There are few games with both the respect and baggage of Deus Ex. The original PC game is considered by many to be a masterpiece, and the sequel—Invisible War—is considered by many to be one of the most disappointing games ever released. Eidos Montreal has been working on a new Deus Ex title that is part prequel and part reboot, with Square Enix as the publisher.

There have only been two Deus Ex titles, and only one of them has been good. With a new team at the helm, a new publisher, and one delay already in the bag, gamers have been nothing but skeptical about the new release, and rightly so. We were able to sit down with Jean-Francois Dugas, the game's lead designer, who was able to answer our questions about the game, explain why changes to the core mechanics have been made, and how they made sure the game still felt like a Deus Ex title.

If you're a fan of the original, get excited.

My first question was based on the reactions I had gotten from gamers who found out I had played a lengthy portion of the game: how much time has he spent simply telling gamers that the title wouldn't be terrible? He laughed, and said he has spent four years getting that message out. "The most hardcore fans, until they can see something or put their hands on the game, there will be concern, and they will be doubtful," Dugas told Ars.

That's one of the reasons why a ten-hour portion of the game was sent to the press: it was a way to get the message out that the game was real, and it's very good. "To really get a good sense of the experience, you cannot just play for five minutes. It's the kind of experience you need to immerse yourself into and learn about the possibilities," he said. "That's why it was important for us to give more than just a snapshot of the game."

Human Revolution has been in development for four years, and has seen its original publisher merge with Square Enix. It also saw a lengthy delay, with its release pushed back to August of this year. I asked if he would describe the development as troubled, or harder than they expected. "I would say that early on when we accepted the challenge to make a Deus Ex game we already knew we were embarking on one hell of a ride. To which extent I would say that we had no clue at all, but we knew we were going into something quite big."

Dugas said they weren't afraid to take two steps back before taking one forward. Every decision was made with the quality of the game in mind, and the extra time has been spent on tightening the mechanics and polishing the game.

Third-person kills and regenerating health divide fans

Two changes to the original game have left some fans skeptical of the game's direction, and I wanted to get Dugas' thoughts on why these decisions were made. The first is the way the camera moves from first-person to third-person when you move into cover or perform a takedown move. It can be jarring—in some cases feeling like it removes you from the action to some degree. He said this was a change the team was comfortable with.

"We debated it when we were in conception," Dugas told Ars. "I would say with this one there was not a huge debate. We really wanted to showcase the augmentations, and we wanted to explore the mechanical augmentations and we wanted those things to be eminent in the experience to go along with the themes. The third-person moments were built for exposing the character, and exposing the fact that he has been crippled, but he's back with these augmentations, which allow him to do these crazy things."

This is a major theme of the game. Adam Jensen is placed in a position early in the game where he's heavily augmented in an experimental procedure, and he wakes up looking part man, and part machine. The characters in the game recognize that he's something different, and this is a world where the augmentations he uses in combat are beyond cutting edge. To many characters, he's an unsettling presence.

"We fleshed it out over the last four years, but very early on we knew trans-humanism would be a major theme in the game," he said. "We thought about what's in the real world, and how we can improve ourselves with technology, and we really wanted to exploit that and see it from the perspective of it's not like he's against it, but like everyone else in life we like when we have the choice to decide what to do or not."

This isn't a life Jensen asked for, but it comes with certain advantages, with just as many downsides. The character was meant to be someone the player could relate to.

"The fact he looks uncanny, or an outcast, it was to convey the feeling more strongly. We always think about the good things, but what about the downsides?" he asked. "That's what we wanted to bring into the game."

The other major change is the now-common regenerating health. If you find cover and take a few moments, you'll regain your energy, and can jump back into the fight. What's hard to convey until you've played the game is how powerful the weapons are, and how fragile you feel before you improve your augmentations. The regenerating health may have changed the flow of the game, but it certainly didn't make it an easy play.

It wasn't always this way. "We knew we wanted it to be tactical. We wanted players to think, and to maybe find new ways of getting around and doing things. Those were the scaffolds of what we wanted to fit with the combat system." They did a lengthy testing session, and they found that players weren't being challenged, and they didn't need to use the cover or to really think about their moves. There was simply no reason for players to slow down and think about what they were doing.

Regenerating health or not, with the newly balanced game, you'll be afraid of the enemies; they can kill you with only a few rounds from their weapons. When you hear a gunshot, you'll want to get down. If you don't have an exit strategy, you'll be hunted and killed. Focusing on the regenerating health is silly when the guns and gunfights feel so brutal. "We think we found the right balance of scaring the player, and giving them a chance to recover if they play well," he said.

Creating a modern game for fans of a classic

With all these changes, how did they make sure the game felt like Deus Ex? "We didn't go for one feature or another; we didn't think, 'Oh my god it needs to be the same.' We went back to the original game and tried to analyze the heck out of it to find the key points and the pillars of gameplay. We identified those and brainstormed how we wanted to portray those really important pillars."

The team knew that by bringing their own personalities and design ideas to the game while respecting what made Deus Ex such a special game, they could make something great, and that didn't mean replicating the original's mechanics. It did mean keeping what he continually referred to as the "pillars." I asked what those were.

He didn't hesitate. "There are several, but the main ones were the mix of genres, with the stealth-combat-hacking-social, and it had to be a story-driven game that was conspiracy-laden. We knew that characters had to be very strong. We knew we had to create a cyber-punk dystopian future." They were comfortable creating their own aesthetic for the game, and he notes that even in its time Deus Ex was not the prettiest game on the market.

"We wanted to create our own signature, and everything had to give the player ways to express themselves through the mechanics, through the items and objects, and use the augmentations to create their own solutions to challenges," he explained. It was that sense of keeping what was important while having the freedom to make changes that helped guide the team to create the game.

I've been lucky enough to play a large section of the game, and I'll get to play yet another portion later in the game at a pre-E3 preview event. From what I've seen, this is the Deus Ex sequel you've been waiting for.