Deus Ex: Mankind Divided imagines a civilisation at war with its own technology. We travel to Eidos Montreal’s HQ to see this spectacular Xbox One cyberpunk sequel in action
Deep in the heart of Prague’s ‘Golem City’ – a teetering labyrinth of habitation modules, piled as high as skyscrapers to create slum housing for an underclass of mechanically augmented human beings – a chance tumble of fluorescent lighting tubes forms a jagged angel shape. It dangles over a vista of polystyrene candle-holders and power cables, ornate vintage benches, 24/7 news vids, merchants’ chalkboards ringed by circus bulbs and steaming joints of meat.
At first glance it’s just another piece of tragic, picturesque clutter, like the brashly decorated placards and pamphlets dropped by ‘aug’ protesters as they’re set upon by police, but there’s more to this broken silhouette than that. The angel is a buried link between the symbolic strategies of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and 2010’s acclaimed Human Revolution. It’s the after-image of the latter’s Icarus motif – the spectacle of a winged man soaring towards the sun, representative of what developer Eidos Montreal terms the Deus Ex universe’s Golden Age, in which the scientific ideals of the European Renaissance were applied to the icky business of blending mechanisms with human flesh.
In Mankind Divided, that motif and that spirit of experimentation have been shattered and driven underground, as augmented people – most still dependent on costly supplies of Neuropozyne to stop their bodies rejecting their implants – are segregated and brutalised following an outbreak of remotely induced mass psychosis at the climax of the previous game. “It’s no longer the haves and the have-nots,” summarises narrative director Mary DeMarle. “It’s more of an ‘us versus them’ scenario.” Looming large amid the chaos are the agents of the Illuminati, a collective of sinister one-percenters who are only too happy to manipulate the public’s fear of an aug uprising for political gain.
Human Revolution was characterised – to a slightly exhausting degree – by powerful visual juxtapositions, pitting the golden hues, textiles and fluting iconography of the so-called ‘cyber-renaissance’ against the sombre palette and imposing concrete regularity of corporate dystopia. Mankind Divided isn’t so much characterised as plagued, paralysed by these contrasts. Racked as they are by skirmishes between styles – venerable oak furniture piled high with silver datapads and servers, plush crimson fabrics spilling across the inside of an office cubicle – the new game’s larger, more complex environments speak directly to the narrative’s portrait of a society driven mad by fear of the ‘unnatural’ or ‘impure’.
There are plenty of non-metaphorical skirmishes underway, of course. As our demo handler guides the camera through a populous area, illuminated by blazing oil drums and the spotlights of flying drones, enforcers are seen frisking cyborg vagrants. As in Human Revolution, political affiliations are tied heavily to dress sense. The world’s specialised anti-aug police wear their own tech enhancements on the outside in the shape of exosuits, modelled to resemble medieval armour with jutting shoulder pads and full-face visors. The most terrifying of the lot drive bipedal mechs, their headlights calling to mind the baleful glow of a Big Daddy’s portholes. It’s wise to invest in a few boxes of EMP rounds before going up against these guys.
Long division
This culture clash isn’t just there for the sake of striking costumes or scenery. It creates and guides the choices you’ll make as returning protagonist Adam Jensen – how you’ll fight or explore, who you’ll trust, who you’ll save and who you’ll kill. To begin with, the writing’s preoccupation with the backlash to Human Revolution’s technological advances means this can’t be a game defined by fancy new gadgets, although there are plenty on offer. It’s a question, rather, of how fluidly and intuitively those tools are deployed – particularly with regard to combat and the game’s newly open-ended boss fights.
The concept of a society split from the outset between vanilla humans and body-modders also lends itself to a plot that doesn’t hinge, as Human Revolution’s did, on the choices you make at the end. You won’t, Eidos Montreal assures, be able to reload your final save and experience a different conclusion: Jensen must pick sides continuously as he negotiates regions like Golem City, and every decision has a deluge of consequences, both immediate and long-term.
