t know who he is.
You see newspaper articles with him, but this scene needed to communicate so much about Darrow; make him this mysterious figure and make him, well: ‘Is he a good guy? Is he a bad guy? I don’t know.’
And I think those bodyguards help to add to that sense of, 'Wow! This is a powerful guy,' so in the end I think it works.
 And the cinematic director wanted to put him close to the fireplace so we could see the flames and therefore we would be eluding to the fact that he was bringing hell on earth, eventually.
 Dark stuff.
$
Wrapping up the story of ‘The Missing Link’ was challenges in and of itself, since we had to figure out a way.
We got you off the boat, but now we had to get you back on the boat and back with your augmentations and weapons, and we didn’t want to actually have you go into the boat and do it.
So, we had to come up with an ending that would get us onto it, that would wrap everything up nicely, and we had to do it with no cutscene budget.
So we had to actually create an in-game cutscene.
 It’s one of the very rare in-game cutscenes we have in the project.
It’s how we should do the cutscenes, all the time.
I think it actually took us three weeks to hack this in, because it’s really hacking.
We didn’t have any tools to do these types of cutscenes. So we’re really proud of what we had in the end.
 It looks pretty impressive.
 It’s cool.
$
Ah! We've now reached the true story twist in the game, where you're about to walk in and see the person; the mysterious contact is about to be revealed to you.
And there were quite a few challenges associated with this mysterious contact and with this reveal.
As you know, you're about step forward and meet Quinn, and discover that Quinn, our lovely little Irish helper, is actually Russian!
And that led to a great casting challenge for us.
 Yeah, it was definitely more of a challenge for the talented actor we used, Julian Casey. Great actor and he's great at doing accents.
Especially the Irish accent, which I believe he is somewhat native of.
 He is Irish.
 But so when we pitched to him, “How is your Russian accent?” he just kind of gave us this scared face, and he was having a hard time with it and I think what may had helped is we told him, “Why don't you go study the film ‘Eastern Promises’.”
Some great Russian acting accents in there, and he actually did it.
I think he spent about three days just practicing dialogue over and over again and when he came in, you know, we thought,
‘Yeah, ok, it’s probably not the most authentic Russian,’ but for a guy who’s jumping between Irish and Russian, it was pretty damned good, and we we’re happy with it.
 Yeah, leave it to the writers to come up with such an interesting challenging twist on that.
The dialogue itself needed to wrap everything up, including reflecting on all of your choices that you made throughout the game, which was yet another one of the fun things that we like to do; trying to keep track of all that.
And then the biggest challenge, maybe as well, was that we had to hide Quinn.
 We didn’t want the player to shoot him, from afar.
 That would have been bad.
 Like, ‘Hey! Pow!’ Oh crap...
 So there's that door opening on the cargo boat, and because it's closed when you get there, and when it opens the forced conversation happens and the guy was waiting for you inside the boat, that way you couldn't shot him before.
Yeah! We're fascists, so we don't let you shoot people.
Until you can.
$
The choice, the infamous choice. Not only was it a very difficult thing to figure out story-wise; how we could do this choice, but the actual mechanics behind the room, where it was; this was a very complex…
 Oh … most painful.
 Painful! Painful! Many meetings on this one.
 Yes, one of the first things you’ll notice is that this choice is made in this little secluded room below the control tower and you’re kind of wondering, ‘why isn’t this in the control tower?’
Well, I’ll tell you why. The reason is, because during this cutscene, what actually happens outside in the world is that time is frozen, essentially, so all the NPCs, if they're firing at you, bullets will stop in mid-air and everything will just freeze.
I could not put this situation where you have to make a choice in the main cube, so I ended up suggesting that we add this little chamber below with a ladder.
That way, NPCs can't actually go down there. So if there was a firefight and you quickly ran for it, it would kind of make sense that you aren't being shot at.
So that solved one problem.
That solved one problem.
But it opened up all the other problems because we really wanted to make this choice have impact and meaning, and we wanted you to be able to see the prisoners who are getting gassed.
 So then we added these two monitors which have the gas, and on one monitor, it's kind of hard to see, but it is Nina, the girl who you meet earlier in the restricted area.
So that is supposed to put a little bit of weight on the prisoners, and the other monitor shows Kavanagh who's also chocking down in the underwater base.
So you're supposed to have this dilemma here, and even putting these two cameras was a big hassle because we didn’t have a way to display the imagery of a camera in real time in the world so that was another nightmare.
 It's kind of all fake at that point.
 Yeah, an interesting cheat that we use often in games there, is we actually duplicated that environment close to the cube where you are right now, and the cameras are actually pretty close. Like Kavanagh is actually just...
 A few meters off.
 In the next room a few meters off, and we just duplicated all of that so that the camera could look at them without loading an extra environment which is not there at all currently.
 Or regardless of that little trickery as well, there was the whole point of how to make the selection; how to make that choice. And I was kind of... I didn’t want the button thing to go on, as in like this big console with two red buttons…
 Not another button!
 …and you have to press one. It's enough with the buttons. So Steven came back with the idea of that part of the conversation itself.
So you wrote it back a little bit, we worked a lot on this, and that actually opened up the idea that within that conversation you don’t really need to answer 'yes' or 'no' to kill someone and you can just quit the conversation because there is a time limit.
That opened up the idea of the possibility of the other secret, major secret choice, which is to save everyone if you find that secret room.
 Or the choice to just sit back and let the timer go off and let everybody die!
 Exactly … And just let everybody die!
 Which Mary was very fond of, if I recall.
 Hmm... Yup!
 And the time limit on top of that displaying the time limit is another nightmare because we didn’t actually have this functionality. What it's actually displaying is debug.
 Yeah! Yeah! It's true it’s the debug; it's … basically the code just running down.
 Yeah. Pretty much.
 So all that to make a very crucial moral choice.
 But go make the third choice. It’s the best one. In the secret room, I hear.
 To kill everyone? What?
 Save everyone.
 Oh! Oh! Sorry.
$
Here we have a few good examples of the stores in Lower Hengsha.
This was really important to us that the credibility of the stores and all the…
 Like in Detroit.
 Like in Detroit, it's true, but they're very different because we’re  in Hengsha and the ways the products are displayed; it's a lot more cluttered and everything.
What was interesting is they were actually made by Chinese people, because we actually outsourced their design in terms
of concept art and also their production in terms of modeling and textures and all that, so I think it came out quite credible.
And another interesting little bit of fact is that the level of detail and credibility that I wanted was inspired by...
 ‘Dead Rising.’
 ‘Dead Rising,’ that mall zombie game because the stores in that game, like…
Obviously, the whole game is in a mall, right?
It's just insane; all those products and packaging, the placement...
 They nailed it.
 They totally nailed it.
That's what it was, but I think it came out really good, and Hubert, the level designer who took care of bridging, I mean the level artist who
took care of bridging, with the Chinese designing them, and building them up with how it would fit in the map and the memory constraints did a...
I have no idea how he did it, because there's like six or seven different stores with so many different textures and products and stuff.
And it just worked out quite well.
 Also pro tip, check the back of each store, there should be some loot.
 Really? I didn't know. I was always busy looking at the products.
$
Yeah, well we're coming close to the guy who tries to bribe us...
 Recognizes you.
 He recognizes us because at this point in the game, the second visit to Hengsha, we have been cornered by the Belltower
guards, so technically you are hunted in the city hub and this guy recognizes you, and he wants money, otherwise he will warn them.
And the thing is that with the gameplay, we wanted for that was originally closer to what was in Red Faction One in the first
game where at some point you have to infiltrate a lab and you are disguised as a scientist, but you had to breeze through the NPCs.
If you did that, they didn't have time to recognize you.
But if you were spending too much time close to one, at some point they’d be like, 'Wait, wait a second, it's him!’
But we never managed to pull that off.
 Yeah it was a little risky because we didn't really have that kind of gameplay in our game general…
 Right.
 So it's kind hard to pull off, but this little NPC addition is, he was a nice little change compared to what you'd normally expect, I suppose.
There's nothing really else like that in the game, where someone will confront you and you'll have a choice to make with immediate repercussions, so it was it was interesting and...
 And it was a great opportunity to use your punch augmentation.
 Yeah, it is actually.
So, we are close to the LIMB clinic in Hengsha Two, and now the recall has been going on where they’re asking people to get to the LIMB clinic nearby to get it fixed.
But Jensen has a conversation with Pritchard and Pritchard leaves the door open for Jensen to make his call.
But when you look at it throughout the game, most people lie to you, and probably one of the few characters that don’t lie to you are Pritchard and Malik.
And Pritchard leaves it open, but I just wonder how many players just went, without thinking too much:
‘Oh, I need to get this chip fixed’ or whatever, and I am not talking about our hardcore fans because they are probably really paying attention to all the little details, but for the other ones around I just wonder.
 But I do remember specifically during one of the play tests where somebody was playing and the recall happened and this guy just sat back and went: “Oh my gosh, there is no way I am going to do that.
Everybody in this game is lying to you. This guy has lied to me all the time.”
And I am sitting there going: “But Pritchard never lies to you. He and Malik are the only ones who are always honest with you,” but this guy was like, “No, he lies to me all the time, everybody lies. I am not getting that recall chip.”
 Because he is such a jerk you know. I am talking about Pritchard, not the play tester.
$
So, right now you may have noticed that you are being contacted by Hugh Darrow, and this is the start of a potential side quest.
It was very important to us to have a lot of side quests, and we knew that we are getting to the end of the game, that
maybe we didn't want to offer as many so you'd want to get to the end of the game, but it was very important to us that you
at least do something for Hugh Darrow, he's one of the main villains in the game and we had a very difficult getting him present in the game.
And with exception of one or two cutscenes where you get him, we really wanted you to have more knowledge of who this guy is, and so
coming up with a side quest that sends you on a mission for him, and in his own mind, is his way of trying to convince you of his own view, so...
 That he's right.
 That he's right. So when you pay attention to the side quest, he's actually giving you, as you do the side quest, and if you're able to use
the social log in it against his agent, then you'll be able to find out hints about the end of the game and the Hyron project that's going on there.
$
So, to continue on the comment of the LEO shuttle and going into space, what was really exciting for me is that I really wanted players to be able to see the Earth, and everything. And actually, that sequence was supposed to be...
 Slightly playable.
 Slightly playable. You were supposed to be in first person in the cockpit and be able to look around through all the windows and see different sections of the Earth.
And as we produced a first version of it that was not playable, was just in cut scene, we didn’t see the Earth really.
And because we always have constraint in time when producing it, I was like, “No, the whole point is to really have a glimpse of the Earth, we need to see it and everything.”
 I am cutting you, also to say that he is wearing a helmet in the trailer.
 Yeah, and now he is reckless. And finally we managed to show a bit more of the Earth. And now we were closing the deal on the Icarus myth; like in the actual myth Icarus falls into the sea, and this is what is happening.
 That was the entire idea, yeah.
$
Okay, so we talked through the game during different cutscenes, like that they are challenging to do and everything.
And sometimes we were debating among ourselves how we should pursue the scene.
And this one is the one that we debated the most within the team, because we wanted to have Zhao Yun Ru to show that she is a very strong
character, that even though she plays the weak link, actually she might be a much more important and strong character than what we can perceive.
And at the same time, we always try to avoid Jensen feeling like that he can be manipulated too easily, and try to avoid him feeling stupid and whatnot.
And in the original scene, it was not necessarily playing that way but...
No, it was different and we made some mistakes in the initial writing because we really wanted it to be that he actually did surprise her, because she was in the shower, she had just finished the shower and she came out.
But we couldn't get the shower effects that we wanted and the whole way that we approached the scene was the idea was that he actually did take her by surprise.
She was terrified because she is part of the illuminati and she thought he was an illuminati hit man coming to get her, and in the course of the scene she realized, 'Oh no, I know exactly who it is.'
And she turned the tables on him. And the whole idea we wanted was to go against the cliche.
Unfortunately, because we couldn't get the shower working and we couldn't do all that, we ended up having to put her in the room, and then it looks like she is awake and aware of him and it is very disappointing.
 Lot of people came to us right, telling us that Adam character wasn't right there.
$
One of our main tools when we design games with this team is called 'the blueprint,' and this is when we lay out every single detail of how the game is going to work, how''s it going to proceed, and what's going to be in it.
And we knew at that point, when we designed it, that it would be some kind of hotel right?
That it was where Arie van Bruggen would be stashed in and Adam would have to go find him there. And during one of those blueprint sessions that's when
we had the idea, we got inspired by the Japanese capsule hotels and said, 'Hey what about if there's almost like little sub-society of these things,'
 A village.
 Literally a mini-village of these things like, this huge hall, almost like underground hall, with hundreds of these things stacked up and people literally live there. They're almost like low, low rent
apartments and the place becomes its own little eco-system with shops, and people are playing cards and drinking and stuff like that, and that's where it all kind of gelled together.
 I think we alluded to the fact that it belongs to Tong Si Hung as well.
 Oh, yeah?
 No, I'm not sure. I can't remember for now if he owns it or if he's just...
 Trying to buy ...
 Yeah, he's got major connections to it, yeah, I think he is…
Who would want to buy that?
 He's stashed many a person in that hotel before, so…
This is pretty cool. We can see that Arie here in his little environment if you want, in the capsule hotel, it's almost as if he's rented more than one capsule; there's the one
he lives in, and he's got, I don't know, six other ones where he's got all of his servers that he stashed in; you know, he's all super-uber connected. So that's a great 'show, don't tell.'
