Eidos Montreal says it’s to blame for the poorly-implemented boss fights in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, because it knew they were weak but crammed them in anyway.
There are two things about Deus Ex: Human Revolution that we can all agree one. One: it’s freakin’ awesome. Two: the boss fights really suck. The internet nodded its head knowingly back in September when it was revealed that the boss fights were actually outsourced to Grip Entertainment, as though that somehow explained how they managed to slip into the game unnoticed, but Producer David Anfossi says responsibility lies entirely with Eidos.
“The problem was not the supplier, it was what we did with them,” Anfossi told Edge. “The boss fights were too much for the team to do internally in the time we had. We totally underestimated the effort to do that correctly. We had to work with an external supplier with that, but the design and everything is from the team at Eidos Montreal.”
“We knew that it would be a weakness for the game, that we had to make a compromise to deliver it [on] two levels. First, the boss fights were forced, which is not the Deus Ex experience. Second, there is no mix [of] solutions to tackle the boss fights, which is not Deus Ex either,” he continued. “We knew that before the release of the game, but there had to be some compromise. It [was] our decision.”
Yet in spite of the criticism, Anfossi also said that if he had to do it all over again, he’d still include bosses, although presumably with a different approach to their design. “There are two options: no boss fights, or do boss fights correctly,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that now we have the knowledge to do it correctly.”