Simply crossing the street to thwart a mugging as you head to an objective could start a narrative snowball rolling, to dangerous effect Donating some of your own Neuropozyne to a field doctor could result in a warmer reception elsewhere in the world. A target that needs to be extracted might be more disposed to come quietly - or even share some intel - if you refrain from carving up his entourage on the way to his chambers. "Choices you make early in the game will cut off characters and storylines for you, will affect your ending decisions, will create opportunities for you down the line," observes DeMarte. Sounds like a perfect excuse for multiple playthroughs to us.
Where Human Revolution cast you as a luckless pawn caught in the crossfire, the sequel takes a turn in the direction of Splinter Cell. With his old employer Sarif Industries in ruins, Jensen has joined Interpol as the leader of an international counter-terrorism taskforce, both for the public good and in order to get closer to the Illuminati. “He’s playing by his own rules at this point,” says DeMarle. “He’s very much a double agent, pursuing two investigations simultaneously – fighting terrorism and going after the people behind all these plots.”
Agent of change
As an Interpol operative, Jensen naturally has access to formidable resources and licence to enter regions that are otherwise off-limits, but as one of the organisation's few augmented ' troopers, his loyalties are divided. This becomes a source of increasing tension when Jensen runs into the Juggernaut Collective, a group of augmented hacktivists and freedom fighters who may be familiar to players of mobile spin-off Deus Ex: The Fall. As the campaign goes on Jensen must choose whether to focus on keeping the peace or defending the rights of his fellow augmented.
You can carry out missions for both Interpol and the Collective - some of which feed into the main plot, к while others change the chemistry of the world itself in unspecified but subtle ways, it sounds like a rigid faction split, but Eidos Montreal says you won’t have to ally with one side throughout. It’s all about whether the needs of the moment outweigh the force of your ideals or your larger objectives – and the result, the developer hopes, is a game you’ll want to replay several times over.
This ethic of freer, more consequential adaptation also applies to that classic Deus Ex four-way between outright attacking NPCs, creeping past them, sweet-talking them in conversation or hacking devices nearby to create tactical advantages. In this regard, the most important of Jensen’s new capabilities are also, it has to be said, the least exciting on the surface. You can now dash from cover to cover by aiming a reticule – as useful when ghosting levels as when moving under fire. The HUD and control scheme, meanwhile, are being overhauled to support faster decision-making, with active augmentations equipped via a Dishonored-style radial inventory to a crossbar menu.
As in Crysis, weapons are customised with scopes, silencers, ammo types and so forth by holding the model itself up to your eye, rather than by way of the previous title’s grid-based inventory (it’s not clear whether there’s an inventory limit in Mankind Divided). Jensen can also kill or disable a foe from cover, rather than popping out to administer the coup de grâce, so ninja playthroughs feel a shade less like one type of game giving way awkwardly to another.
Metal age
The idea behind all of these tweaks, explains gameplay director Patrick Fortier, is to foster a more fluid and aggressive, but not necessarily more combative, kind of play. Deus Ex hasn’t become an action game, whatever its frenetic reveal trailer may suggest: the balance of power between styles is as before, but the options are easier to get at, and the payoffs in terms of both cinematic impact and practical consequence more pronounced and satisfying.
The later stages of our demo are evidence of this. Having failed to win over a mission-critical NPC after a ‘social boss encounter’ – as in Human Revolution, these see you picking more or less heavy-handed responses in order to sway the target’s opinion – Jensen is given 20 seconds to escape a chamber while enraged aug revolutionaries cut through the door. In a game like Call of Duty this sort of scenario would trigger a headlong rout amid showers of disintegrating screen furniture, but in Mankind Divided it’s left to you to set the tempo.
You can always lock to cover and blast your way out, deploying the diamond skin Titan aug to shrug off bullets. But you might want to cloak instead, allowing the vengeful revolutionaries to pass by while you scour the room for leftover trinkets and intel. You could also avail yourself of a ceiling vent to get behind your attackers, toss a smoke grenade and use Jensen’s visual implants to pick them off through the murk. Much will depend on which augmentations you’ve piled Praxis points into, but there’s always room for improvisation regardless of gear.