 One of the things going on which we spoke about earlier, it's kind of funny 'cause we really wanted to have... I really loved the whole concept of the
Japanese pods, but at the same time I had the tech-artist guy telling me: “You can put twenty people in this environment,” and I was like, 'How am I going to portray...?'
 This sub-society thing.
 A sub-society, basically, in a tiny village. So one of the ideas I had that I suggested was: all the closed pods, if we could put silhouettes behind them that could move... In the end we couldn't get them to move, because
we had problems with reacting with chaos, actually; if you'd fire a gun the people would still be playing their little game boy, or whatever or doing whatever they are doing inside the pods.
 Like making love?
 Exactly, or making love.
 Because there is, in one of the pods...
 Yeah, we had a lot of fun with those. I think I remember we ended up putting one of them have like Optimus Prime behind it...
 What?
 I didn't know that.
 Yeah, we removed it of course. Although during the process of creating, it was a lot of fun.
 The lawyers again, huh?
 Yeah.
 But there is a couple having sex.
 There is.
 Yeah, I was going back to the couple having sex.
 Just people having fun.
 Just want to make sure that you confirm it.
 But just doing that really helped with adding life to the environment that has a limitation of...
 Twenty people.
 But what's interesting is what you're saying, just to make sure people understand this, we are talking about just like those silhouettes, those shadows behind the windows, which add a lot but they are not real NPCs.
 Exactly, you can't do anything with them so it was a little... little trick.
 Yeah. But it works.
 But we were scared at first when we heard that, 'Oh, you have room for about twenty NPCs, and oh, it needs to feel alive'. At first we were kind of depressed.
 And I had a lot of moments where you'd fire a bullet in capsule hotel and it would crash, because there would be so many people running around and causing such a problem of resources that the map would just crash, so.
But in the end it turned out super cool, I think, and a lot of the pocket secretaries that we hid too, in the environment to give a lot of life, to give a backstory to the people living there.
We have someone who abandoned their children, and just look around and read around and you'll...
 What? Really?
 There is, yeah...
 It's one of the great... it's almost as if we made a little city hub, almost.
 Almost.
One of the things we wanted to do with Arie van Bruggen was make sure that he was, inside of his little pod was an aquarium of sorts.
So that he actually had a secret passage in his aquarium that would allow him to escape if ever there was something that went down.
In the end it got cut due to resources or time constraints, all that fun stuff...
 But I remember Jon had much crazier idea, he wanted this elevator in this and I was like, 'What... what the hell was that?'
 It would've being amazing, I wanted him to go back into his pod, and cause he's such a tech guy and he knew he was being... so he had rigged the whole thing to like to
start going down, you know, like an elevator, like a spot, and I wanted once he walked out of the capsule hotel, if they looked up they would have seen him being jettisoned out of Hengsha and it's...
 I remember that day in the meeting when you proposed that and you are so excited, and everybody's like...
 Blank stares, like what the hell is he talking about?
 What the fuck is that??
 Which is what usually happens whenever I have ideas right?
 No.
 Yeah.
 Could see the sudden blue like with the sky and clouds?
 Would've being amazing!
So this part of the Alice Garden Hotel was really interesting to me because I wanted to have a secondary route for the player to take to get out of the entire building
that wasn't the front entrance, and one of the ways I did that was just think of ways that these people who live there, things they have to do during their daily lives.
So I thought they needed to take showers and you need to go to the bathroom, they needed to have a locker room, they have washer and dryer all these kinds of things so this just naturally created the entire underground back portion of the...
 I love it too.
 And visually speaking.
 Visually speaking.
 And gameplay-wise too.
 Game-wise, yeah.
 Thematically, yeah it was amazing.
 It was like a nice little surprise, the others like, where the hell am I? And it keeps on going and going.
 It give even more context to the Alice Garden Pods place.
 Makes it more alive.
 Makes it more alive. Yeah, exactly.
 Credibility as well.
 And one of my favorite parts actually was that  as you enter the Alice Garden Pods, there's actually a gated fence and that showcases the end of the level that you see.
 Pretty much.
 When you first come in, I really liked that, just connects the bottom like that. So, everything worked out well.
$
I remember very much when Faridah dies; having to do this whole thing is quite a process to get it.
It was really, you know, you play the whole game and Faridah's with you and she's your companion, and Jensen and Malik have this relationship; they only call each other by their last names throughout, very professional.
And this was a scene that would really strike and it's the one time he actually uses her name.
You only get the scene if you haven't managed to save her, if you actually flee.
And the other thing that I remember about it was that the person who kills her, who shoots her, it depends on some of your earlier choices.
There is the TYM head of security, Narhari Kahn, who you could have seen in the eavesdropping scene in Tong's office if you done that…
 In The Hive.
 In the Hive, and then if you didn't do it there, then it would be; potentially he was leading the charge of
Belltower soldiers and you could've killed him at that point in the capsule hotel and if you didn't kill him then, he might end up
inside Tai Yong Medical offices and patrolling and if you didn't kill him then, he was the one who actually comes out and kills her.
But, if you didn't, if you managed to kill him, it was a different guard.
And I remember most players probably don't even know who Narhari Kahn is.
 But for many of the members on the team he was such an important person.
 Some character.
 We created this whole things for ourselves you know.
 Yes.
 You know that in that event one of my friends called me the moment Malik died, pissed off at me, like “Why did you kill her?”
 This became a huge thing.
 A huge thing.
 All the fan art of Adam and Faridah together.
 The whole relationship, everything.
 People like, it became stronger than Adam and Megan…
 Absolutely.
 Like people think that the ones should've been in love are these two and when she dies, and it's, I remember the countless meetings we had for
‘How are we going to see her being killed, how far do we want to bring the camera, is it going to be a cutscene, is it going to be in-game...far, close.' it was just…
  It was hard and tough. Tough decisions.
So yeah, this cutscene has been quite a challenging one to produce.
Adam Jensen goes back to Hengsha for the second time, but this time around he's ambushed by the Belltower guards, since he made quite a lot of mess so far in the game.
And at this point we were trying to give a sense of a…
 I love this missile shot, sorry.
 …to give a justification for the VTOL crash, but without using an explosive.
So we went with this kind of EMP grenade and getting the FX was quite challenging, and you might not
notice, but the layout of the map where the plane crashes is reversed compared to where you start in the game.
But nobody sees it.
$
So, the Tong’s mission was a pre-order mission that we did.
Actually, that mission was born out of another map that we cut, which was the Belltower HQ in Upper Hengsha.
And this is where you had to go to save Tracer Tong and since,  like we discussed, we cut Upper Hengsha, then this Tracer Tong thing went away.
But we had to make this new mission; we were like: “Wait a second, we can recycle what we cut for Belltower and do the Tracer Tong recovery mission.”
 We couldn’t recycle everything because what we did want to have in Belltower, we wanted to have more of the evidence about Namir and Federova and we were unable to salvage that.
But we did get that idea of rescuing Tracer back into this area of the game.
 But you had to rewrite quite extensively the dialogue for what you already had planned for Belltower which didn’t fit anymore with this new environment which was an old factory.
 Yeah, well the big rewrite for this was actually just Tong sending you on the mission itself, and we had to rewrite his dialogue
and explain away, if you didn’t get this mission, we had to explain why he sent you off to the port without getting something in return for it.
That was kind of, for us, the big rewrite on this, but then this got to add some interesting new dialogues for Tracer and for all of that as well,so. It was a fun little thing to add back.
One of the interesting things about Tracer when I was making this level, was that I got a chance to go back to Deus Ex One and look at some of his dialogues, and
one of the things I actually requested was that one of the very famous quotes that Tracer says; I wanted Adam to say it to Tracer, so that Tracer says it later on to J-C.
It was kind of like this little throw-back that I really wanted to do, that I though was really interesting, that for sure the hardcore fans would have recognized.
But I believe I also remember with Mary, you were a little hesitant to write about Tracer…
 Well yeah, Tracer was such a beloved character but he was, you know, beloved from ten years ago and people have a tendency to remember differently than it actually exists.
And I know that when we had, because we had to write dialogues for Tracer in here, that he would be talking, or even talking to Adam in the dialogues.
And so the writer who I assigned to this, Annakin Slayd actually, he went in and he was listening to all the dialogues and he was doing all those dialogues to try and get the tone, and I remember him coming back to me and saying:
“Man, he is just flat as all get-out. There's just no personality to him,” and I am like: “Well, you know…”
And he’s like: “Can I give him some life or whatever because he is younger?” And so it was a really delicate stepping stone that we had to walk there.
 But I can't remember, did we manage to get the sentence you wanted in there?
 Maybe, go check for yourself.
Go in the vent above his cell and park yourself there for a while and see if Tracer says something.
$
Well now we enter the Harvester’s hideout, it's like the group of Tong Si Hung. Actually, there were supposed to be scavengers in Bangalore, but since we cut Bangalore...
 Yeah we had the whole idea in Bangalore, that Bangalore's like this technological city that rose on the height of the technology boom, and when it
all fell apart, it busted so you'd have these people who are scavengers in Bangalore who're taking the tech and repurposing it and trying make a living off of that.
 And it became the harvesters in Hengsha, and actually they were inspired by the scavengers we see in the ‘AI’ movie from Steven Spielberg where all the
robots are going to try to go for the parts they're missing and that's why also the Harvesters have all that kind of those souped-up augmentations and everything.
And I think also that there're kind of… they were supposed to be the organized crime that was related somewhat loosely to the triads of the X one.
 Yeah, by putting all the events of Bangalore into Hengsha, the return visit, we were able to beef up Tong Si Hung's crime organization, and since he's a reference back to
Deus Ex one, his son Tracer Tong is part of the triads, so the harvesters became the scavengers from Bangalore became the Harvesters who are part of the triad groups in Hengsha.
 Oh yeah, in that way, ok.
So, here we're in the room where, depending on how it went with you guys with trying to save Faridah Malik or not, but if you failed, she ends up being dead on the table here.
Now she's just dead there, but originally she had severed limbs and everything.
It was more a gruesome scene to make it even more disgusting like...
 And we even saw some of her bowels sticking out and it was really gross.
 Yeah, but we had to modify it, because we were not complying with the Japanese  ratings for the game.
 And I'm glad that we did, because I know that a lot of fans who failed to save her were absolutely  super upset about this, and I remember one person telling me at the convention that
he went there and when he saw her body, he dragged her out of here, he searched through all the streets of Hengsha to find a safe place for her because you do not leave a comrade behind.
 Must have been a Marine!
 Yes.
 The cool thing about that room as well is that it's one of our great showcases of the 'underground black market' augmentation, because it was an important theme in the game and some of the stuff we wanted to do.
But in the final product, it ended up being not all that present, and in that room you really see all the mess, the blood, the awkward tools and stuff like that.
 The other side of the medal, basically.
 Yeah.
 There's the good, that's all shiny and stuff, and then there's the aftermath, which you don’t see.
 That's it.
So this dialogue that you have with Tong Si Hung here was quite challenging to write in many respects.
It was actually one of my favorites.
But it was very challenging because we had to react to so many things; we had to react to whether you had killed the Harvesters, we had to react…
 to van Bruggen.
 To what had happened to Arie van Bruggen, and so there were all these variables that we had to do.
And the one that we almost missed until the last moment, was the fact that you might have played all of Hengsha One and Tong would never have met you, because you could have snuck through the vents and eavesdropped on him.
And I didn’t catch that because the dialogue was always starting with “Ah, you again!” kind of thing like: “Ah, you have ruined all this!”
And howdo we kind of explain that he doesn’t  know who the heck you are until you walk in here?
So we almost missed it, but we caught it, and I was very happy that we did. Tong was a fun character, very interesting.
 And also at this point with Tong, we just wonder how many players really make the link with the scientist Sevchenko in the
walk and talk at the beginning of the game; that he have this really weird augmented arm, and now it is Tong Si Hung who has it.
So, because now you have played for about twenty hours, to which extent…
 Yeah, because we never heard anything from the fans, or forums, or fan art or whatever in relation to that.
So even in the articles reviews, I don’t think...
 It's either nobody remembered it by that time, or we thought it was bigger than it is, or people really don’t care.
 People were just like: “Ah ok, cool. That’s it, that guy with the moustache at the beginning; that is his arm.”
 The 'Movember' guy.
 Yeah, the 'Movember' guy.
The room as well, is a good example of something that was important to us in the game… it sounds like all my stuff start with “Something that was important to us in the game,” so this was also important to us in the game.
Was: every time there would be something mundane, like this is kind of a boiler room or something like that; to always, not always - as often as possible, to give it something special.
And if you look at all the dozens or hundreds whatever light bulbs on the ceiling…
 Ah, I love those!
 Say that again?
 It is so nice.
 You like them? Yeah, so there we go, thanks, that is kind of, that was the goal. It is so common place in video games, that 'Hey, this is a boiler room, you know; here is a picture of a boiler room.'
And then the level ends up looking just like a regular mundane boiler room, or I don’t know.
The example I give all the time is, you know, it has to happen in the lobby of a bank and it just looks like a boring bank.
We always try to make sure that those places would have some spunk nonetheless, and this is what these light bulbs do.
 The rule probably is that a boring room doesn’t have to be boring right?
 Pretty much, yeah.
 I want this for my bedroom ceiling.
 I don’t want to make it for you, looks like a lot of work.
 It must be expensive in electricity though.
So there are not a lot of computers in the Harvester hangout, but one of them in particular belongs to Tracer Tong.
