Deus Ex: HR’s gameplay director admits to putting less work into boss fights, apologizes

Actually this one was pretty easy if you used the takedown glitch.

Didn’t like the boss fights in Deus Ex: Human Revolution? Well, I’ve got some good news for you: the developers think you’re right. At this year’s GDC, Francois Lapikas (the game’s gameplay director), admitted that less work was put into the boss fights during development. They “didn’t have direction sheets for boss fights”, and essentially just “[put] enough ammo and enough weapons in the room that would be enough for players to just defeat them and say ‘That was nice, let’s go on.’”.

Apparently, they were designed more as a break from the game’s pacing than any sort of real challenge; a quick gunfight to break up the stealth, exploration, and hacking that dominates most of Human Revolution’s playtime. Playtesting did “flag the boss fights as a problem, but they didn’t flag the severity of it”, Lapikas goes on to say. So, yeah. If you found that fight with Barrett teeth-grindingly awful, the people who made this game understand and have promised that “Next time, we’re gonna think about it more.” That’s fine by me, considering that Human Revolution was pretty damn great when you weren’t fighting bosses. Thanks to Kotaku and Destructoid for the information.