Trivia / Deus Ex: Human Revolution

• Actor Allusion: Possibly unintentional, but this isn't the first time Dennis Akiyama has played an Asian mobster with a prosthetic extremity in a cyberpunk future.
  • As well as Motoko Kusanagi of Ghost in the Shell, whose VA Atsuko Tanaka voices the Big Bad of the game in the Japanese dub.
• Approval of God: Warren Spector, the man behind the original game had only a few issues with the game, ^note The cover system, no resource free weapons (particulary the fact that melee takedowns use energy), enemies taking too long to reset after failed stealth, and surprise surprise, the boss battles. and he considered the game a good addition to the series.
  Spector: “Here’s the deal, the real bottom line. When I got to the end, I felt like I had had a Deus Ex experience. The team up there was really respectful of what we wanted to do in the original game and I think they did a really good job, with the exception of just a handful of things that frustrated me.”
• Ascended Fanon: The idea that Adam took up clock-making to regain his fine motor control wasn't planned by the developers, who planted the books about clock-making around Adam's apartment to imply he was a natural collector and had a habit for taking things apart out of curiosity. Playtesters instead assumed that the crafting was Jensen adapting to his body, which the devs found to be a much better idea and made canon, especially after the playerbase had much the same reaction.
• Call-Forward: Enough for its own page!
• Content Leak: The game's first act, apparently prepared as a preview for journalists, was leaked online before it was officially released. This turned out to be good, though, since, after playing the leaked version, people previously skeptical of the game preordered en masse.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Elias Toufexis, Adam's voice actor, claimed that he's embarrassed about some of the early recordings before he'd gotten a handle on Jensen's accent and speaking patterns, such as the conversation with Haas (which at certain points almost doesn't sound like Jensen at all). His explanation for the fluctuations is that the voice recording process took place over the course of two years and the resulting mix was between recent and old material.
  • According to the Director's cut commentary, the developers feel this way about the way they chose to show the effects of tainted microchips on NPCs; a random guy falls from a small ledge after a scene transition in Hengsha. They even mentioned that without context it just looks like a glitch. It's intented to show that people have trouble standing up, but as no-one around them was programmed to react to the event and the fact that the guy then gets back up and starts going through idle animations completely ruin the impact.
• Defictionalization: There are prosthetics being developed that're based on designs from the game.
• Developer Commentary: The Director's Cut of the game includes commentary from the dev team, played over cutscenes and at specific points in the environment that the player can trigger manually.
• Executive Meddling: The reason why The Missing Link was DLC added later (rather than part of the core game, as originally intended) is because the game was rushed after being delayed repeatedly. This is the same explanation for the why the Tyrant boss battles are more "head-on" than series fans would've liked, since they were farmed out to third-party developers to save time during production (Which is also why two hub areas- Montreal and Upper Hengsha- were abandoned).
  • Fortunately, the Director's Cut puts everything back together (while maintaining the "separate but integral" feel of The Missing Link), and redesigns the boss battles to provide a much wider variety of options for dealing with them. Except the Hyron battle, which is completely unchanged.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The Director's Cut version is now the only version of the game readily available digitally. For those who preferred the original version, it can still be found on Amazon and the Square Enix store.
• No Dub for You: A very odd case for both Latin America and Spain: The game uses the Latin American Spanish dub for both regions, rather than doing an specific one for Spain. In fact, the Steam page of the game blatantly warns you about this, due to the Spaniard distaste for non-Spaniard dubs.
• No Export for You: The Collector's Edition is Exclusive to Europe.
• Pre-Order Bonus: There are various editions granting some combination of 10,000 credits, unique weapons and remote-detonated explosives from the start of the game. In the US, the bonuses are retailer-specific, excluding the 10k credits. Plus, a 'cut' mission (which features an appearance by Tracer Tong from the first game) is thrown in as well, leaving the meaning of the word "Cut" in this context rather dubious. The Collector's Edition have all of these bonuses together, and a limited edition Adam Jensen Figurine, although the Collectors Edition is Europe Exclusive. The Augmented and the Collector's Edition both have an Art Book and making of DVD.
  • At least the extra content can now be bought for pocket change (on Steam, anyway).
  • And the Steam version, naturally, gives Team Fortress 2 players the eight items of the Deus Ex-themed Manno-Technology Bundle update for free —- you'd have to find/craft/buy them individually otherwise.
• Promoted Fanboy: Will Rossellini, the game's technical consulting for medicine and prosthetic, got the job because he reached out to Eidos saying how much his expertise could help the writing team, and because he was a huge fan of the original Deus Ex. The writing team in turn made him one of the employees in the Sarif offices, since he works in that field he would be present playing a Character as Himself. He thought this was awesome.