We needed to establish his presence first of all, for the link back to Deus Ex. But also because you could have, in different versions of this depending on what you do, you might be sent on a mission by Tong to rescue his son Tracer.
And so we kind of tried to put evidence around through e-mails and things about Tracer, his connection to the Harvesters, and foreshadowing how in Deus Ex one, he is going to end up being kind of anti-augmentation.
And so we did it, and one of the computers here, in particular belonged to him.
 And thanks to Steven, because he was the one really pushing for us to nail Tracer Tong, and you came up with, I can’t remember; you had a document at some point about how to do it right.
 It’s because we had this bonus mission that we were adding, and I really wanted to put a lot of emphasis so that the real DX1 fans would be able to recognize it, and people who aren’t will play and enjoy it.
But I really wanted them to send at least a message: ‘Devoted fans, here is some information on Tracer Tong that you might not have known about’, and stuff like that. Just little throw backs are always fun.
 Because of you, we didn’t screw it up.
 Yeah.
$
Right in front of you guys, I want you guys to meet our little friend named Chubie.
 He had a name?
 Didn't know that.
Chubie is this stuffed lion that one of the level designers, Jasmin Roi had on his desk and he asked one of the modelers, I believe it was Tanya, Tanya Lyon, to model it to put in his level and once he put in his level, it was
kind of an inside joke between all the level designers, this little plush doll that Jasmin really liked, and so we ended up, we started putting it everywhere, like everywhere, every level designer kind of hid one in the level.
It got to a point where it got a little bit out of hand.
 Is there an achievement attached to that? They could've done.
 We wanted one but there wasn't so, it got a little out of hand when our Lead was going through the levels and he was just getting frustrated because he's finding lions everywhere.
 So, he actually asked the QA team to go through the whole game and bug every single Chubie, every single Chubie that they found.
 Did they find them all?
 The bright side to this is that they did not find them all, so if you find one, that's a little present from us.
 That is the only one that is the kind of the secret switch for...
 That one is a legit one, it's actually got a purpose, you can push it and it'll open the door to the back to make sense of the whole secret compartment, but the rest of them, not really so much, so keep an eye out for Chubie.
 Feed him if you can.
So here we see one of the main vistas of Lower Hengsha that we can see while we are in Lower Hengsha.
It was quite tricky because we used to have two floors like we said we used to have the Upper Hengsha map and the lower where you would actually take
an elevator that would bring you from the top part to the lower part or vice versa, and the roof or the floor, depending where you are at was supported by these huge pillars.
Like these huge struts and that's where the elevators were in, and going down or up was a breathtaking view it's just...
 It was working.
 It was working, we had it and even the vista was there, I would say probably sixty-five percent finished.
It was just amazing, so every time we would do this, the players would do this, it would have a really great view of Lower Hengsha.
But then we had to cut the Upper Hengsha part.
So we lost this great possibility of seeing the city like that, so I really wanted to make sure that there was still a place where we could see it, but then with the Level Designers, because they had
other  onstraints with gameplay, visibility, all that kind of stuff, it was hard to figure out where to put it, and then in Arie van Brugen's apartment, which also used to be in the Upper Hengsha map as well...
 Yeah
 At one point I just saw, actually you know, it wasn't even me it was one of the Level Designers or one of the Level Artists who said
'Hey, there's this huge bay window thing and maybe that's where it could be' and here it is and it worked out quite well.
So here we are in a bathroom and you can see the three shells.
This is one of the many Easter eggs in the game and this is taken from Demolition Man, which I'm not even sure what, even in the movie, what they do, this is the level artists, Hubert and...
 Thomas?
 And Thomas, who had fun with these things. But I think that's the point in Demolition Man, I think he even...
 It's the mystery.
 Yeah, even him he doesn't even know what the shells do, and here they are in the game. We don't know what they do even...
 But Thomas and Hubert were very good at putting a lot of more odd stuff in the map.
 Yes, they were the funny guys. Yeah.
 Such like the hot dogs if you remember, especially in Upper Hengsha, we had this massive hot dog!
 But the story, the reason why there's a massive hot dog is an amazing story, because we had the hot dog stand in Detroit right?
To sell the hot dogs and needed a little hot dogs you know, modeled and whoever modeled them, the mustard on the sausage was actually modeled, it wasn't like a texture or whatever, it was like 3D mustard
for a thing that took three pixels on screen, so we had such a great laugh that they blew it up you know, they made the hot dog really big to show that. 'look even that this size you can see the mustard.'
 So yeah, so kids, if you are studying to be in the...
 The games industry.
 The games industry, never do this kind of thing, never do that!
 Never, if you have to do mustard, do not model it, alright? Use a texture, please.
 Please, don't do that.
 Or wait like two or three console generations at least, before you model it.
But yeah, so they ended up like they would hide that hot dog in a drawer, not drawers but closets, so you would open closets and the hot dog would be there...
 Like surprise! He hid it in the roof, the floof as well.
 Yeah, Antoine there's something you ran into in Upper Hengsha, there was a guy was walking or something...
 Yeah, there was like a catwalk somewhere and there's a guard walks up to it and scratches his ass like, 'I don't know what that is' And he turns around to...
...just come back and, huh, still don't know what that is.
 And the thing is that, we thought for a long that they were still in the game but they have been removed...
 Yeah.
 It became a hunt. It's like everybody's like, I think I saw one somewhere and I don't know where I found it.
 I wish it would left at least one, and also are the pedals still there?
The rose pedals, because there was an apartment either in Upper Hengsha or Lower Hengsha, you'd be in a living room and there was like this path of rose pedals and you'd follow it and get
into the hallway, and it stopped in-front of a closed door, and you open it, it was a bedroom and the pedals going all the way to the bed.
 And again, it's Hubert and Thomas who did all these crazy things, were always done by these two guys.
 Oh my god...
Here we are with the objective of getting the email off of van Bruggen's computer in order to know where you supposed to go next and there is another
email on that computer which actually ties into the idea that there is this hidden hacker somewhere in the city of Hengsha, who's quite good.
He, as I mentioned earlier, he originated all the Nigerian emails, but he actually has a transcript of the opening conversation in the game, the conspirators with Bob Page all talking, and he has heard that
whole conversation, and sends an email to Arie van Bruggen on his computer saying you've got to come and see this and if you can find that hacker's computer, you'll get the transcript of the opening conversation.
 And also.
 Yes?
 We can see a little post-it right?
 I know you guys have seen the forever alone and the troll faces that we put on post-its all over the places so, we have a lot of fun making games so...
 Or making games that are not fun enough, so that we need to add.
 We have to have some fun in the resume.
Right now we are into this mission to find the apartment of van Bruggen, and see who this guy is.
But one thing that people don't know is that we had to cut the second floor of the city or if you know, you don't know that those missions that right now you are playing, were meant to be in the second part of the
city, and as we were going through production issues and we had to cut some material, we had to find ways to see if we could bring those missions back into Lower Hengsha, and basically avoid breaking the story.
 Yeah, because originally we were planning that you would start in the Upper and then you'd come down and you'd have to go back up for another mission and back down and it was suppose to
be this back and forth but when we decided to get that we had to reduce in scope, and we ended up having the find places where we could put all those Upper missions in the down area.
 It was truly heart breaking about the cut. When that happened I was working on two of the locations that were in the Upper Hengsha.
When they got cut, I was pretty devastated but in the end it's still...
 Can I say that I was really devastated with you?
 Yes, but in the end it still worked out because all the missions, we were still able to grab them and bring them down to Lower Hengsha, and as a player you had no idea that it was even supposed to go up there so...
 Yeah, and based on that I want to point out the amazing work that you, Mary and JF have done because there's been a lot of cuts in that game, like in any huge game, and it's a very complex story.
It's a story that every bit is quite important and the way you guys, every time managed to repurpose the locations to accommodate all these cuts and then have something that was
supposed to be in the whole city hub and bring it into a new city hub that it wasn't supposed to be a part of is quite amazing and like Steven just said people never noticed it.
 Doesn't feel tackled up.
 Not at all.
 No it actually many times the cuts actually helped strengthened the story, and cutting the entire city hub above actually made it easier on the writers, because we didn't have to come up with tons of content.
 That was the right call, even though it's, yeah, it was the right call even though it was a sad call to make, very sad.
$
So the mission in the brothel, we have to pick up a security card of a Belltower guard to get access to...
 To Tai Yong...
 The Tai Yong Medical.  I remember that was working in Upper Hengsha before we cut it, in the Chinese office, Steven, you did the Chinese office right?
 It's a government office.
 Rest in peace.
 The Chinese government office.
 Rest in peace, GOV China.
 GOV China, yeah.
 Yeah, it was a really cool level that crediblized the entire process of the whole smart card that we needed, and in the end we just put it in the brothel.
 That was probably cut that really is a little odd, but it worked.
 Well yeah, Mary managed to create a story around that...
 Well actually, I don't think it was me because I think the...
 No, was it?
 No, well I think the Upper Hengsha government office there was tons of stuff going on in there, you were suppose to get in, when we had to cut it, I think it was
one of the level designers  for Hengsha, might've been Francis, he said 'Let's put it in a brothel, because we should have a brothel, it's a different location,'I remember someone
raising that at a meeting and everyone going 'Yeah, it's really cool,' And I'm sitting there like, 'Ok, we'll find a way to do that,' And that worked.
 Is it normal that most of my memories of the Chinese government office are torturous and painful?
 No.
 Yes because you have this big cleaning robot that was cleaning the windows outside.
 The big robot, the window cleaning
 That actually probably the only one that I like as a memory I mean.
 Yeah, you dreamed about that for a month.
 No, but the map itself there was something about it like...
 Yeah, the endless stairs like, you couldn't go through the elevator and you have those stairs forever.
 But it wasn't gelling or something, I don't know.
 It was just the best map in the year.
 Well that's the reason...
 Ok, so I'm not the only one then that's what I'm saying.
 I mean it was your first map ever as a level designer, right?
 The cleaning robot was awesome. It was like this right as we'd walk next to the window.
 Yeah was suppose to be like fitting...
 We'd see this big robot with those big suction cups walk in the building and those big brush cleaning.
 And actually you were going outside through a window that's been broken or something.
 Broken, he would pass under one of those robots, yeah.
 All things you guys will never play.
So this is… pretty soon, we'll see one of my favorite parts of the game, visually speaking, and this is the matte painting.
It was done by Meduzarts, a company here in Montreal and we needed this really impressive vista of Hengsha, seeing the Upper Hengsha and the Lower Hengsha, and should appear just about now.
There you go, so really stoked about it; I think it came out really good. This whole idea of a double-decker city, and it's kind of sci-fi and credible at the same time.
 Yeah, really shows it off and what I remember about this actual cutscene was that, we produced this cutscene for the game, but we then did a different version for the E3 demo because...
 The E3 demo, yeah.
 …the story changed. But we used the exact same visuals. So, we had to rewrite the dialogue and fit it into the time frame that we had, to make sure that it was exactly going to work, even though it was all different.
So, this is the fabled Hengsha map. This is one of our main landmarks of the game, if we can say in terms of city hubs and level design. So the whole idea…
 It was originally going to be Shanghai, wasn't it?
 It was originally… it totally was supposed to be Shanghai.
We were going to downtown Shanghai, but then we saw this documentary, or more like a ‘mockumentary,’ about putting a second floor over Hong Kong, and we said it'd be pretty good to actually have a map like that.
But the thing is that in Hong Kong there's actually a real reason why they would have a second floor, it’s that there's no more room for Hong Kong to grow.
There's ocean in the front and there's the mountains in the back blocking everything, any type of expansion, and this logic doesn't work with Shanghai.
 Shanghai.
 So we wanted to keep it, we needed logic, we needed a reason, so we started looking around on Google Earth and we saw these little islands.
One was called Hengsha, and we said, 'Hey, what if this kind of became the Mecca of cybernetics and then they ran out of space, because very soon they just built rapidly and they ran out of space and they ask the Chinese government if they could get the other islands around it,' right?
And then you came up with the idea that the government didn't want to for monopoly reasons and they said,
'Hey, you know what. We have tons of money, we can do pretty much what we want. We'll build the second floor,’ and that's where the whole idea of the Pangu or the 'floof,' which stands for...
 Well, we'll get to that later.
 Will we? Yeah. You'll know later. That's a bit of the story of why the city has two floors and really...
 And also, one of the thing that we wanted is that even though we anticipate what the world is going to be twenty years from now, we still wanted to have those more ‘over the top…’
 Yes.
 locations, where it awakens your sense of wonder a bit beyond…
 And it's beyond what is probably going to be possible in twenty years from now.
 Yeah.
So one of the things we did here was that, we had to actually move The Hive slightly to the right, towards the corner so that you could see it much more easily as you are walking on the street.
Reasons for landmarking issues where you'll at least have something you can see in the distance that'll help you from getting lost, and another reason we actually done was for the bartender side quest.
If you actually solve it in the correct way, when he puts up the giant TV screens and shows that the guys, the culprit behind the murder...
 Actually it wasn't the bartender it was Faridah's. It was Faridah's side quest.
 See, I was even more confused, but basically you could see it more clearly there from. You have a much bigger visibility on that, so it turned out really cool.
 And also we had to make the building taller because we have a section on the rooftop and if players are exploring, you had to see The Hive. You remember it, Antoine?
 Yeah, you need to see the whole thing.
 Exactly, so...
And there was also this issue of players jumping off the world.
 That's another story.
 That's why we made it higher?
 As the map grew, everything was getting harder and harder to...
