"Apartheid" is a loaded term, and it could easily turn out to be a cheap and simplistic way to lend gravity to the plot. Fortier says the team wants fighting to feel like a more viable and fun choice, which has the secondary effect of opening up some darker possibilities for players - in the demo, Adam seemingly sinks his chance at negotiating with the pacifist activist by killing half the people in his compound, then accusing the man of hypocrisy for wanting to defend himself. The Deus Ex games tend to emphasize stealth and social graces over combat, but that’s also supposed to be changing. "And then you'd get out and have a little corridor and then you'd get into another room." In Human Revolution, "you'd get a room, and there would be a certain number of in it, and it'd be closed off, and you'd fight in there," he says, arranging a phone and a couple of magazines in a line to demonstrate. Even beyond the new abilities, Mankind Divided is trying to play this mastery up in every way.įortier says that he wants the game to be less linear and guided than its predecessor - perhaps more like the first Deus Ex. You can kill bosses in the original game by hacking into the right email servers. If being suspicious of him is bigotry, it’s the sort you reserve for someone who carries an arsenal of weapons and a grappling hook into Starbucks.ĭeus Ex is often about achieving complete, panoptic mastery over a place - the more you snoop around, finding every secret passage and eavesdropping on every conversation, the better off you’ll end up. His iconic wrist blades are now also javelin guns. He can teleport like Corvo Attano in Dishonored. Adam can hack security systems remotely like Batman in the Arkham series. Really, how could he? Eidos Montreal is padding the already impressive list of augmentations in Human Revolution - including invisibility and an electromagnetic parachute - with some of the most useful powers from more recent video games. "He has no shame or discomfort anymore about who he really is." And while Adam was ambivalent of his cyborg conversion in Human Revolution, "he's embracing himself a lot more" in Mankind Divided, says Fortier. It plays with the aesthetics of oppression, but the game is only fun because your character doesn’t actually experience it - in the demo mission, in fact, he’s hunting down an aug rights activist (and alleged bomber) for an anti-terrorist group. In Mankind Divided, they’re apparently treated like a cross between lepers, ethnic minorities, and political dissidents.īut Deus Ex, like many video games, has a strange relationship with power and marginalization. Its mechanically augmented humans ("mech-augs") have gained new powers at the expense of social acceptability.
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Since its start in 2000, the Deus Ex series has been known for balancing open-ended gameplay with complex stories about transhumanism, conspiracy theories, and global politics. We see it all around us, all the time," says Patrick Fortier, gameplay director of Mankind Divided. "Fear becomes the natural human reflex, the fear of differences. And then - after a terrorist bombing and a sudden leap of scenery - we’re in the ghetto of Golem City, where augmented humans live under "mechanical apartheid." They present their passports at a checkpoint, where they are greeted with suspicion and improbably large drones. She and protagonist Adam Jensen, who was unwillingly given life-saving mechanical upgrades in the earlier Human Revolution, pass the station restroom signs: one for "naturals," represented with standard green human figures, and one for "augs," whose red figures have amputated limbs. "Damn clankie," he mutters when he sees her face, traced with lines of chrome. A man bumps into her, and she falls to the ground.
When Eidos Montreal boots up the E3 demo of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a woman is standing on a train platform in the year 2029.