While many gamers revere the original Deus Ex as one of the great games of all time, its prequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War is not held in nearly such high regard (in fairness, Invisible War shows a respectable score of 80 on Metacritic, though this pales in comparison with Deus Ex's stellar 90). With Eidos Montreal on the verge of releasing Deus Ex: Human Revolution, some gamers have expressed hopes that this prequel will be closer in execution to the original DX, rather than the follow-up.

It turns out the developer is sympathetic to this sentiment, as nin sends along a post on the Eidos Montreal Tumblr Blog (thanks VG247) where this point is, quite diplomatically, addressed in an answer to the following question: "Did your opinion on DX:IW change through development? It seems most of the fan community hated it. Did you incorporate any ideas at least in part inspired by Invisible War? Or was it entirely ignored?" Here's the reply from "Frank," presumably game designer Frank Lapikas:

My personal opinion of it did not change, no.

Have I played it? Yes. Through the end.

I’m glad to finally have this question.

We’ve tiptoed quite a lot around the issue of Invisible War, but we’ve never fully answered people who wanted to know how much of it we actually used as inspiration.

I shall do this here and now.

My aim is not to start a flame war. But if we’re to peel back the curtain on how this game was designed, I want to be truthful.

And the truth about Invisible War is that I personally did not get as much enjoyment out of it as I did the original Deus Ex.

Looking at Invisible War was a cautionary tale. The game showed us how some apparently simple design decisions such as universal ammo could alter the essence of what Deus Ex is.

When you look at IW, all the staples are there: the future, augs, weapons, a conspiracy, dialogs, stealth, side quests, etc. Yet it doesn’t feel quite right.

It made us realize that it would be very easy for us to screw up Human Revolution. We had a fine line to thread after all.

So in essence we used IW and compared it to DX1 in order to operate a “course correction”; which means we reverted most decisions in IW in favor of what DX1 had done.

From my knowledge (and sometimes defective memory), there is nothing in Human Revolution that comes from invisible War alone.

Doesn’t mean Invisible War was a bad game.

But it’s not the game we were trying to live up to.