prodigydancer
Arcane
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That's some nice C&C. Might as well go full BioWare, resurrecting long dead NPCs and re-using bosses from the previous game.
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Deus Ex Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Pre-Release Thread
- Thread starter Infinitron
- Start date
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One heck of a delay. It's nothing Witcher 3 didn't do, though, and that turned out all right.
GuiltyofBeingTrite
Savant
Yea, I wouldn't be too worried. I don't think publishers delay hundreds(?) of millions of dollars in revenue easily.
Stainless Veteran
Arcane
In b4 another augmented preorder.
Lacrymas
Arcane
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The smartest thing they can do with an ending that ultimately culminates in Deus Ex is to not have an ending that even remotely affects it. Having world-changing consequences in your sequel hook is bad from a developmental standpoint. It's simply not possible to make 4 different games of decent size at the same time. Ignoring the HR endings deliberately (since they've said in an interview that they didn't think them through due to time constraints) is GOOD in this case. We all know that Mankind Divided won't have the C&C of Deus Ex or AoD though. They will be the Bioware type "choices". I hope I'm wrong of course, but I won't hold my breath :p
anus_pounder
Arcane
Well, I still have Xcom 2 for my early 2016 gaming. But holy shit, having to wait that long to play DX: MD.
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http://www.rocketchainsaw.com.au/marydemarle_mankinddivide_192841/
Interview with Mary DeMarle, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – PAX Aus 2015
Deus Ex: Human Revolution could be considered one of the biggest surprises of the last generation. At least, it was one of mine. A decently faithful revival of an iconic series most had given up on, and both a critical and commercial success. Enough to warrant a sequel early next year in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.
As we all patiently wait for the sequel, I had the opportunity to sit down with Mary DeMarle, lead writing of both Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, to discuss the ins-and-outs of writing multiple narrative paths and moral ambiguity in a massive action role playing game. Read on!
Jarrod Mawson: Starting off, Human Revolution was deeply rooted in a “cyber renaissance”. How isMankind Divided extrapolating on and developing those themes?
Mary DeMarle: Well, with the cyber renaissance in Human Revolution it was based on the fact that people were mechanically augmented and it was the dawning of a new age. Transhumanism, the golden age. Because of the way Human Revolution ends, the golden age is over. And the world is starting to fall into more of a chaotic, terror ridden time. So there are still vestiges of the cyber renaissance that are in the game, but we’re starting to see a lot more of what we’re calling corporate feudalism. And it’s kind of a return to the colder, darker…
Jarrod: A bit like a fallout, an end to the wondrousness…
Mary: Yes! And now it’s all becoming brutal, this is reality now.
Jarrod: So are these the core themes being explored in Mankind Divided?
Mary: Yeah, certainly I think from, and I’m not going to speak too much on it because I’m not the art expert, but thematically ‘art wise’ there are going from the cyber renaissance towards the corporate feudalism kind of thing and we’re starting to see more of the blue overtones of the original game coming through. Thematically, story wise, we’re still always looking at transhumanism and the central question of “What does it mean to be human?”. In Human Revolution it was kinda looking at “Why do we do the things that we do?”, and it was all about control, everybody needs to control something in their life. But now it’s looking more in terms of “What does it mean to be human?”. And when the world is starting to fall apart there’s a lot of chaos, when there’s opportunists coming to the floor to take advantage of things, how do we react to that? How do we build on that? Do we handle it more with our emotions, or do we handle it more with our reason? How do we find balance in a world that’s spinning out of control?
Jarrod: I find the concept of transhumanism in Deus Ex to be really interesting, because the series deals with so many other more…pulpy things. Like the Illumanti. But transhumanism is a very real thing. Is that something you’re personally interested in?
Mary: I come from a very scientific family. My father, he was…actually he was a future forecaster. He was always looking at where technology was going. Back when VCRs first came out he predicted very accurately how quickly they would penetrate the market. So I come from that kind of background and science and stuff is really interesting to me.
Jarrod: I suppose something like Deus Ex requires plenty of research.
Mary: Yeah, exactly. When we were working on Human Revolution it was really interesting to pursue all that kind of transhumanism research.
Jarrod: One of my favourite details in Human Revolution are the pills Adam is taking…
Mary: Oh, the neuropozyne?
Jarrod: Yeah! The actual chemical composition and reaction it has on your body is accurate, in terms of helping the body adapt to transplants. I thought “these guys know their shit!”
