No Alan Carr roleplaying runs for us…
Deus Ex: Human Revolution had one big problem: the boss fights were absolute and utter arse. Players who had dedicated themselves to stealth or diplomacy would find themselves thrown up against a purely offensive boss that would massively overpower them. It sucked, it wasn’t fun, and they tried to fix it in the Developer’s Cut of the game.
We thought at first that Mankind Divided was going to be fixing the problem even further. With claims that all the bosses could be defeated passively, many people – myself included – took that to mean we could talk bosses down rather than have to fight them. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case.
In an interview with Eurogamer, gameplay director Patrick Fortier explained that you can’t get past bosses through dialogue alone, with those being separate events. You can stealth bosses, or you can go head-on, but you can’t talk to them:
Some of the communication about that has been muddled a little bit. People took all different kinds of parts and muddled them into one. So, there are verbal debates with certain NPCs, [and] classic boss fights are another thing. They’re two separate things. Having said that, in a classic boss fight we will support combat, stealth, lethal, non-lethal, in ways we didn’t necessarily manage in Human Revolution.
So there we have it. While there will be support for non-lethal boss encounters, you won’t be able to sit down over a cuppa and have a nice chat.
It’s a bit of a shame really. I’m totally up for a bit of femur-snapping, and I’m sure they learned how to do good bosses after The Missing Link DLC and the Director’s Cut so I have no concerns they can’t make the bosses better this time.
Understanding the debate about augmentations that’s central to the story and debating using that sounded really interesting to me. I really like non-lethal pacifist runs in games if I can help it. Oh well.
