Asking for It: Our First Look at ‘Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Deus Ex! It's that bit in the play where some dude in a robe pops out of a cardboard cloud to tell everybody that, actually, the spirit of Christmas was inside you all al… hang on, I'm getting my wires crossed. In this case, Deus Ex is the definitive cyberpunk role-playing game series, restored to the limelight by Canadian developer Eidos Montreal in the (sad) absence of franchise creator Ion Storm.

The last installment, 2011's Human Revolution, was the tale of Adam Jensen—a sharply bearded cyborg you could upgrade to be a better talker, fighter, hacker, or assassin as you went about saving the Earth of 2027 from frothy-lipped technovangelists and despotic fat cats. And the upcoming Mankind Divided, for Xbox One, PS4, and PC? I went to see that at Eidos Montreal's offices recently. Let me tell you all about it.

'Deus Ex: Mankind Divided' announcement trailer.

Human Revolution wasn't exactly a work of sunny, Steve Jobsian optimism, but it did give play to the idea of a "golden age" in cybernetics and transhumanism, with entrepreneurs like David Sarif free to meddle with our God-given flesh for the supposed betterment of civilization. Set just two years later, Mankind Divided puts the screws on. Regardless of your decision at the end of the previous game, it presents a society racked by dread of biomechanical augmentations following a remotely triggered outbreak of psychotic rage among those with implants.

Everywhere you go in Mankind Divided, "augs" are getting shafted by the state and an attendant mob of private military corporations. A portion of the campaign takes place in "Golem City," a vast shanty town composed of crudely soldered-together habitation modules, where unfortunates with prosthetic limbs huddle over blazing oil drums or wave placards at enforcers in body armor. There are checkpoints where flying drones and thugs in giant exosuits train spotlights on queues of frightened people, sifting the vanilla humans from the cyborgs. The social split underwrites the game's marvelous art direction—symbols of hope from Human Revolution, such as the silhouette of Icarus soaring towards the sun, reappear in a twisted, half-suffocated form, squeezed in amongst giant imposing slabs of corporate architecture.

(On the fear-of-tech topic, Motherboard has a fresh article on how the game's fiction reflects our own cyborg anxieties.)

Jensen has come a long way since losing most of his lower body to a terrorist attack in Human Revolution. Nowadays he's cock of the roost at Interpol, where he heads an elite squad tasked with tracking down rogue augs. In secret, Jensen is also working to uncover the Illuminati—gaming's go-to bad guy of late, a dastardly cabal of the rich and powerful who'll settle for nothing less than wireless control of every living thing on Earth. This quest leads him to the Juggernaut Collective, a group of augmented revolutionaries, and it's here that things get messy. As an augmented person himself, Jensen entertains a certain sympathy for the Juggernaut's political objectives, but can he help them out without compromising his day job?

The answer, naturally, is no. You'll be asked to pick a side throughout Mankind Divided, weighing up the needs of the moment against whether you think keeping the peace is more important than upholding the rights of fellow cyborgs. This isn't quite a binary faction split—acting in the Juggernaut Collective's favor at one point won't lock off access to the Interpol plotline—but the world will react in all sorts of ways to the decisions you make. The idea, Eidos Montreal's narrative director Mary DeMarle told me, is to create a highly replayable game that doesn't revolve around your choices at the end, as Human Revolution did. One player might speak to people, use weapons or visit areas that simply aren't present in another's playthrough.

Mankind Divided's reveal trailer (which you can watch just up there) left a lot of people worried that the series had gone full Van Damme, shucking off its stealth pretensions like a tatty dressing gown as Jensen pirouetted from one execution to the next. The trailer wasn't exactly packed to the gills with evidence of the previous game's sophisticated NPC conversation system, either, unless you count firing a cluster bomb into somebody's face as some sort of playful icebreaker.

Don't despair, oh waggers of chins and huggers of shadows. Mankind Divided is built around the same four play styles as its predecessor: winning people over in dialogue, sneaking past them, hacking computer systems (nowadays from afar, if you install the right augmentations) to exploit terrain variables such as motorized ladders, and, of course, capping punks or skewering them with your pop-out elbow katanas (these can now be fired at stuff, for the purposes of Arnie quotes). The difference is that when you are plunged into open battle, it's much more fun, thanks to Jensen's new augmentations and moveset. Speaking of which…

As in Human Revolution, you'll overhaul Jensen's various cybernetic abilities with Praxis points as the campaign rolls on. The new moves and augmentations Eidos Montreal has shown off so far are mostly about mobility and aggression. There's the PEPS launcher, a fold-out wrist cannon that takes a few seconds to charge but liquidates unarmored targets; an aug that propels non-lethal Taser-style darts from your knuckles; the Titan skin mod, which coats you briefly in super-enduring liquid metal; and the Icarus Dash, which lets you zip short distances on the ground or while airborne. Jensen's basic moveset has also been expanded for ease of use—he can execute or knock out people from a corner without breaking out of third-person view, customize weapons in first-person without switching to an inventory screen, and dash from cover to cover by aiming a reticule, as in the most recent Splinter Cell games.

Fancy yourself a real-life cyborg? Motherboard has something to say on that.

Human Revolution's boss fights weren't exactly its most celebrated features. Like cockeyed gate-crashers at a family reunion, they stomped all over the game's delicate interplay of systems and abilities in favor of "good" old-fashioned ballistics—much to the dismay of players who'd kitted themselves out as saboteurs or social manipulators. It was no huge surprise to learn that Eidos Montreal didn't actually design them—the job was handed out to Grip Entertainment—and the developers are adamant that they won't make the same mistake twice.

Every boss encounter in Mankind Divided is supposedly available to the full range of approaches. You can tiptoe up to bosses and bop them on the noggin. You can slash at their defenses with rifle fire. You can sweet-talk either the boss or perhaps his or her underlings, avoiding a confrontation entirely. You can even take down every bigwig non-lethally, which (Xbox Live achievements aside) should have intriguing ramifications for the game's ending.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided doesn't have a release date just yet, but if it gets one this E3, these words will be amended appropriately. All screens from Deus Ex Universe.

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