Mary: We were lucky, because we worked with a science expert who could help us with those details. That being said, on the question, I have to admit being a little bit wary of new technology. I always hate it when my computer breaks down, because I’m not the techy who can fix it.
Jarrod: I suppose that’s reliance on a tool, but when it crashes your power is stripped away.
Mary: You feel vulnerable. And those are interesting things to explore when you’re talking about merging man and machine.
Jarrod: Is that something Mankind Divided will look at?
Mary: There may be touches, but we’re really more dealing with the segregation, and the kind of chaos from it.
Jarrod: With something like Deus Ex you have so much narrative written, constructed, like Adam Jensen as a character who has relationships and is taken through scenarios. But Deus Ex, as a video game, is a series built where there’s a lot agency in how you act and behave. As a writer is it difficult to reconcile constructing narrative that is deeply focused, with the reality that players can do whatever they want?
Mary: There’s definitely challenges inherent in it. When we created the character of Adam Jensen…within the game industry there’s always the debate “Should the main hero be an avatar, blank slate that the player decides? Or should they be a fully fledged character who is your friend, that you’re guiding on a journey?” And for us, when we started, we looked at that and we said we’d like to see if we could do a little bit of both. We’d like to have a character who has a strong background, strong character traits, strong history, strong personality. Somewhat rooted in the world. And yet has something happen to them in the beginning, and when that happens they become a blank slate and it’s the player who gets to guide them. So we can use the personality traits that we decided for him to keep him on a focus, but allow him to do whatever the hell the player wants. And you can take that character and you can make him a serial killer.
Jarrod: Yeah, the serial killer…as you’re playing Adam Jensen, you’re embodying this character, and through a mission you could be somebody who is very patient, chooses not to kill, careful and methodical. Or you could be a total nutbag, punching and killing your way through. I imagine that’s quite difficult to balance from a narrative perspective?
Mary: It is, but it isn’t. Because we’re really looking at it as…you have to look at it less as the authorial vision, like you get in film and television. And it’s really more about, let’s look at storytelling in terms of; we know our plot, we know our beats you have to get through, we know the character has to get there. And we let the player do it. Then we use the rest of the world to reflect on what the player is doing in a non-judgemental way. We don’t want to judge you, we want to show the consequences of what you’ve done. So we can have things like, for instance, you go through and you kill everybody. And then you have a newspaper pop-up, or you’ll have people who know you respond. It’s recognising your behaviour, calling it back to you. And some of the people might judge you for it. Like a character in the game might sit there and say “I can’t believe you killed everyone, that’s terrible”, then maybe there’s another character who’ll say “You killed them all? They deserved it.”
Jarrod: Some of the poorer writing you see in games…it’s very arbitrary. Very binary. Good is good, evil is evil. Do you look for creative ways to, in your stories, where for example a player might be playing the pacifist, being the “good guy”, but there might be consequences that they didn’t expect?
Mary: Absolutely. With our license, we say it isn’t about black and white it’s about shades of grey. Because life is shades of grey. I’ve often said we need to be very aware, as the writers, as game developers, that we’re not judging you for your actions. And we’re not saying “Oh, you’re always getting complimented for the good things you do”. It has to be that you can help someone and they could slap you in the face for it. I often tell the story that I remember in my own life, where I was travelling in Greece and I was at the airport and, you know, people have spare change. And I saw this couple come in, they were travelling and they had spare change, and there was this Greek cleaning woman and they were like “Here! You can take this, we don’t need it”. I was watching this whole thing happen. They gave it to her because they couldn’t use it, and they walk away feeling proud of themselves, but what they didn’t see is that she spit at them as they walked away. So we constantly have to think about those moments.
Jarrod: It’s less about having the story revolve around the player, and more about making them feel like they’re part of a world where everybody has a distinct personality.
Mary: Exactly.
Jarrod: Working on such a big production like Human Revolution, and then Mankind Divided which I’m sure is bigger again, what are some lessons learned? I remember going through Human Revolution with the director commentary, and in the final stage you mention that it didn’t pan out quite as intended simply due to the logistics of game development.