 To contain.
 To contain the players.
So, here in Hengsha a lot of people are talking in Mandarin, and that was one of the things I wanted on the project.
Since we were to travel around the world, I wanted players to be able to feel the real place, like if they were there.
 Like they are really traveling, yeah.
 Exactly, when you go to a foreign country and you don't understand the language, you feel that you are a stranger and that's the kind of feeling I wanted to have.
 And it made an interesting challenge for us, from the writing side, because of course, we had a couple of challenges; first we would of course write in English, and then we had to
decide which parts would be in Mandarin and which would not. Because you didn't want to... if the player was playing without subtitles on - because all of the subtitles would be in English,
but if they weren’t playing with subtitles, we still have important story information, important gameplay information that has to be communicated. And we have to do that, which
is why you'll have a lot of the conversations as you're going through it, you will see that there's an English person speaking to a Mandarin speaker. And that is going on in the game.
 But at some point too, Antoine, we had the augmentation, right?
 Yeah, it's true. We had a long discussion about using an augmentation to actually actively translate Mandarin, or any other language for that matter, that we would be visiting.
I think we cut it because it was way too...
 Well, it got so big because all the signs would be in Mandarin, and do we now suddenly look at signs and we see the signs in English? And...
 Just to think about it, we were exhausted.
 That would've been awesome.
 It would've been awesome, but we would've been...
 In the augmented reality, you know that kind of stuff, yeah.
 It could have translated the translation into another language, and subtitles translated from different…
 And as it was, we had to get most of the translations done so quickly that we were having our receptionist translate all the dialogues, and I think we had artists who were actually doing all the signs.
 Yeah, one of my concept artists, Donglu Yu, who's Chinese, did a lot of the translation and a lot of the Chinese signs and all that.
 Imagine all of the mass of Q&A doing this things as well, translating.
 Yeah, and I hope for Chinese people that we did an okay job.
 An okay job.
So, with this game because we are in the future, and media is taking more and more of an overwhelming stance in the city and in our society, that we would need
all these billboards and all these ads and whatnot, and especially in Hengsha because we already are in Asia, there's way more of these things than in North America.
We knew that we couldn't do as much as there is today and so even less than it would be in the future but we still wanted to try to do as much...
 And gives the cyber punk feel of that place operation is Detroit.
 Which is a total tight end with cyber punk visual culture.
And a lot of these would have to be animated so we had this problem like, 'Okay, we have all these billboards produced we all want them to be animated,'
How's that going to happen, what are the limitations going to be and the tech artist did a really good job of all creating these shaders that was almost like a small little video editing program inside
of the shader where we could have different layers of different things animated and have different palatte effects and invert stuff and flip stuff around and make them rotate and it was pretty good and
then, if you go look at the DLC you'll see that the artists had truly mastered the shader, because it's like two steps beyond what's in the Human Revolution and what they did is incredible, so pretty happy with that.
So here we see one of the more peculiar or weird things in the game, even though it's definitely a game with a lot of weird visual things.
But this goes with this whole idea of ‘art installation,’ which is something we really like, the art design team.
I wanted to make sure the game had quite a bit of it.
Here's a good example, there's this empty lot between two buildings, so probably, this building burned down or
something, and what do they usually do with an empty lot, they either build a new building or they make a parking spot or something.
And here, it's just filled with air conditioning units, five stories high. Make up what you want with it; is it an artist who did this?
Is it the city who commissioned an artist to do it? If you go to Asia, if you go to...
 It looks like a trash zone.
 But it's not a trash zone, because obviously they are painted.
But yeah, fair enough, but the idea is that you go to China and the air conditioning units are everywhere; there's just thousands and thousands of them per street.
And I questioned myself, ‘what do they do with them?’ Where do they put them when they’re done, and there's probably a landfill of them.
And we said, ‘hey, maybe there's an artist who did a cool art installation with it,’ so.
But this is just one of many, and that's the whole idea of trying to have a bit of contemporary art in the game, I guess.
So here, Antoine, we see a building which is the ammunition factory for one of our weapon brands in the game, right?
 Yeah, I think it's the 'Steiner-Bisley' factory.
 This ties in really well with a lot of the effort we put into the game for all the company names and all the logos, all the brands and stuff like that, because it's a modern game; it's also cyberpunk and stuff like that.
When we started designing this game, we told ourselves we'd made the game so much more credible. Just look around you, I'm asking you people
right now listening, just look around and you can see dozens or even hundreds of stickers and brands and logos and stuff like that, just in your living room and whatnot.
And we wanted to reproduce this, so...
 Yeah, we really wanted to anchor it into reality.
 Exactly.
 Make it believable.
 And even if you don't notice them, I'm sure your subconscious does, because we’re bombarded with these things right? Continuously.
 Absolutely.
 And yeah, so this is cool because you've been playing with these weapons through the entire game that have that brand 'Steiner-Bisley'.
 Yeah.
 And now you're in front of the...
 The building that makes it, yeah, that's pretty cool.
 Yeah.
 But actually, I went into a lot of details for the weapons and some items as well.
Like different kind of manufacturing techniques, like different countries making different kind of things.
If you look at the Americans, they do something in different ways than the Germans and the Japanese....
 We had two sites for the guns right? What was the name for the...
 Amerussian actually. And Germasian, which was like Germanic and Asian, looking very slick, very high polished like the Germans' weapons
or the Japanese cars and stuff, and then you get the American, which was more stampy and quick-manufactured for lots of people.
So the feeling of the textures, well, you probably know better about the shaders, but the actual feel of the weapons and some of the items reflect that as well.
 And actually, this philosophy has been built before designing the guns, so we would inform the designers on how to...
 Yeah, something that Antoine put together even before we got into the actual visual design.
 It actually influenced the names as well, I think. Like more American brands, like very Texan stuff, and then you get the more European.
 'Steiner-Bisley' sounds more European.
 Yeah, 'Steiner' something... exactly, yeah.
 So Antoine, you were the mastermind behind it.
 No mastermind. It's just an idea.
 So humble.
 So humble. And a funny thing as well; there's a hundred brands in the game, literally, and the brands were all, in terms of the names, were invented and created by one of our writers, James Swallow, a good buddy of ours and...
 Who is English.
 Who's English, which is why he says...
 It's not his fault.
 It's not. He's just born that way.
 We can't blame him for that. And also, the logos themselves are all made by this genio graphic designer that we had at the time. His name is Timothe Lapetite, and amazingly, he left on a weekend and he designed every single...
 He did every, over a hundred logos, yeah.
 The hundred logos, the hundred brands with different ways of having the logo as well for each brand, and more than one logo for... It was just insane.
 And they were all good looking.
 And they were all good, we had like one or two that we changed, and that's about it. So, crazy work.
So, if you look right in front of you, maybe lift the camera a little bit, you're going to see this greenish, emerald looking colored building, this is actually
the lower part of the TYM, of the Tai Yong Medical building, which you eventually infiltrate and you need to reach the upper part...
 Spoilers?
 Director's Cut I guess, we are alright.
But yeah, so the idea was just it would've been a beacon, would've been a landmark, in the lower part, the Lower Hengsha.
 You are suppose to see it from above everywhere.
 Everywhere you went, that didn't work out superbly well, and even in a place like here where you're right in-front of it, you still don't really notice it is, what it is, but it is what that is.
 It is just the lower part and it is pretty tricky, because this is a factory and factories are usually...
The footprint of a factory is really large and they're really low because they are assembly lines.
And here the concept is that it's a vertical assembly line.
So it's just one big building, inside things are built by moving not horizontally, but moving vertically from floor to floor.
So, it was an interesting concept.
And there was a part where we actually had to go all the way there by foot, right? If I'm not mistaken, was it?
 No, you were taking the train, but you were supposed to see it.
No, you were going to go there by foot and eventually when we did districts for Hengsha, splitting the city in different parts, that
initial concept didn't work anymore, and we had to have the streaming, the loading times, we added this kind of subway...
 The subway thing, yeah.
 Subway yeah, travel to get it.
 It turns out when you try to make a building seem very huge, if you want to walk to it, it's really long to walk around it, and things just don't work out.
 Yeah, if it's truly really huge, yeah.
 Yeah, so the train was a perfect solution to mask that...
 That thing.
 Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, the sad thing is just at the end, nobody really noticed this was that really main fabled building that we had to get to, yeah.
$
So here we look at the signage for the Hengsha map.
Now we are with Steven Ciciola, who was one of the level designers on the Hengsha map and also with Antoine Thisdale who was a game designer also on the game.
The first iteration of the map, we realized that it was really confusing and once players were going around, they were lost. It was kind of a mess.
 Yeah, we originally planned so that Hengsha would have a different feeling compared to Detroit and in the end it worked out and a lot of play testers mentioned that they really enjoyed the feeling of Hengsha.
But at the same time, a lot of people are getting lost including the dev team, and...
 That's a bad sign.
 People who worked on the map really got lost, including myself actually.
But in the end we had a lot of little tricks that we used and implemented that helped navigation.
One of them is we added these giant billboard signs you can see all over the place.
They weren't there originally and they were a big problem.
Apart from that, we used a lot of lighting and we reoriented a lot of small sections and...
 Created the districts.
 Exactly. And we cut out a lot of content because there was actually too much and it was just so overwhelming.
So we had to cut down on certain places like that so…
 But in the end, it's one of the maps that is really appreciated by the players and they managed to be able to navigate through it right.
 So, in the end it worked.
 In the end it worked, but it was, yeah.
  I think I 'm still lost somewhere in it.
 Where are you?
 I don't know...
$
I'm not sure if you've discovered this yet as you've been playing this game, but Human Revolution is full of Easter eggs, there are thousands of Easter eggs within this, and one of the Easter eggs that I was particularly
fond of, that I didn't know about but was told by the artists is that, the level designers and level artists for Hengsha, actually thought it'd be really cool to put the codes for the storage units in plain sight, and you see basically...
 Next to the storage unit.
 Next to the storage units, so as you're going through and you see all the storage units, all these garage doors and if you look at
the wall next to them, there are numbers all over the place and the ones that are underlined inevitably end up opening up the storage units.
So that I thought was really a cool Easter egg.
 I worked so hard to find these bloody codes, they are what... they're just there! I didn't know about this.
 I don't think a lot of people on the team knew.
 One of the interesting things about that little Easter egg is that it gave us a secondary way to give a code that was not a pocket secretary which...
 True!
 As designers, we kind of had gotten fed up with the pocket secretary.
 And as writers who have to write them, so did we...
 So exactly, we were a little fed up with people for accidentally forgetting their codes and leaving their pocket secretaries to be found, so this was a fun way to do it.
 Smart little bastards.
Well after getting out of the construction site, whether you save Faridah Malik or not, at this point Adam Jensen experiences another glitch in his augmentations.
 Again, such an important story point and we couldn't handle it very well.
As you get out of the construction site, you see the NPC falling over the ledge of
the balcony and the other ones around, but it never felt right, it feels more like it was a bug or...
 It's even worse than that.
 I feel it's because he falls...
 Because he falls in the kind of scripted event thing and when the scripted event
ends, because he's not dead, the AI takes over and he gets up, and he chooses one of the  ‘idles’ and he just starts lighting himself a cigarette there, like  nothing happened, you know.
 And no one in the environment comments on it and nobody… we didn't write anything to handle that. We totally didn't handle it that well.
 Yeah, nobody reacts afterwards and... yeah, exactly.
 So yeah, it's there but it's poorly implemented.
 So it would've been better...
Yeah, I would've like to have better handled it in dialogues and things like that, but at this point we were so over our heads with how much writing had to be done, that it was really hard....
 Yeah we had to finish the game, yeah.
...and we have to finish the game and it was hard to stay on top of all of that stuff so…
 And not only that, but the positioning was a big problem because in Hengsha, you’ve got so many different routes you can take, and it was the first bottleneck that we had for the player.
 Yeah, we had the choke point there.
 Exactly, otherwise you could either go right or left or up or down and we had to choose there and it wasn't really the best location for something like that, so...
 So a big 'Oops'.
 Again, maybe they'll get it right in the movie.
 Yeah.
$
So, now we are in the sewers that lead up to the seaport map.
Actually, when we look at the Lower Hengsha map, and the fact that the seaport is obviously, on the sea shore; the way of the
geography, the way we built this city - we didn't have a real credible access to the seaport, and the seaport technically is much further down the road.
We were like: 'Ok, how do we cope with that? How do we fix that?' And then we thought: ‘You know what?
Jensen is just going to walk into a sewer, and then he is going to get out into the seaport and therefore ,since he will have no point of reference, he will buy the fact that it is totally logic. But he won’t see it.’ I think in the end it worked well.
 At the end it works.
So, here we have what I think is one of the very top most beautiful places in the game.
Again, it’s all about seeing the double-decker city; another great matte painting done by Meduzarts here in Montreal.
 ‘The Sick Vista’.
 We call it ‘The Sick Vista’.
 Thanks to Steven.
 It is just good; it is just so great to see something that is probably the most sci-fi thing in the entire game.
It could fit in any space opera thing almost, if you look at the kind of mechanical design that we gave it and all that.
But yet, it is a very 21st or 20th century city that’s seen at the bottom of it and the very normal kind of docks and piers and oil refinery things we have in the foreground.
So, great contrast here, really impressive stuff.
 And it is funny that one of the reasons it is so good is that you see it from a ladder climb and that is something...
 Yes, as you come out.
 Yes, as you come out. So that forces the camera to look at it and it is just 'Whoa', breathtaking.