Our demo handler opts to avoid contact entirely, equipping the new Icarus Dash aug for a precarious escape along ceiling girders, only to be lured in by the potential of an exploding barrel and kick off a raging battle in a hydroponics lab. It’s as much a test of the world’s reactivity as Jensen’s wits – objects and surfaces deteriorate under fire, though not as comprehensively as in Battlefield, and a blast wave sends a pile of blue barrels cascading across the map.
“Not only is it about what the ability does – it’s how quickly you can access it, and how intuitively it lends itself to a situation while you’re getting shot at, how you respond when you’re stressed,” says Fortier of the revamped line-up. “Is it mapped to the controller in such a way that you’re not going to fumble it? Because we’re a pretty controls-heavy game!”
Control freaks
He’s especially enthused about the Icarus Dash, which compares to Dishonored’s Blink spell and the vampiric swooping of 2014’s Thief reboot, Eidos Montreal’s last release. “It lends itself to offence, but also to stealth as well, it’s all about player style. It lends itself to creativity when you’re setting yourself up to use another aug, to reposition or in order to create an opening. It’s very versatile.”
Mankind Divided’s layouts put more emphasis on verticality than those of Human Revolution, so investing in the Icarus Dash aug early on is advisable if you’re to visit out-of-the-way nooks in search of PDAs that contain map insights and bits of backstory. One such chamber in Golem City is home, for reasons not given, to penguins. DeMarle won’t tell us whether these are augmented penguins, but it’s probably worth checking them out regardless.
If Golem City shows the world of Deus Ex at its most compromised and uneven, another location, the blue-veined glass-on-concrete Borg cube of Palisade Bank, is Deus Ex at its most sterile and subjugated. Eidos Montreal refrains from taking us on a tour, but drops a few hints about the building’s contents. “It’s not a bank you and I would go into to withdraw cash,” says executive audio director Steve Szczepkowski. “It’s a bank for the biggest corporations in the world – almost our equivalent of the famous Swiss banks – where big corporations can store their data.”
The theme here is ‘corporate feudalism’, the art department’s catch-all term for despotism carried out at boardroom level. “It’s the opposite of the cyber-renaissance theme,” says art director Martin Debeau. “Everything is based on the idea of a castle. Super-straight, no curves. We wanted to create the effect of a huge safe. There’s no emotion to that map; it’s purely about reason. Everything has a purpose; everything is function. The challenge was to do something that looks interesting without putting emotion into it, and I think we’ve touched on something there, but it’s definitely the place in the game where we are at the far end of the spectrum.”
Augmented reality
Eidos Montreal is in it for the long haul with Deus Ex. The studio has expanded considerably in the past few years, adding over 100 staff and an inhouse motion capture facility. Besides Mankind Divided, it has at least one secret project on the boil and is helping Crystal Dynamics out with development of Xbox One timed exclusive Rise of the Tomb Raider.
Things haven’t always seemed as rosy as they do currently, however. The developer’s Thief reboot took half a decade to develop, thanks allegedly to internal politics, and received muted praise from reviewers – although it went onto achieve “favourable” sales and contributed to an upwardly revised Square Enix profit forecast later in 2014. Co-founder Stephane D’Astous left under a cloud in July 2013, accusing the parent publisher of a lack of “courage” and “leadership”.
Thankfully for all concerned, Mankind Divided is expressive of a team at the height of its powers, offering up a world of sparkling thematic density and coherence, tied to a smart if cautious revision of the mechanisms of battle and infiltration. It needs to make a strong impression – this is the first in a series of projects set in the Deus Ex universe, as Square Enix moves to capitalise on the unexpected but welcome success of Human Revolution.
“Human Revolution was kind of a one-off,” notes Szczepkowski. “We were just thinking about not failing. We were trying to revive this franchise and hoped that we would do something good. But now the mandate’s changed – we have a much wider scope to consider when we try something. How does it fit in?”