Mary: That’s a good question. What are the lessons that we learned? For me, from narrative perspective, and I don’t know if I’ve yet figured out how to do it…but I did feel that the boss battles, I mean everybody complains about the boss characters from a gameplay standpoint, but from a narrative standpoint we built these massive back stories for these really well developed characters but we didn’t reveal any of it in the game. Because it’s all told from Jensen’s perspective, so how can we? So one thing I was looking at was how we could make more defined characters, and try and find ways to present that better. Moreso one of the things I wanted…I was looking for bigger challenges. So for me it was like the story for Human Revolutionwas somewhat linear. It did have moments of choice, but it was still a straightforward arc. This time around I was like “I want to play with that”, I really want to put choice and consiquence in. So I want to make it that things you do, from the very beginning, all throughout impacts the ending.
Jarrod: You mention that for the final stage of Human Revolution, where you had ideas for how you treated characters would impact how quest arcs played out, but due to time and budget…
Mary: Yeah, we had to cut it all back. So I want to keep pushing on that, I think on Mankind Divided. You guys will have to play and let me know if we succeeded. We did manage to get things where like midway through the game there’s a pivotal choice you have to make, you cannot do both, that changes the story. Your perception of it changes and all that. And the ending, things you do early on will change the choices you have. With side quests, definitely, we have things where you can choose to do certain things in side quests and depending on how far you want to go with the side quest it could then come back an impact the main story.
Jarrod: I liked the side quests in Human Revolution, but they were very much small side arcs rather than woven into the main quest.
Mary: Yeah, so now we want to try and find ways to bring them back and add more life to things. I still want to keep pushing and exploring what we were just talking about, where how you treat characters early on leads to all kinds of reactions. Hopefully we’ve succeeded with some of that stuff in Mankind Divided.
Jarrod: Wonderful. Thanks for taking the time to speak to us, and good luck with the game.
an Administrator
Self-Ejected
Good interview .. Looks like a cool game is coming.
Gnidrologist
CONDUCTOR
It was Deus Ex.
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Ludo Lense
Self-Ejected
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Did that fuck even play his own game? Punishing, did he want players to just stop bullets and explosions with their face?
Oh wait...
Listening carefully I think he meant to say restrictive instead. He wasn't talking about difficulty as much as playstyle.
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Concept art of Jensen's new apartment: https://www.deusex.com/news/happy-holidays-deus-ex-2015
Jensen never struck me as the guy who was that into aesthetics and what not.
It's not about what the character wants, it's about what the set designer wants. And actually, aside from a painting or two, everything I'm seeing is surprisingly utilitarian.
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http://www.pcgamer.com/deus-ex-mankind-divided-power-and-choice-in-cyberpunk-prague/
Deep in a theatre in rainy Prague, bionic commando Adam Jensen is trapped in a closet. The door is the only exit, and that’s guarded by a bipedal robot loaded up with machine guns. There must be a way out; Deus Ex is all about choice.
I search for a vent, because there’s always a vent. But with the exception of a big bin, the room is empty. I have fled into the most featureless and poorly ventilated space in the Deus Ex universe. I consider my abilities: my electric dash will get me killed slightly faster than ambling into fire. Cloaking isn’t going to help either. I press a button to bring up my gun. From here you can switch ammo types, add silencers and tweak your scope. No armour-piercing rounds. Damn.
A frag grenade! Robots hate frag grenades. I open the door, toss the egg and close it again as the robot opens fire. WHUMP. I use my augmented vision mode to see through the wall and spot the robot lying still on its side. I crack the door. There’s a terrible whirring noise. The robot stirs, righting itself in a hideous tangle of legs. It’s not dead. It’s not dead at all.
I retreat into the room. This is Adam Jensen’s life now, this room. It’s an incongruous end for a man who has dedicated the two years since the events of Human Revolution to becoming the perfect walking weapon. Human Revolution Jensen was the improvised, slightly buggy prototype who could only punch two people before having to recharge his batteries. Mankind Divided Jensen is colder, harder and deadlier. Eidos Montreal refer to him as Jensen 2.0.
Jensen 2.0 has just come up with a very stupid plan. With the right upgrades Jensen can lift huge objects, like the massive bin sitting in the corner. I open the door and grab the fridge-sized object, hugging it against my belly for dear life. The robot opens fire, and the bin soaks up the bullets—it’s working! I bump the robot backwards. The robot’s guns fire point blank into the bin as we perform an absurd rotating waltz into the corridor. I’m a genius. I silently thank Prague council’s commitment to bin sturdiness and slowly back away. I make it fi ve steps before the bin breaks. I’m an idiot.
