Artists behind Deus Ex: Mankind Divided imagine the world in 2029

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – “The choices that you are offered are game-changers”

Design studio Autodesk recently paid a visit to the studios of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided developer Eidos Montreal. They’ve put out a video, and while the emphasis is on Eidos’ relationship with HP, the short clip is peppered with fresh footage of the game in action. Check it out below.

Elsewhere, Canadian voice actor Elias Toufexis – who provides the gruff tones of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided protagonist Adam Jensen – had a lot of interesting things to say about the game during a recent interview with YouTube channel Video Game Sophistry.

“The game looks incredible, I love the story,” said Toufexis. “I’m really, really happy with the story in particular. It’s really good this time.”

Toufexis went on to praise the replay value of the game, as well as the various endings. “I’m not going to give them away, but they’re definitely different than the last time. The choices that you are offered are game-changers, in the literal sense of the word.”

The voice actor – who has also worked on Far Cry: Primal and TV shows Smallville and Supernatural – was the voice of Adam Jensen in the previous Deus Ex game. He confirmed that his work on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is over, and that Eidos Montreal is polishing the game ahead of release.

“The game is so dense, so thick in terms of plot and the world. The world is so vast now, in terms of all the people you meet and the different things they’re going through. I hope people play it twice, or even three times, to experience the entire thing.”

You can watch the full interview below:

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided  – “Mechanical apartheid”

Science fiction has a knack of tricking people to think about complex, real-world politics. Whether it’s Star Trek’s cold-war tensions or Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 and the South African apartheid, changing people to aliens or robots is a good way to broach sensitive social issues. The Deus Ex series has a record of touching on topics ranging from racism to transhumanism, and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided looks set to continue this trend. 

The world of 2029 has fallen into what the developers have described as a “mechanical apartheid,” with augmented individuals pushed in ghettos, and increasingly frequent terrorist attacks raising tensions in cities across the globe. While raising the South African apartheid has been criticised by some as racially and historically insensitive, it remains to be seen how deep the game will go into examining the politics of segregation. In an interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided gameplay director Patrick Fortier defended the use of the term:

“You are going to go to see what people are living through, even the word ‘apartheid’, if you look at the definition, it comes from French for “to put apart”, to separate. It’s a literal description of the situation that our world is describing. It’s not a tagline. It’s not a little thing to get attention. It’s very much at the heart of the storyline that we’re exploring. We don’t feel at all like we’re being careless, we’re not just throwing it around.” 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Gameplay

The last time we saw the game in action was at E3 2015, in a gameplay demo set in a very tense Prague before and after a terrorist attack.

The first-person perspective, mixed with a third-person cover system, will return from the Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DE:HR). The series’ emphasis on multiple approaches to a situation will also be in place, with players able to opt for hacking, stealth or guns-blazing action, with augmented powers to suit. Great, you say. But what’s new?

For starters, there will be more non-lethal options. If you decided to play things stealthily in DE:HR, you only really had a tranquilizer-dart gun and a close-quarters takedown. Now you’ll also have a Tesla gun arm to take down up to 4 opponents at the same time. There will also be remote hacking, which will give Jensen new ways to negotiate his way past cameras and barriers. The hacking system itself is also updated.

DE:HR was angled towards stealth, but Eidos Montreal has promised a comparable level of depth to the new game’s combat route. Lethal approaches look like they’ll be bolstered, such as with the Nano Blade – which can impale enemies to walls or explode to take down multiple enemies. You can change ammo type on the fly, and there’s also a new Titan Shield augmentation that lets Jensen become a human tank for a short period of time. 

READ NEXT: An interview with artist and bot-maker Matthew Plummer-Fernandez