 It gives a good sense of scale as well, like how huge that is. It is amazing.
 And something that made me very happy on top of how successful it is, is that this is the first time that we truly showed the game to the public. This was at E3 2010, if I’m not mistaken.
We started in Hengsha, but we culminated in that part and it was always like every time… We must have demoed it, I don’t know, a hundred
times during E3, but every time that we were coming out of that sewer and that vista was appearing, I was like: ‘Yes! Bring it on!’
 But demoing it at E3 always gave me… I always felt so guilty demoing it because I knew that at E3 your briefer was Malik, and yet I knew that, because we kind of adjusted the story for
the demo, I knew that it wasn’t going to be Malik because we didn’t know if Malik was dead or alive here and it had to be Tong instead. So, that was always for me while I was demoing, going: 'Yeah, ok...'
 It is a small lie.
 It is a small lie, just a small one.
 There was a bigger lie.
 Yeah, but we will talk about it in another beacon.
 Yeah?
 Yeah. And the other thing, speaking of lies, I remember; when we get to get out of the ladder like Steven said, and now we absorb this big structure of Hengsha
and start to infiltrate the place, and for the first part of the demo - obviously, we were still making the game, and the AI was still so buggy at that time.
 That is the lie I was talking about.
 Oh, ok. I thought you were talking about the other one.
 Ah, no. So many lies.
 So many lies.
 It is a conspiracy.
 Like Eliza says, trust no one, because everybody lies. And for the first part of the demo, we had to totally shut down the AI.
They were just doing their patrols but you could have jumped all over the place, you could have shot the gun, you could have done whatever you wanted, they never would have reacted to you.
 So we were at E3 playing it like: “Oh my god, he almost saw me! Oh!”
 And what’s funny is that it was ensuring the experience but if we had screwed up our choreography then it would, yeah...
 People would have realized: ‘Well, he should have seen you. You are mentioning that this thing is all hard and stealthy, and you were just right in front of him.’
 And also, in another map of the seaport, we wanted to reinforce somehow through e-mails: the concept of the kidnapped women. It became the inspiration for the DLC.
 It became the inspiration for the DLC, ‘The Missing Link,’ which came after because it was always something we wanted to have; to explain that women were being kidnapped and that they were eventually going to be in the Hyron project.
But the actual story as we had written it for the game didn’t really support that strong enough. We had nothing.
We tried in the seaport to reinforce it a bit more with e-mails hanging around here and stuff, but we never did. So, when it became time to do a DLC, we said: ‘That’s the story we are going to tell.’
And it kind of was the impetus for making ‘The Missing Link.’
So here, that’s the first time we discovered that we could use the box guard to drop from a chopper into a scene.
And actually, as we were building the E3 demo, that feature didn’t exist, and we really wanted it to be spectacular.
We wanted to give a little bit of 'Oomph' to the experience, and everything.
And we really pushed, and I was really pushing for it: “I want that chopper that has a box guard and drops it in the scene,” and everything.
We managed to pull it off for E3 and after that, we had to rearrange the map so that if you play stealthy, the box guard didn’t show up, and if you didn’t play stealthy, now it would show up.
And that is why also, once we did that after when we built the construction site in Hengsha, you also have the box guard that is dropped by a chopper, so we reused it another time in the game.
But if it was not for the E3 demo, we would have never had that kind of stuff.
 And then in the hangar here, we were also supposed to be supporting the story of the kidnapped women and the life pods, and kind of setting up for how Jensen was going
to get in to one of these pods and get to Omega Ranch, but again, I think it is probably an area where we sort of dropped the ball a little bit and we never really made them very visible.
They are here in the hangar, but nobody ever sees them or understands what they are.
 It is just weird, yeah. I don’t even remember really what happened because there was just like three or four of them all the way in the back, and to be honest, I have no memory of why there were just three or is it… there’s got to be a reason.
 I think what happened was we were under...
 Because I remember how much we wanted to put tons in.
 Yeah, we wanted to have a lot and we wanted to have you kind of wondering what the heck these are, but I think what happened was just that we had a lot on our plate and we didn’t have enough time to get it pulled off.
So that is what happened.
$
So, this is one of the very successful shaders in the game, yeah.
 What are they called, the shit shader?
 The shit shader, the one was done for the sewers and what's interesting is that even though, at the state that it is in, in the final product, it's pretty good and it looks like what it has to, it used to be like ten times
better, it was literally one of the best shaders I have ever seen, it's all the way out there with all the crazy water shaders that we see where it's perfectly simulated.
It was the most perfectly simulated crap floating sewer pickle...
 Floating things.
 Yeah, it really worked, whenever I play the game I refuse to go into that water.
 Exactly, even me too, I played so many times...
 I cringe when I fall into that water.
 And I always managed to avoid because like sometimes I had to hide from guards and crouch in there...
 Yeah you crouch there.
Yeah, you look at the camera level you're like, 'Awww...'
 I don't want to get out and dirty and whenever putting him there.
 And Jensen jumps out of it and goes in The Hive and ask for a drink?
 I remember a weekend I had a kit at my place, like I would bring like, you know a dev kit once in a while at home in weekends to review
the game, and my girlfriend at the time, when I was in the sewer and she saw that shader, like the original really creepy one, she really reacted to it.
But the real reason why we changed it was not it was too gross.
It's because to get this perfectly amazing gross effect it was like an extremely expensive shader, like literally, as you would get really disgusted but the frame rate would also go down, so...
 Well that makes it memorable.
 Yeah, you would like it, would be like in slow motion for you to see it even better, so we had to like cut down the shader to gain the frame rate.
 Just imagine the gameplay with this you know, NPCs could smell you from a distance, that'd be awesome.
 Well, that was a shit story.
$
So now we are in The Hive, the bar that we have to meet our friend Tong Si Hung, and actually that bar went through many iterations, like we have memory limitations, we have streaming also to consider, a lot
of things, but we wanted to build a place that would feel alive that would feel that people would go there to have a good time on the Friday night after working hard all the week long and everything.
And in the first iteration of the bar that we had, especially when we were trying to nail this down for the 2010 E3 demo.
 E3, yeah.
 And everybody was sitting around and just talking and when we were getting in this place.
It was like, 'Ugh, it felt totally dead,' it didn't feel and especially that...
 And it's supposed to be the most popular night club, you know in Hengsha.
 Exactly and you couldn't have that many NPCs on screen.
And I went like, 'Let's try to not add people, but instead have some of them that are standing up and just dancing, moving a bit,'
Even though they don't do much and just by doing that, it totally changed the...
 The atmosphere.
 The perception and the atmosphere of that place.
 It's funny because we tried to make a really popular area but the thing is the designers were limited how many people we can place on screen at any given time, so it was really tough to make a crowd like a club scene with fifteen people.
 At the end, it's not too bad.
 Yeah, so we had to make people move around a lot, do a lot of different occupations that involved movement especially because...
 But it was mainly movement in place…
 In place.
 Those were the light and NPCs that couldn't...
 No body 's moving around. There's not one person moving around.
 I think it's the waitress?
 There's a few that are actually...
 Are there? I don't remember. To me everybody's just, yeah?
 Yeah.
 They are cycling around but…
 Maybe it's one or two NPC's.
 It's really not many.
 And I think the name of The Hive actually, if I remember correctly, it was a placeholder name, The Hive, we were working on early story and stuff and
we were like, 'Oh, we need a bar and it should be like The Hive or something,' so we kind of pulled it as a placeholder figuring we would change it later, but then it actually ended up…
 Well, Thierry, the concept artist who had a big part in visually designing it, he got really inspired by the name, the temporary name and made it look into some kind of design version of the bee hive, so then we had to stick with it I guess right?
 And then we could work with the worker bees and all that.
 And later on for...
 Yeah they answer the text.
 ...dialogues and everything. Sometimes…
 Inspired some of the character design as well.
 Sometimes temporary names stick.
 And this place I like it. It has the good atmosphere, the place looks good.
 Yeah, because that was the idea to make like you know, bars in video games usually don't really feel like real bars, they feel like places, you know you're like some kind of alien that has been told what a bar is
supposed to look like, but you've never been in it, you have to design it, that's usually  what they look and feel like in video games, and I wanted to make sure that it wouldn't happen that way in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
And also some of the contemporary stuff, like the big media wall, with the LED lights and the...
 That's awesome.
 Yeah, it actually turned out really well.
 You see it from far away on the streets as well, like...
 True, so it could've been even more credible than that, but I think it's one of the good…
It's like I think it's Xbox Magazine I don't remember, probably not, anyway, there's an
article about all the, I think it was all their
top ten or top five best bars in video games and we were like number two or something like that, it was like that ... not too bad.
 Which was not too bad. And I think also the song helps to sell the place and it creates a good atmosphere.
 Well the whole thing, it broke when you got in it broke the pace a bit, it changed the feeling the player had, you just get in and it's like
a whole new environment within an environment, that was cool, and make you feel like really like a new place something...
 It was different.
 Yeah, very intriguing.
Yeah, so now we are in front of the bartender, which eventually will be revealed being Tong Si Hung, but at this point we don’t know that.
And building this social boss fight… actually, it's the first one we presented to the press in 2010 at the E3.
 Yes, the first one we showed.
 It's not the first one we built, but this one was really hard to nail.
 This one was really hard to nail for us, from the writing perspective.
 You were dealing with a stranger.
 Yeah, I mean, when we were going through the blueprint, it was such a cool idea, because we wanted our 'Keyser Soze’ moment, you know, in the game. And  when you think about that it's like, 'Oh, how cool is that going to be?'.
But when you’re actually faced with building the dialogue challenge, you are like, 'Okay, but there's no common ground, there's nothing for him to be hiding from us, we don't know what we are trying to get out of him,' and...
 And it's tough to make it personal.
 It was tough to make it really personal and you know, like with Wayne Haas, we built this entire backstory and relationship between Jensen and him so we could kind of play with that, but here we struggled for a long time to figure out:
 ‘How do we make this at all interesting and why is it that he's just not going to tell you who he really is,’ and all that.
And I can't quite remember, I think it was you who gave some inspiration to us by saying, ‘think about it in terms of Yoda’?
 Yoda and Luke Skywalker, their first encounter, like that Yoda is trying to guess or gauge what the kid is and everything, so basically this is
how it helped us to solve the problem, and we tried to play this kind of game where Tong Si Hung tries to get the sense of who Jensen is and what he’s got.
 Yeah, and in every single one of these you have to build them based on the personality of the character, so once we had that, we could
sit there and say, 'Okay, what is this character of Tong and what is he in'. And it ends up being… I think it's one of my favorite ones, in the game.
 And actually, Tong Si Hung didn't exist until we cut the Bangalore map.
 That's true. Well, he existed here, but he wasn't an important character.
 Right. Yeah, you're right.
 He's really just the owner of the night club, but then we originally had...
 I don't even remember that...
 We had an entire map...
 Yeah, because the harvesters were supposed to be in Bangalore.
 I remember that.
 And we...
 And when we ended up having… We originally had an entire different map, and instead of coming back to Hengsha you were supposed to go to India instead.
And in India you would meet another crime lord and he would be a character there, and then when we had to cut India, we folded it into Hengsha. Then suddenly we could take this character, who was not very
important in the beginning of the story; we could make him Tong Si Hung, we could tie in the relevance to ‘Deus Ex’ the original, and it became much more important, and his character really blossomed at that point.
 What was it about the... if you were in the conversation, like, Tong teleports to...
 Yeah, we had a big problem with Tong, Tong's magical teleporting act that he had...
 It's an augmentation.
 Well, it was basically when you’d finished the conversation with him, he would stay at the bar, and when you’d go down, I believe it's regardless of whether you win or lose, he would teleport to his office.
Whether you spotted him from the vent and voyeuristically watched him, or if you actually took a win he would be there, and you would be like, 'How did he just get from upstairs to downstairs so...'
 So we actually added the stairwell you see right behind Tong's bar upstairs; we added this doorway that was locked, with a stairwell leading down to the basement, to sort of credibilize that.
 But you can't use that door.
 You can.
 Yeah, you can, it's...
 It’s a level three or four password.
 Yeah, it's a high level hacking, if I recall.
 And if you hack it…
 He teleports.
 Yeah, he still teleports.
So here we are in this little room and there's actually quite a history in this little room, but you wouldn’t know it from playing it.
Originally, we were thinking, we wanted to have this whole idea that Tong ran this underground fight club, and that actually the Head of Tai Yong Medical's security force who you could potentially
see him talking to in the overheard conversation if you are hiding in a vent, would also be a major player with this whole underground thing and there's emails that refer to the fight club and this whole thing.
 Wasn't someone that someone in the team that wanted us to have a mini game about this fight club and have the ability to fight some guys.
 That possibly...
 I think it has been dropped to the table.
 I think it was brought up on the table and we really wanted to have that, but we ended up not really being able to support, we were going to have posters around town, we were going to advertise, you know who's the latest champion in the fight club.
And we never quite made it to all that, but all of this ended up on basically this room, I think various people on the team really loved that idea so they put this room in there as kind of an homage to that idea that never quite made it.
 But eventually we turned it more in line with Tong Si Hung's character and the harvesters, the group he's leading and that fact that they are blackmailing people and probably even torturing or killing.
 Torturing.
 Turned out to a torture room.
 Yeah, that's what it became.
 Pretty much, like an empty, dark and very sad place.
 Kind of mafia interrogation, all this.
 Exactly so...
 There are thing is blow on the floor and everything, like there's a chair in the middle, and you know.
