Deus Ex was extremely well received by fans and critics alike, but one major thorn in everyone’s side are the mediocre bossfights.

We recently learned that these were in fact outsourced to a little-known developer, GRIP, and we’ve heard their side of the story on what actually happened.

Eidos Montreal however, has been pretty mum on the subject, but have now responded to the criticism and given their explanations on what exactly happened, and how these mediocre boss fights made it into the final game.

Talking to Rock Paper Shotgun, the project lead Jean-Francois Dugas speaks about how the execution of the bossfights wasn’t in line with their original design.

“When we started the goal was to have those boss fights with the same design and rules as the rest of the game. We had our pillars of stealth, of non-lethal actions, and everything else, and we wanted to make sure that was reflected in the bosses, but in the end it was not… I think the biggest weakness there wasn’t the concept of having bossfights, it’s just that our bossfights are not Deus Ex bossfights and that’s why people are complaining about them. I guess we live and learn.”

“Should we have cut them? It’s a decision we made, we said ‘well at least they will be entertaining in some fashion’. The biggest surprise, actually, was having released the game and finding that people thought they were frustrating. Not just that they weren’t that interesting, but that they were frustrating.”

It seems somewhat startling that they considered these to be “entertaining”, considering all the angry feedback pouring out over the internet from frustrated customers, no doubt hacked out on the keyboard after ragequitting the game following their 27th death. The reason seems to be flawed feedback from internal playtesters.

“The playtesters internally gave us a lot of good feedback for the game, and on the bosses they felt that the fights were entertaining and making you use what you had learned,” said Dugas. “They didn’t say they were frustrating. We knew it was not in step with the rest of the game, but the surprise for us was that the playtesting was correct everywhere but the bossfights. So lesson learned.”

Certainly the concept of a bossfight itself doesn’t necessarily seem flawed in a game like Deus Ex, but rather the execution which was the problem. A bossfight executed within the design and gameplay constraints of the game could have been really, really cool. It’s good to know that this experience hasn’t made Eidos rule out the concept altogether.