I’m also dead, but laughing. In Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, even a tiny and almost featureless room can create moments of emergent absurdity. “That’s exactly the kind of story that we look for,” gameplay director Patrick Fortier tells me. “We really believe in the strength of spontaneous moments. They’re really powerful, and we believe that they’re as exciting for players as the big scripted moments.”
I’m inclined to agree, and happy to discover that Mankind Divided is a solid continuation of the Human Revolution formula. In Mankind Divided Jensen flies all over the world as a special forces expert working for the Deus Ex equivalent of Interpol. The world is still reeling from Human Revolution’s techno-virus outbreak that turned augmented individuals into frenzied cyborg killers. Now augmented people are oppressed, segregated and treated as an underclass in what Eidos Montreal awkwardly refer to as a “mechanical apartheid”. Jensen wants to track down the Illuminati members responsible for the state of the world, and punch them with his big metal hands. As executive narrative director Mary DeMarle puts it: “he wants to meet the puppeteer, he doesn’t want to just be the puppet anymore.”
Mankind Divided will play out over a collection of hub zones, although Eidos Montreal hasn’t confirmed how many yet. The Prague level I explored takes place in one corner of a sizeable area—roughly two or three city blocks in size. The rest of the zone was locked off so I couldn’t explore first-hand, but the new hubs will be more populated and detailed than Human Revolution’s, thanks in large part to Mankind Divided’s new engine.
“It’s definitely a bigger monster than Human Revolution was,” says audio director Steve Szczepkowski. “In Human Revolution we could put maybe twelve people on screen that were moving, and then maybe another six static that would just sit and do their occupation. Well, that’s doubled.” The amount of dialogue has grown as a result. “I don’t remember what the total actor count is, but I know we’re already way over a hundred. And that’s with unique characters and all the factions we have so there’s a lot of voices. We’ve done a lot for the acting economy here in Montreal.”
Games like Metal Gear Solid V have changed our assumptions about what emergent sandbox games can be, but Deus Ex is about density rather than size. The Prague theatre is a warren, and there are plenty of ways in. You can climb in through a window into an office protected by a laser grid. Going left leads you to a couple of ladders that get you to the roof. There’s a vent there that drops you right into the bowels of the building. Go right and there’s a moving platform that you can activate using a biocell, the biological batteries used to recharge Jensen’s abilities. I used this platform to get a huge box onto a ledge, which I then jumped on to find a second way onto the roof. You can even enter through the beautiful glass dome on top of the theatre. Alternatively, if you want to test your guns, just walk in through the front door.
The level of detail far exceeds Human Revolution, which always felt constrained by its engine. There’s stuff to pick up and throw everywhere, which means I get to find out how guard robots respond to being hit with a traffic cone (they don’t like it). The streets are dark, rainy and atmospheric. I lure the poor robot down to a grimy public toilet where it sets off an EMP mine I planted earlier. I leave it collapsed just outside the gents, but just have time to admire how grotty the place feels. Human Revolution’s gold filter is gone, which frees the theatre’s lavish interiors to feel substantially different to the grimy city streets.
This artful clutter gives Eidos Montreal more ways to teach you about the world. You can hack into terminals to read emails and pick up news-pads, of course, but I also found a TV in the Prague level that showed a full length news report presented by Human Revolution’s news anchor, Eliza Cassan. If you know the truth about Eliza from Human Revolution, you might sense just a little bias in her reporting.
The leap in world fidelity means more graffiti, newspaper front pages that blow around the streets, and more detailed books, posters and road signs. It’s a richer place, and full of neat designs for weapons, robots and augmentations. Company logos and clothes subtly play on the recurring tessellated triangles motif of Human Revolution, and there’s a signature elegance to the technology. I couldn’t stop looking at Jensen’s arms—dark and tightly coiled, like armoured vipers.
Those arms can do marvellous things, and Prague is a great playground for Jensen’s new abilities. As in Human Revolution, he can cloak. He can use an aug that helps him to move silently. Titan armour can deflect bullets for a time. His close-combat retractable elbow chisels can now be fired at enemies. His knuckles can deploy multiple homing electrical shock bolts to a group of guards. Jensen is a heavily militarised Inspector Gadget, and feels remarkably powerful.