 So it makes total sense with the characters in his group, but it has never been planned.
 That's story telling right?
Here's another good example of our ‘show, don't tell’ philosophy, this room tells a lot about Tong and who he is.
He's a man who doesn't really care about fluff at his level like for himself, his club is really nice, and somewhat posh, but if you look where he works, he's in the
basement and he's in some kind of utility room, with crap all over it, all sorts of tacky little things left and right, so were really happy with it, Jim Murray, the concept artist
did an amazing concept for it and again it's one of those pieces that ended up looking exactly the same in the game, a lot of attention to details, a lot of effort put into this room.
It's a great room itself. It's a great showcase for what we try to do visually in this game.
Well, we are in front of the bartender. It's in the Hive, I think it's one of the places that inspired a lot of fans to make crazy videos with Jensen and the NPCs.
Like the Punch Punch Revolution, Safety Dance…
 Yeah, Safety Dance, with the cover system, that's great one.
 I remember this one, the safety dance. I was laughing, I was crying...
 Because Adam makes this little, he makes this groove when he goes from left cover to right cover or whatever, and this guy just like, 'Hey, if I keep him going, it looks like he's dancing.'
He just goes on for the entire Safety Dance which is, by the way, a song from Montreal.
It was Men Without Hats, it was one of the main 80's bands and that time. And...
 What was the other video, like he goes in front of the bartender and he asks him, 'What kind of drink do you want?'
And then he goes in his head and starts to punch everyone...
 Because it's called Chinese Gut Punch, something like this I think.
 Gut Punch, yeah something like that.
 I think it's like that and then he...
 All the names of those drinks, you can't imagine Adam Jensen drinking any of those.
 Any of those yeah.
And then you see him kill everybody and he just gets out of his day dream of killing everybody, he's like 'The Chinese Gut Punch.'
 And what's even more fun with those drinks is you should go in the menus and you should look at the item descriptions because they were written by Mark Cecere and he had so much fun, the thing that are in those drinks...
 For the drinks?
 Yeah the drinks you should read the descriptions of these drinks they are talking about how poisonous they actually really are and it's quite interesting, so take a look in the menus.
 And he was in the AA at that time right, eh? Mark?
 Just kidding, you had a couple of chips in his desk.
 All that to see that the fans made us laugh quite a bit yeah.
 Love you guys.
 Yeah, no seriously, it's true what JF 's saying, now we are saying about a lot talking about lot of the fan made stuff in relation to The Hive but just everything was so unexpected, we had no idea that it would connect that much, so thank you.
$
So this is a pretty funny place because, in the entire game, I think we have like two elevators where there is stuff in it.
So we can see here there is like crates and pallets and stuff like that, and that is about it, I think there is only one other, and I don't know why we did that, I mean...
Yeah, we had restrictions.
Did we?
We could not put the bodies of NPCs and stuff. It was complicated.
I remember, at one moment, when we were thinking to put like a force field in front of the elevators so no physical objects would go in them.
And then, this is when you have a like crazy idea, then you go see like the game director and say, 'We have to do that because of this and that,' and then, you know, it breaks the immersion.
But we had...
But you know that the game director would listen out.
And you know the game director is looking at you with evil eyes.
He would listen. So, sometimes, we know that we will find solutions with the physics programmer, that spent lots of time working on fixing and bringing ragdolls, like dead bodies, and crates in the elevator.
But it ended up working, we can bring bodies in the elevator.
It works, just the problem we said, no NPC would wake up on a different floor.
So instead of making the rest of us unhappy, we just made the physics programmer unhappy.
Exactly.
Okay, not too bad.
Damn, if I knew.
So originally, when we get there to the floof, the original intent was just to have a big 'show-don't-tell' kind of piece to really have the players understand what kind of structure was there, that was separating Lower and Upper Hengsha.
Yeah, that basically having a construct like that would be an extreme engineering feat, right?
This slab that's separating both cities, if you want, wouldn't just be a flat concrete thing, right?
It would be like, you will have tons of engineers working on it and that's why you see these little kind of trams, little trains passing by that are probably transporting these engineers to different spots around the floof, and all that.
So that was important to us.
But you called it the ‘floof?’
You keep referring to it as the ‘floof,’ but the in-game name is the ‘Pangu.’ But the reason we keep...
And what does the ‘Pangu’ mean?
Ah, it's a character from Chinese mythology.
I can't remember right off hand what it is, but the origin of the word 'floof' and why we keep calling it 'floof' is because we kept referring to this great big ramp as basically the floor for Upper Hengsha and the roof for Lower Hengsha.
So we just kind of said, 'It is the floof!' And everybody kept calling it the floof for the longest time, and I think even in one of the dialogues…
We are so clever.
…we actually have Jensen call it floof, and I remember Elias reacting to that name going like, “What? What?”
And then when we explained what it meant, he couldn't believe the simplicity of that. It was really funny.
And it is cool that we left it in the game. It is like that's what people do culturally when there are weird things around them, they find names for them.
And they call them that way, yeah.
And they call them that way.
It added credibility to this thing, yeah. And nevertheless, like that was supposed, at first, to just be a 'show-don't-tell' room.
But our lead level designer, Rene-Martin Pauze, really felt that something was missing here, that...
We needed more than that.
...we needed more gameplay and everything, and he really pushed the level designers to try to integrate some sort of physics puzzle into
the mix and everything, and it became this little place where you have to either shut the electricity or take the boxes to go around and climb over it.
And it felt slightly like a ‘Half-Life’ kind of puzzle you would find in such kind of games.
And as we play-tested the game, it was one of the moments in the floof that became one of the favorites of the players.
They really enjoyed that little puzzle, but that is the only place where we had it.
$
So this is the data core room where you need to get according to van Bruggen's information.
The thing is that it's funny it's one of few rooms or places in the game where you have laser challenges.
As we built the game, often times we started by building the ingredients and everything, and then, eventually, we built the maps and try to use them.
But as we built the maps, we kind of realized that all the environments we were visiting and everything were not necessarily having the right logic to take advantage of some of the
ingredients, and we were like, 'Oh!' Our lead level designer, Rene-Martin Pauze had his guys working on some gems and trying to find cool ways to use the lasers and stuff.
And it was hard to really make them fit in the game, and therefore, here with the data core room, where it is supposed  to be heavily guarded because
there is a lot of secret information and everything, we went like, 'Okay, hey, that would kind of make sense to use those ingredients here,' and this is where we put it.
The only regret... So I think in the end it worked well, the only regret I had is that with our alarm system, it was kind of hard to give a very clear feedback to the players because
if you are detected by a laser and you are very far away from the alarm panel, like the sound doesn't go really to you, like you hear it but it is very low, it is very subtle.
And if you were not paying attention, probably you didn't realized that it was... the alarm was triggered.
And now you see those Belltower guards coming to you and you are like, 'What the hell happened?'
Like sometimes it wasn't clear enough like if you were detected by the lasers or not. But in the end it was not too bad.
Okay, so here we have a nice vista of Upper Hengsha seen through, obviously, Upper Tai Yong Medical building.
It is a bit of a sad thing. I mean, it looks really good, however, we used to be able to, you know, walk through this and actually go see it.
Yeah, and we had to cut it.
Like you have probably heard in another of these little beacons that you have been listening to, we have talked about the fact that we cut the city hub that was the Upper Hengsha thing.
So, literally, what you are looking at now is something that was an entire city hub, and what kind of sucks about it is that, that was the most kind of conceptual, architectural place with the Eco-architecture.
Everything was... we had made a lot of research based on how buildings are going to be built in the future, and how a lot of gardens and a lot of greenery... how it is going to be integrated.
and water recycling and all that kind of stuff, and electrical transportation and whatnot, and this was really, really cool and...
If I remember correctly...
On top of that, we had a...
...we had a whole university.
There was a university.
...university because what we were saying that Lower Hengsha was the blue-collars and stuff.
That is so true.
And on the Upper Hengsha, it was all about the university, the scientists, the brains and things like that.
It was the brains, the scientists, the guys working in Upper Tai Yong Medical, basically.
Exactly, and also with the universities, there were supposed to be a lot of students and apparently, because the game happens roughly during fall time...
Yes, there was a holiday.
And apparently in China, there was kind of a holiday or a celebration with the people there, and you were supposed to go in Upper Hengsha with the kind of flyers and decoration for that kind of celebration.
Yeah, we had the whole thing set up. That was amazing. We had different cars, remember?
We had invented a whole car that was parking itself by stacking together, all like lifting themselves and just like...
Everything, like the fire hydrants were different, it was so well thought out; there was a little park for children...
We had the huge plaza where we were seeing the entire city. It was somewhat breathtaking.
Oh yeah, because it was like rice paddies, the staircase-style rice paddy. It was built around that idea.
And you had the building in the middle, and the sunset, and it was just basking in sunlight. It was the whole idea that this was burning like Icarus, because this was the epitome of trans-humanism, technically.
Oh, my goodness! We might cry.
And I remember being super relieved, very relieved when we cut it, because I didn't know about all the wonderful thought that had
gone into the whole festival and all that, and all I was looking at was, 'How are we going to write enough lines of dialogues to cover all this?'.
And the elevator as a big airport-type terminal... how were we going to do that?
 Yeah, the elevator to go back down. It was like a terminal, that's true.
 And I remember hearing about it and going, 'Oh, my god, I can't write all that!' And so I secretly...
 But all the art was finished. This is what was crazy. Artistically, it was like 80% finished.
So I would say that the biggest heartbroken dude was me because... and the artists who obviously
had built this map, because artistically it was almost finished and it was really one of the gems of the game.
But in terms of exploiting it to its fullest, it was probably the weakest part of the entire game.
The weakest, yeah. The global experience was weak.
So it made sense.
Well, Tai Yong Medical was a very interesting map to build, like we referred to in other small stories in the beacons.
That map ended up being too big and we had to cut it and we also wanted to reflect a little bit on the Upper Hengsha that we had
to cut as well. But also, it was kind of a mix; a social map mixed with a restricted area, like a 'behind enemy lines' map.
So we had that part where it was more like, 'Okay, all the workers, and you just get in there, and probably it is not each employee who knows everybody, so you can go in there.
But there are some guards and the guards are protecting the restricted areas. And when you cross those areas, now you are behind enemy lines.' And
we had those people and you could mess up, and we had to manage the chaos with the workers, and then with the security guards and all that kind of thing.
It had been a very, very complicated thing to pull off because, as we were moving forward…
There were robots as well.
The robots.
But as we were moving forward, we realized that the design rules were not always super clear, and as we were building those maps and facing those
problems, we were forced to really acknowledge them and finding solutions to what would give you the right feeling, while maintaining the credibility of the place.
But it has been nightmarish for, I would say…
Tough map.
Yeah, at least a year and a half.
So here is another good example of, you know I have been repeating this a few times, of taking a place that is like a location genre if you want, that is extremely commonplace in video games, for example here, a laboratory, and give it a new spin.
It is very easy to make them look kind of all the same and not really generate lots of flavor or ways for the place to be memorable.
So here is the idea, you have this lab with this very modern contemporary lighting fixtures and installations on the ceiling and also a bit of the way that the walls are designed and whatnot.
Yeah, that is a lot of what we tried to do and it just makes you remember them a little more, hopefully.
So if you gave Arie van Bruggen a gun in Tai Yong Medical, you will have just heard him contact you or are about to hear him contact you to hack your bank account.
It was one of the fun little ways that we wanted to pay off that reward, to give you something.
And it also ties into kind of the way, the philosophy that I had about the briefers.
I have always hated it in different games when people can contact you on these private channels and just know where you are, and know how you are, and who you are, and they can just get in and you have no idea who they are.
Now you are politically correct because with 'us' you were referring to Deus Ex One.
I was not! But at any rate, it was a really important point for me to make sure that every time anyone contacted Jensen, there was a reason that they could do it.
So usually, the only ones who would do it would be Sarif, Malik, and Pritchard.
And every once in a while, someone else would, and there would always be a reason, and I think this was one of my favorite ones when Arie could just hack in.
Of course he could hack, because he is this world class hacker.
 Actually it reminds me of the first external playtest we did for the Alpha build.
We had this player that actually was in this part of the game and what Mary is talking about was already implemented, and he was really into what he was doing, and then he gets to the point
where van Bruggen contacts him, and I remember the guy like just removing his helmet and turning around and looking at us like, 'Oh, my god,' like, 'how did he contact me?' and like 'Oh!'
He couldn't understand, like he was so surprised that he managed to get into your bank account, and the fact that all that you say, that
Mary's philosophy seemed to had an impact on some players and it was really well done, and for him it was a very interesting surprise.
$
So this sequence with the two box guards that you have to face or try to avoid and opening the roof for Faridah to pick you up.
It was really challenging because at the beginning we mention probably a few times, Narhari Kahn, which was an important character.
Well, he was the head of Tai Yong Medical security and he was supposed to be an important character depending on how you play.
He turned out not to be.
Yeah, and he turned out not to be.
He was supposed to appear in Upper Hengsha as her bodyguard and all this stuff, and so we were gonna have this boss fight against him and the box guards.
 Yeah, it was a mini boss fight.
 A mini boss fight. And then he ended up, well, we ended up… he could have been dead by this point because we brought him in at various points.
And so then, we ended up now dealing with the fact that we had to get the box guards and you had to get Faridah to land, and how could we deal that if the player went…
So we cut him because in the end it was not a big consequence, like a relevant consequence. So we focused on the two box guards.