• Real-Life Relative: The voice actors for Adam and Megan are married.
• Role Reprise: Even though it's been a good ten years since the first game, they went out of their way to get the guy who voiced Bob Page in the first game.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Before Human Revolution was conceived, Ion Storm had plans for their own version of the third game in the series, with the Working Title of Deus Ex: Insurrection. The project got as far as entering the pre-production stage in early 2004, but it eventually ended up being cancelled in the wake of Warren Spector's departure from the studio in 2005. The proposed game's storyline remained in flux throughout its existence, but it being a prequel set earlier in the timeline than Invisible War, and even the original game, was fairly quickly settled on. Warren Spector suggested a few potential plotlines:
    • A story centring around a protagonist named Xaiver Gale, a cyborg operative worked for a UN Black Ops Task Force, codenamed "Black Rain" who was involved in a lot of sketchy mission in the 2020s. Having grown disillusioned due to the many questionable things he had a hand in, Gale would be retired from active duty, until a VersaLife experiment gone wrong and his daughter being kidnapped would have conspired to put him on Mandatory Unretirement. The story would have been presented in an Anachronic Order, jumping back and forth between Gale's various Black Ops missions in the 2020s and his predicament in the current day.
    • A story set during the Collapse itself, were the player was put in the shoes of a kid from Neveda who lied about his age to join a local militia, hoping to restore law and order. As the story unfolded, the protagonist's sister, Natalie, would be inducted into a local quasi-religious cult, named "The House of the Righteous", and then mysteriously disappears. The militia would gradually come to see the cult as a threat, and eventually ask the protagonist to go undergo undercover in the cult as a new initiate, in the hopes of figuring out the cult's agenda, while they themselves would be motivated to go through with in the infiltration in the hopes of finding their sister. It was also noted that with a few tweaks the plot could also work as a sequel to Invisible War.
    • Insurrection's project-leader, Art Min, however, settled on using his own ideas for the storyline, which featured a protagonist who was the father of Paul and JC Denton (suggested names included Blake Denton, Bryce Denton, and Adam Denton). Set in 2027, the USA would be a waning superpower, its status the world police threatened by a creeping economic downturn, and with China and Russia, themselves now emerging superpowers, chomping at the bit to take the Americans down a peg. Denton Sr. would have been a Delta Force commando, who gets embroiled in a conflict over extra-terrestrial technology between USA and China, which eventually escalates into open war.:
  • There were originally going to be more city hubs in the game: Upper Heng Sha (which was even partially completed), Montreal (the devlopers' home city, which they were rather regretful for not managing to include) and even India. They didn't complete these due to lack of development time, not wanting to stretch out the story too much and so that they could focus on making fewer but bigger hubs.
  • They also stated that the lack of development time was the reason why the game's Multiple Endings are literally chosen via button presses as opposed to something more involved.^note (The original plan was to have each ending require multiple steps and particular progression paths through the The Very Definitely Final Dungeon, similar to the original game and Invisible War) The endings themselves however, were exactly what they intended.
  • The "neo-Renaissance" was also supposed to have a greater influence in fashion.
  • A conversation boss fight with Megan Reed, that would have revealed more about their failed relationship.
  • An alternate opening, that had you breaking into Sarif HQ as to test their security system. The fact that you were breaking into Sarif and not a competitor firm wouldn't be revealed until the end of the sequence.
  • You were originally supposed to be able to spare Fedorova and Namir after defeating them. You can still see hints of the original idea in Eliza's conversation with Adam after the fight with Federova where she asks if you will save your opponent, dialogue that was never changed.
  • A cut level would have had you visit a Humanity Front rehabilitation clinic in Utah where people would have their augmentations removed. The rehab clinic would have secretly been home to a Purity First cell and was originally going to be where you had the social boss battle with Isaias Sandoval. The clinic was cut for time, but most of the completed content was moved to Detroit.
  • The Director's Cut reveals that Malik was originally intended to be Arabic and use Arabic swear words - while her VA could pronounce them right, the developers weren't happy and decided to change Malik into an American.
  • The Tai Yong Medical building was originally supposed to be arranged as a vertical factory, with a long shaft following the entire building and robotic production lines following the entire height of the building. The building was also meant to be a major landmark you could see from everywhere in lower Hengsha, but in the finished game it's only occasionally seen and while pretty to look at, doesn't really differ from the other background scenery.
  • The Nigerian Emails that could be found throughout the game were originally collectables, with the player getting an achievement for finding them all. This was later cut.
  • Some of the Director commentary in Hensha mentions that a translator augment was discussed at one point (As in, without it you'd have problems in Hengsha unless you knew actual mandarin), but was abandoned due to the large amount of work creating 2 variants for every line and sign in Hengsha would have required.

---