The power trip is sustained by a redesigned energy system. No longer are you constrained to a handful of energy pips. Instead, you have a bar of energy that depletes a little every time you activate an ability. For continuous abilities such as cloak, the remaining bar will gradually drain as you remain invisible. Energy used sustaining continuous abilities conveniently recharges, but the initial energy chunk you blow on ability activation can only be restored with a biocell.
With more juice, you can chain abilities together into monstrously satisfying combos. I used my Icarus dash to leap into the middle of a group of guards, and then immediately deployed my typhoon attack. The camera popped into third person and Jensen spun, shedding a spray of miniature warheads from his arms. You can combine abilities simultaneously with good results. Activate your silent feet aug and then dash, and you can quickly and silently close in for a close combat KO, for example. Close combat attacks still pop you into third-person view for a brutal miniature cutscene—Jensen has learned an especially handsome uppercut since Human Revolution.
Mankind Divided’s augmentations have been redesigned to solve a key issue with the first game, where choosing a stealthy, non-lethal approach mostly prevented you from using the game’s loudest and coolest toys. Mankind Divided tackles this by giving augmentations multiple functions, and non-lethal variants when necessary. If you choose, the typhoon attack can fire a spray of green gas bombs that incapacitate guards without killing them.
“Every time we add new augmentations we try to see how versatile they can be,” says Fortier. “Even something like the nano-blade—which thematically is more offensive because it’s a blade—you can still use it as a distraction as well, if you want to maintain stealth. We’re trying to think about augmentations in that way, that they can serve multi-purposes.”
I still haven’t found a clever second use for the amazing shock-blast, however. Human Revolution’s PEPS gun is now built into Jensen’s arm. Firing it hits the area in front of you with a massive concussive shockwave that sends enemies and any nearby detritus flying. It’s Deus Ex’s equivalent of Skyrim’s Fus Ro Dah dragon shout. The Icarus landing system also returns, cushioning long drops with a deeply satisfying golden electric forcefield. If you tap as you fall Jensen releases the forcefield as a destructive blast.
If you prefer a more subtle approach, try the hacking game. Cracking a complex device like a workstation sends you into a familiar minigame in which you capture nodes on a web. Each node you seize carries the chance of activating a countermeasure system that races to turn nodes red before you can take control of the device. Bonus nodes grant you extra currency and hacking power-ups, adding a fun element of risk-reward brinkmanship.
With the right upgrades you can also hack smaller devices such as security cameras quickly and at range. Jensen makes a safe-cracking gesture at the target and a box appears showing a soundwave with several spikes, and a line moving rapidly from left to right. As the line moves over the spikes, you can tap to remove them all and activate a disruptive affect. A range-hacked camera shuts down. A hacked security robot is temporarily disabled. The minigame is basic, but it turns hacking into an offensive tool that you can use in the middle of a gunfight. It speaks to the evolved philosophy of the sequel, which says that whether you opt to play loudly, quietly, lethally or non-lethally, most of Mankind Divided’s tools should be useful to you.
Even the core movement and cover systems have been refined. You can now dash a short distance from cover. The distance of the dash is indicated by a faint line. If it touches another point of shelter, a faint outline of Jensen shows that you’ll snap into cover at your new location. You can also dash into open ground to quickly close with an enemy, or make a hasty dash to a ladder or a vent without being spotted. It minimises the amount of time you spend slowly squat-stalking guards and makes stealth movement faster and more decisive.
Mankind Divided feels familiar, but from the cover system to the new augs, almost every system has been touched up. The result is a sleek power fantasy with enough sandbox freedom to let you own your anecdotes. I still have plenty of stories from my hours in Prague. I threw a sniper off his rooftop perch at the guards below, stole his rifle and cleared out the lobby from the streets. I’ve distracted guards with a traffic cone and walked right around them, invisible. All this in one small corner of the game. There’s still plenty more to discover about the story and the conversation systems, but Mankind Divided is a few months of polish away from being another great Deus Ex. We definitely asked for this.
bloodlover
Arcane
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- Sep 5, 2010
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- 2,039
Sounds good, sounds good. I really hope they won't make the same mistake where we have to wait for a GOTY/EE edition for proper boss fights for non-combat characters. I am still not fond of mini-cutscenes but whatever.
I am curious to hear more/see the new locations. I hope they still put in an Asian megacity, with the GItS looks and feels.
I am curious to hear more/see the new locations. I hope they still put in an Asian megacity, with the GItS looks and feels.
God fucking potion chugging crap candy bar "gameplay" 
Hmm. Ok.
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