But the thing is that we wanted you to maintain your ability to sneak by or to fight. So if you fight the box guards, it’s pretty straightforward, you destroy them and end of the story.
Now you go and you can activate the beam to open the roof and get Faridah in.
But if you are more a stealthy player, we had to find the tricks on how you have to disable, to link the box guards to the security systems.
And until they are disabled, you cannot open the roof, and now today it seems pretty straightforward and simple but to get to that, I would say relatively elegant and simple solution, it took quite a lot of time to get there.
Here is a little 'maquette,' a little scale model of the Tai Yong Medical building, and when the artist showed it to me I was like, 'But what is this? This is way too small!'
I am like, 'What is this, for ants? It needs to be at least three times bigger!' And we ran out of time, so we could never do it three times bigger.
But the architect scale model really showed us like what the Tai Yong Medical facility is.
Yes, it really does.
It is like the foundations of the entire universe for Tai Yong Medical, right?
That is exactly what it is because once they had this, they were able to build the real one.
But joking aside, the reason why we put it there is because when we had the entire map in the Upper Hengsha, we could
literally see the building and the whole thing was designed, concept-arted, everything built, but when we cut it, we didn't have…
Upper Hengsha you mean?
What did I say?
Lower Hengsha.
Lower Hengsha? Sorry, Upper Hengsha.
And then when we cut Upper Hengsha, the player had no conception of what that building looked like anymore.
So we said, 'You know what? Often in buildings, there is little 'maquette,' there is a little scale model of that building inside that was done by the architectural firm that has built the building.'
And this is what that is.
It is funny how that happened.
So here again, a room that I really like, that represents really well the staples of the art direction.
Everything is in there, contemporary design, art installation, the baroque for the cyber-renaissance and whatnot.
The idea again is that Zhao is the one that is dealing with trans-humanistic technologies in the most wrong way, if I could say.
So the idea is that the room is in the sun, it's literally burning like Icarus because if you look, it makes no sense.
There is sun coming from all directions of the penthouse, where you can't really have this.
Sun is one-way directional, but we didn't care about this. So it is literally...
 We were going for the effect.
 We were going for the effect. We were going for the metaphor. So it is literally as if the penthouse is almost in the center of the sun, if you want.
So that is the whole idea behind it, and I like how it came out with the empty frames, the empty picture frames or painting frames.
Again a lot of artists would come to me, a lot of production artists that are like, 'What is this, why are you putting these empty frames?'
I am like 'I don't know, I just think they look cool, they make people ask questions, you know. So even though there is no answers...'
 And having that in the center of the sun reminds me as well that the company name 'Tai Yong' is Chinese for the sun.
 Exactly.
I really like this part of the penthouse, where we foreshadow to the Panchaea events; actually we see Zhao’s costume in here with the Hyron Project as we are going to see in Panchaea later on.
Actually it is a really, really nice costume.
It is an amazing costume, it was designed by 'Chippy', or Brian Dugan; his artist name is Chippy, amazing concept artist, brilliant guy.
He did an amazing job to create this suit that looks techie, but fashionable at the same time, and it is great that it is just there hanging on the rack because she is obviously preparing the whole thing but he has no idea.
 And I believe there are actually blueprints.
 There are some plans, blueprints.
 There are blueprints of…
 There are blueprints of the Hyron Project, and they are there, it's true.
 There are emails in various computers along the way that foreshadow a lot of it .
 I love that those things don’t make sense when you play them the first time, but if you would replay a second time now...
 It makes sense.
 There is a brand new world that opens to your eyes.
 It’s the, 'I see dead people thing.'
 Yes.
$
Well, here we are about to encounter this poor NPC that is caught in this incident at the beginning of the Tai Yong facility.
I don't know, we always struggled to make this thing work properly in terms of setting up the incident in the first place, and how you could save him or not, and what were the consequences.
And since you're kind of a stranger infiltrating this place already, it made it something really awkward, so...
Yeah, we went through many iterations. I felt the poor level design guys kept coming up with ideas and bringing them to us and we were like, “It's not credible.”
Yeah, and after that, once you either help him or not, now you stumble into the Belltower guards before the control room of the pool area and everything, and like this bribing thing, and then… It was convoluted.
It was convoluted. What we were trying to show, though, is that, we were trying to show right from the start how Tai Yong Medical doesn't really care about
its employees and doesn't have a lot of… it uses cheap materials and all that, and I think we were struggling very much to try and put in something credible.
We got something that at least works but it's straining it.
It works but it's not very elegant.
And I always liked the fact that he's in some kind of like a hazardous chemical that's spreading out, and he's in a hazmat suit and, at first, there was not even any cracks on his window.
Oh, yeah!
So he was like… Well, he's in a hazmat, so we ended up putting like a cracked window on his, like, visor but also he's got a whole breathing mask under it nonetheless, so I guess it's his skin irritating or something.
So here we're inside the Tai Yong vertical assembly line thing.
And at this point, we're seeing kind of like that pool thing where they're putting the finished product, the finished augmentations in it.
A super cool idea that we had but we weren't able to execute, we had to cut it out was because this is an assembly… a manufacturing plant, exactly, that's vertical because it's a skyscraper, which kind of makes no sense.
If you look at all the assembly factories in the world, they're all flat buildings that are really, really long and large, with a big footprint because basically they have those long...
They're taking a lot of real estate.
Yeah, they're having those long assembly lines, basically.
So we kind of sat down and we said, 'How's that going to work in a building?'
So we had this huge shaft at one point that was, probably like, I don't know... like dozens and dozens of stories high, and we had a whole vertical assembly line, and we had the whole mechanical thing working…
 And we were navigating through this.
 We had to navigate through it, and you had like those robot arms that were going up like soldering things, and then crates coming out and, you know...
 It was coming to live at some point.
 It was totally coming to live, but it's just, I think, that the problem was at the level design standpoint.
It was really kind of awkward to navigate and not all that fun. So we just...
And not only that, the map turned out to be much bigger than what we expected.
Yeah, we had like so much other… a lot of other parts, areas and everything in that lower part of TYM, so we just needed to cut down.
And in this one we have much less storytelling.
On top of that.
And that was the one that if we were to cut it, it would have less effect.
$
So, like you said, here we had to really focus on the inside of the Omega Ranch compound and everything, and loose the outskirt.
We were originally supposed to have three labs, three separate labs that were 360 degrees where you could go around them using the path you wanted but...
 Yes indeed, we originally had three labs and the three scientists you have to talk to in Omega Ranch were located one in each lab.
And it was very open, the map, but we had a lot of problems with the memory mostly, and the streaming, so we ended up cutting one of the three labs and putting the scientist that was there inside the microgen lab.
 It sounds simple, but actually, when we had to do it and repurpose the scientists in different places, it added some confusion.
 Yes, we had to actually work with the layout I had already created to place the new scientist.
So it wasn't necessarily thought to hold two scientists in this lab, but I think we ended up with a great solution.
 Yeah, and on top of that it can be super easy if you use the antenna that we repurposed inside the Omega Ranch compound.
So here we are in the barracks in Omega Ranch and what we tried to do here it was try to retrofit the Spec Ops into this map because they were supposed to be in a secret area of Belltower in Hengsha that we cut. We talked about it before.
 Yea we talked a lot about how we wanted to get Belltower, how we had the Belltower in Upper Hengsha and we wanted to hide all this information about Namir and his team so you could find it there
and when they got cut, we couldn’t do it so we had to try and find a way to retrofit it and so that is kind of what this barracks, we put the barracks here in Omega Ranch but then to hopefully get that information in...
 We have a couple of texts but…
 We have a couple e-mails around that refer to the Spec Ops and refer to that and even I think there is something that tells about them in some of the computers.
But we basically were running out of time again and we just kind of ended up not really getting a chance to get them in, sadly.
 No but we did get the sense and the feeling that there was pressure from the player like when you get in, you actually feels like these guys are there and you don’t really know why they are there yet, so that did work out in our favor.
So we are in Omega Ranch now, and we are with the level designer who created this map, Louis-Etienne Rivet, and actually right now we start in the hangar as a starting point.
But it was not like that before, we were in the outskirts right?
 Yup, indeed, JF.
We started in the outskirts outside the compound and your first objective was actually to go disable the antenna, and from there you would infiltrate the compound and you would reach the exterior courtyard which exists in Omega Ranch.
Sadly, mostly because a lack of time and also for streaming constraints, we had to cut some parts of the maps and that part was cut
so we decided to recycle the antenna idea and integrate it to the compound where it became a secondary objective for the player to disable.
 And if I remember well, when we were starting in the outskirts, and maybe you can confirm, Jon, but one of the motivations we had for it is that most of the game happens in cities and concrete and everything.
We wanted to kind of change the pace a little bit and have a little bit more of the nature.
 We were trying to break our whole...
Yeah, because that Omega Ranch was supposed to be in a remote, almost countryside and we wanted to make sure that we could show that, but it didn't really come through.
So, this is the antenna I was talking about a bit earlier.
We had a lot of problems actually with players actually understanding what the antenna was because we talk about it in the first briefer, but people didn't necessarily make the connection with the visual.
So we ended up adding another location where it can be disabled from and it is from the barracks.
Yeah, because you can go and climb on the antenna itself and disable it from there, or go in the barracks and there is another spot where you can disable it remotely.
 We also had to add a map of the compound inside the barracks because we couldn't give a window on the antenna where we would just allow you to see the antenna from the barracks.
But again for mostly streaming and memory constraints, we had to add an actual map of the compound.
 So all that because of T-Bone right?
 Yup.
So, at this point we're about to create the distraction.
 The infamous distraction.
 The distraction to get access to the restricted area of Omega ranch.
And I remember that even though what ended up in the game sounds very simple, it was really hard to get there, because  of getting the proper feedback to the player, that the scientists were helping you into getting into the restricted zone.
 Yeah, because we really wanted to bring that sense that Jensen was working as a team with people, but they were spread out all over the compound, and
they were supposed to create things that are supposed to set off alarms, and without some major explosion it was really hard to figure out how we coordinate all that.
 And if I remember well, Louis-Etienne, we were talking about an explosion with seeing a wall being destroyed or something like that.
 Yes, yes, but that was very complicated because all of the art had to be redone for after the distraction.
 Oh, yeah, yeah, that is why we didn't do it, because we didn't have the time with the artists.
 I remember that yeah. It would have been like making two maps almost.
 Exactly.
 Yeah, and in the end the result is not too bad, but it is slightly too subtle.
 Yeah, one of the big challenges with this scene was actually, the distraction itself is made by the scientists, who are not located
at the same place as the player, so for the player to understand something that is not happening in his field of view that was really hard, so...
But in the end, hopefully the players got it.
 Hopefully.
$
So, this part of Omega Ranch was supposed to be where we kind of wanted to show all the atrocities, you know, the experiments that were done on humans, and in terms of the advancement of transhumanism and stuff like that, and bio-tech technologies.
Sadly though, it is not really present like all the crazy ideas we had.
Some really horrific things that we wanted to show, like we had a room that we literally called 'the horror room'; this was the map for that.
It was our kind of 'Silent Hill' map if you want, but yeah, now there is the bed, there is people lying in beds and whatnot, but that is pretty much as far as we went for all that.
 Yeah, I mean the map went through several revisions like we were discussing with Louis-Etienne, and by the time it was time to put the love into it, it was kind of already too late.
 Yeah.
 But, the good news is that we learned from our mistakes and when we faced the same challenge in 'the Missing Link', the DLC, we had learned, so we tried a lot harder to make it...
 To make that happen...
So there is some good from learning.
...and you still feel it, you still know that this is what's going on, but it is just not as strong as what we wanted.
Here is a room that I really like tying in with the cyber renaissance idea and analogy in the game. So here’s an operation room, how do you say that, operating room? Yeah, operating room.
 An OR.
 Yeah an OR. Exactly, operating room would be like a direct translation of French, I guess. The idea is that back in the renaissance, when they started doing public dissections for other doctors, that is what would happen.
They had these amphitheaters with those kinds of steps with all the stairs around them, because at the beginning, only very specific doctors and scientists were allowed to do the dissections.
They had permits and personal permissions from the kings.
So they would go from city to city and all the doctors would come around to see them do the dissections and just kind of all be surrounding what is going on, and learning from it.
So, that was the idea here, to kind of make a very modern and tech-looking room that also had a bit of that rustic, weird amphitheater thing around it.
 And the fun little interesting fact for me in this area is that the voice actor who is acting for this character, the scientist, is the same voice actor who plays Wayne Haas in the game.
And yet, many, many people probably don’t pick up on that, because he was very talented and very capable of changing his style up.
 You mean, he is not whining every character he has.
 And the other point is that they are supposed to be working, so how come they are all standing still?
 That is a good question.
 Do we have an answer to that?
 No.
 No, ok.
So, this morgue is pretty cool because even though, maybe some of the human atrocities didn't come through as much as we wanted in this map, at least once we get to the morgue, we see what we could call a body count type of thing.
We see all these people, all these bodies, all these dead people covered up with the drapes, or whatever you call that.
So I think it works really well that is where you really start understanding, 'Oh my god, like this place, like these people where literally cannon fodder', I guess you could say.
 They were killed for the sake of science.
 Killed for the sake of science, they were guinea pigs exactly.
$
So, now we are in the micro-gen lab and actually, as we get there, there is something different in terms of challenge.
If you have noticed by playing the game until now, that most of the challenges are happening on the horizontal plane.
Our lead level designer, Rene-Martin Pauze, really wanted us to change the pace a bit and try to go for a little bit more of the vertical plane challenges, and that
with the art and the style of this lab we could really take advantage of it and create one of the very few zones in the game that have some vertical gameplay.
So the interesting acting bit here, is the voice actress who plays Nia Colvin is actually the same actress who plays Doctor Marcovic in the game.
She is Leni Parker, very flexible and versatile actress and she’s actually got a bit of a fan following on her own, because she was a major character, I believe, in the show Earth: Final Conflict, and she still gets a lot of fan mail related to that show.
 Is it normal that I don’t know that show?
 Ahh, you are just not geek enough.
 Ok.
 Hmm, flexible actress...
So, this doctor, this scientist at Sarif is again another good voice actor story because I am not sure if you have recognized this voice yet, but this
is Alex Ivanovici, who also plays Arie van Bruggen in the game, and again, also you will hear him later as some of the crazies in the Omega Ranch.
 Yeah, he is definitely one of my favorite characters.
I am glad Mary mentioned earlier his role as van Bruggen; we had a hard time casting that because for me personally I remember they wanted a Dutch accent, and I did a lot of research.
And it wasn't, I don't want to offend any Dutch people, not to say it wasn't interesting , but it didn't really allow us to have fun with the character and give him sort of like a bit of a quirky sort of side, and we liked that he was a hacker and everything.
So we kind of said: 'Ok, well we can't really incorporate the Dutch accent in where it is working for us.'
So we gave him a bit of free reign and we gave him, like Mary already mentioned, the Gary Oldman - 'True Romance' reference and he came up with something that was totally original and we really loved it.
He did such an amazing job. My only disappointment is that we didn't have the time, on the character side, to give him a unique character that suited the voice, and instead he ended up being kind of normal looking.
 Yeah, and what I love in this is that this scientist is so meek and so... You really feel like, my heart goes out to this guy; he is so scared and he did such a great job in bringing that to life.
 Yeah, it shows the range that he has.
 But if we come back to those scientists, what also for me, I liked for once - you have Pritchard that helps Jensen throughout the game, but it is more kind of a psychological help.
And now getting the feeling that those scientists are kind of taking a part of what you have to do to save Megan and save them eventually.
 They are being proactive on saving themselves as opposed to: 'Help me Adam!'
$
So, like I was saying before, I always felt that there should be gameplay separating the cut scene beats into certain things.
And one of the things that I was always thinking we would have here, is an opportunity through, once Darrow threw the signal, to actually have to struggle your way through Omega Ranch, through the crazies so you get that experience of it.
And it was kind of in my head how this was all going to play out with the non-crazies.
 But the thing is that I wanted to save those fabulous crazies for the last map as much as possible.
They have been hinted at in the white room when we are with Megan and you see it on television.
And we wanted to have a first glimpse in Omega Ranch before heading to Panchaea, just to have kind of a foreshadowing, like all the mess they could do.
But I didn't want to overstate it; that is why we managed to keep it very, very low profile.
 Yeah, and the other struggle that we were having here was how do we get Malik to come back if she is alive, because we really wanted
a payoff for that, and it wasn't so much 'how do we get her to come back and save you', but if she is not alive, how do we get you out of here.
And we had a whole struggle to try and figure out, 'Ok, if Malik is dead, then it is going to have to be Megan and the scientist who save you, and if she is alive then it will be her,' and how do we play all of that into basically a funnel at the end of this map.
So, one of the interesting points about the e-mails, yet again, in this game is that we really wanted to accomplish so much with it in Omega Ranch.
We wanted to bring the Spec Ops in and reveal things, but by the time we got to it we were so behind that we just kind of lost a lot of our intentions, and then we had to bring in some of the other level designers to help us with this.
And I remember reading this one e-mail from one of these level designers that made absolutely no sense to me and I couldn't understand it. It was all about ‘Hangar 18’?
 Yeah, actually it was Bruce, one of our narrative designers on the team that came to me one day and said, “We are in a hangar and stuff and well, could I reference it to Hangar 18 from Megadeth?” and I was like, “Well, why not?”
And he showed me what he had written. It was subtle enough that you have to know Megadeth, but it was clear enough that it would make sense if you know the band.
 How is it related to Megadeth as oppose to relating to the real Hangar 18? What are the signs that you know it is Megadeth and not like the real…?
 It is like I can’t remember what the men was referring to but...
 It was Hangar 18.
 No, it is Hangar 18 but...
 Because Megadeth is referencing the real Hangar 18 so did you understand what I mean?
 But that was referencing to the song and it was signed by Dave One.
 Ah, there you go. Okay, Dave One would explain it.
 Yeah, but Mary, she came to me one day and said, “Oh, this doesn’t make sense at all!” And I said, “Yeah, he ran that by me, he ran that by me and it totally make sense. It’s cool, he can go with it,” and Mary is like, “Ok...”
 And I think a lot of the people on the team who like heavy metal understood that and got it, so that was one of the joys of working in a very diverse team.
So, here is the shuttle that Adam takes to go to Panchaea from Omega Ranch.
We had a lot of interesting discussions and debates about how Adam is actually going to go to Panchaea, and this is pretty
cool because these technologies are being developed today; the whole idea of having civilians being able to travel into space.
The private sectors and all that kind of stuff and probably in 2027, these things are going to be there, or a lot more advanced for sure.
 Or more accessible.
 Or more accessible, exactly. So it kind of makes sense, Hugh Darrow is obviously extremely rich; he needs a fast way to travel. But a lot of people weren’t too sure about it at the beginning, right?
 No, a lot of people were not excited by that, and they thought...
 They thought it was too much.
 Or not realistic enough or many reasons. But somehow to me it was very appealing because going in space, that it is a very visceral dream, like take off from a planet and stuff...
 Yeah, it is pretty cool, and taking off from planets is really cool.
Also, the cool thing, remember, when we had the E3 trailer and we saw basically the shuttle landing next to Panchaea, people thought it was a missile, and people were complaining like, “Oh my god, Adam is going to be riding a missile?”
Do you remember that?
 And it was the reference to Stanley Kubrick’s movie.
 Yeah, it was a reference from…
 I’ve got to love the bomb, what was the name of the movie? I can’t remember.
 It’s ‘Dr. Strangelove.’
 ‘Dr. Strangelove.’
 So yeah, this is it, the LEO shuttle.
Here is the introduction to the Namir boss fight.
Actually, we had to manage to get two versions working, because depending on Hengsha Two - if you went for the chip recall or not; whether you lose your augmentations or you keep them for the battle.
And actually the idea of losing all our augmentations for that boss fight was quite debated in the team; it was a bold move.
 It was a very bold move to basically strip the player from at least half of his experience in the game, and force him to use or to be clever about the weapons
and well, just run around as much as he could to survive, rather than just use a cloak or any other augmentations he has accumulated over the play through.
 And also for you, as you were balancing the experience of the game play, it was tough because you had to make it interesting if you have your augmentations, but if you don’t have augmentations, it still needs to be playable.
 Yeah, well there was always, we knew, the idea of the choice and consequence was always there, like if you don’t have your augmentations it was part of the player’s choice.
I mean, whether you knew it or not. It was still a discussion we had that if he had the augmentations, the combat would be much easier, and that is
the point of augmentations, whereas if you go with the non-augmentation, the challenge is there that you have to sort of survive as a bare human being.
That is pretty much what happens depending on the choice you make.
Hello everybody, welcome to this amazing game that is Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
 If you are just joining us....
 If you are just joining us, well, we want to say 'Hi' to each and every single one of you.
If you have been here for about 40 hours, well, you know who we are. Ok, so this room is pretty interesting, because the concept of this room with
Namir being somebody who's got his skin ripped off and all the other statues and everything in it, is one of the earliest ideas we actually had in this project.
It goes all the way back to like May or early June 2007.
We had the exhibition here in Montreal from the human body thing. What is the name of the artist we used to know back in the days? Anyway I forgot about him, about his name, that is.
But anyways, so we said, one of our concept artists, Thierry 'BARONTiERi' designed this guy that was fully augmented and the augmentations looked like they were muscles.
And we said: "Hey, this is pretty damn cool, you know. Let's keep it and let's design an enemy where its entire body is like that; it is fully mechanical, only its head remains a human head."
And then because of the exhibition in Montreal, we said: "Hey, what about he is actually camouflaging himself within an exhibition just like that, and let's play with this."
It is one of the ideas that stayed the entire course of the development until where we actually had to produce this. So that is pretty cool.
 That was one of the main challenges we had, actually. The first question was how to replace the statues with Namir that mimic the animations and stuff, and what would happen with the statue?
Does it come back after? Are they holograms? All of these crazy things. So that was a bit of a challenge on that aspect.
 An interesting little bit of fact; the statues, not Namir but the other statues... but Namir also - I will get back to this. We had their penises modeled on them, right?
And we had to take them out. Because obviously we are not mature enough you know, people who play games and what not, when we see penises we 'Oh my god,' then we go on a killing spree.
 If we offend someone...
 If we offend someone, we are really sorry. And what is cool about Namir is not that we took it out, it is that purposely his penis is not there. He probably removes it before combat or something like that, yeah.
 Talking about removing things, Namir went through a lot of changes as well.
We used to have him jump on the sides of the room; there are big pillars and he was supposed to jump from one onto the other with a sniper rifle - actually the laser rifle, I think, and he shoots you with it.
And we could never get it to work properly. It was very confusing and the player could not actually understand what was going on.
So we decided to actually have him run around faster, cloak and jump over the railings. Well, it's not a railing, but so that was very interesting as well.
 Also, he had kind of a nano-whip like in Johnny Mnemonic ,where he could grab Jensen and pull him back towards him, and with your gun you would have to try to shoot at it so he could release you and if not, he was doing a takedown on you.
 Yes exactly, that was a bit of a punishment but that was kind of cool. Well, it is all cool.
So yeah, here it is one of the two versions of the cut scene.
 The meeting with Megan Reed.
 When we meet back with Megan Reed, it depends if you went for the chip recall or not. So it plays out a little bit differently.
But that was a very, very difficult cut scene to make because it was at that point with all the twists or the intrigues of the game, of the story, were coming together, and now we were going into the final stage of closing the story.
 Yeah, when you are dealing with the story, it is like everything is coming to a head and there is a lot of information that is coming together at this point.
And when we were first working out the story, and working out the blueprints, I kept saying:
 “Guys there is too much information, there’s too many story beats that are being revealed in this scene.
We are revealing the truth about Megan and we are revealing the truth about Adam’s DNA and how it has been used, and we are ultimately revealing who the true villain is in this piece.”
It is an awful lot to communicate and I knew, I just felt like we need to separate it; we need to have gameplay that separates those points.
 And I remember you were the one pushing for it quite a lot, and I still wanted you to pull this off, because now we were to invent gameplay
that didn’t necessarily exist or we didn’t plan for, and it would have forced us to do filler stuff just to pace the information a little bit more.
 Yeah, so it was something I have to admit, I was raising my objections from day one.
I was raising it in story meetings, I was raising it in blueprint meetings, but ultimately what was coming down was, ‘no, we have to get it all told in this because we can’t stretch the maps, we can’t stretch the gameplay.’
 So from a creative stand point you were totally right; that was the wrong approach, but as we had to cut many maps and as we had
to really close the deal with some of the game aspects and everything, it was the right call to make from a very, I would say rational, stand point.
 And actually, it was good we did it that early because most likely we would have had to cut all that gameplay that I thought was needed anyway and then I would have had to rework the story.
But at least at this point, I knew up front; we’ve got to make this scene work. Somehow, we have to make it work and we did what we could.
So here we’re in what we call ‘the white room’ in the game.
This was a pretty tricky room to nail down for different reasons, because this represents really well when you want to do something  that people have a really hard time envisioning in their heads.
We were like, “I want this room white,” and they were like, “Ok, you want the walls white?” “ No, I want everything white, as if someone walked in with a paint gun and just sprayed white over everything.”
And people were just really reluctant to, if you remember, JF, and we were really pressing on like, “No”….
 Because people were saying that it wouldn’t look good.
 Yeah, a lot of people said it wouldn’t look good, and we had to use a few little tricks, like ‘tech’ tricks that we weren’t using in the game at all.
And basically, we were just like, “We want it,” you know, “just figure out a way to do it.” And it ended up working out really, really well.
 This room is gorgeous.
 This room is gorgeous; it worked really well with marketing as well as a publicity for the game.
And what is a little funny anecdote; one of the marketing artists, when he was working at classifying all these screenshots for marketing, he comes up to me and he shows me this room.
You know, this screenshot of that room that I had taken, and he is like, “This room is obviously not finished. There is no texture; all I see is normal maps.”
And I am like, “No this is it; it is textured.”
He is like, “No,” and I am like, “Yeah, yeah, if you look at the leather, you can see there is leather texture; if you look everything, the tiles look like ceramic or whatever. It is just that it all is white.”
And he is like, “Ok.”  Then he is giving me this weird look and goes back to his desk and I get this little messenger message and he is like,
“But you know, but seriously you know, the textures are not there,” like he thought I was joking. And I am like, “No, no, no. This is it.”
 This is the room.
 So this is what the game is in a lot of ways. It is just making these weird things that had never been done before.
 And what is fun about this room actually, it really breaks the pace in the game because, as Jon covered, very often we try to be as original as possible, but still we try to stay grounded in this kind of alternate reality.
But with this room we went the extra mile to really break the expectation and bring it beyond what a player could expect. And definitely it is the kind of room that will get stuck in your head for a long time.