New DEUS EX game cancelled

A new Deus Ex game in early development at Eidos Montreal has been cancelled. The news broke as Embracer Group, who acquired Eidos Montreal in 2022, confirmed over 100 layoffs at the company.

"I never asked for this."

"A new Deus Ex game? I'm pretty sure everyone asked for that."

"No, I was referring to the layoffs and cancellation."

"Oh, that was unclear."

"Yeah, I get that now."

Embracer Group went on a buying spree of IPs and development studios during and just after the COVID pandemic, when video game stocks were riding high. Embracer planned to leverage a huge portfolio of talent to do a massive deal with a Saudi investment company. However, as the post-COVID video game bubble burst, the Saudi company pulled out, leaving Embracer suddenly flapping in the breeze. The company has since been shedding jobs and closing down studios at a rate of knots as it tries to balance its books.

The Deus Ex franchise is one of the best-regarded in all of video gaming, with original entry Deus Ex (2000) still often cited as one of the greatest video games ever made for its iconic story, characters and incredible freedom of choice. It is often cited as a shining example of both the RPG and immersive sim genres, with the player allowed to follow the story and events however they wish, no matter how implausible or seemingly game-breaking. Console-centric follow up Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003) was much less successful, both critically and commercially, and was believed to have killed the franchise. However, the series was brought back from the brink of extinction for Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), which was regarded as another modern classic and sold extremely well. Sequel Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016) was critically praised, but sales were cooler, with anger over an attempt to monetise the single-player-only game with cosmetics and a cliffhanger ending which some believed made the game feel incomplete.

Eidos Montreal were moved to other projects, spearheading development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018) and working with Crystal Dynamics on Marvel's Avengers (2020). Eidos Montreal then developed the well-received Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (2021) before the Embracer sale, and apparently began work on a new Deus Ex at that time. It was unclear if this game was a follow-up to Human Revolution and Mankind Divided (which followed the same cast and storyline) or a new story in the same universe, or even a remake of the original game.

The Deus Ex series has bounced back from total extinction the past, so hopefully that will be the case here.

New DEUS EX game in development

Eidos Montreal are "very early" in development on a brand new Deus Ex game. The studio was recently sold by Square Enix to Embracer Group, along with all of its attendant IP.

Eidos Montreal previously developed Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016), which were both extremely well-reviewed and Human Revolution sold very well as well. Mankind Divided underperformed according to Square's expectations and the studio moved to developing Shadow of the Tomb Raider (2018), and Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy (2021). Eidos Montreal is currently providing assistance to Playground Games in their reboot of the Fable franchise for Microsoft.

It is unknown if the new game will continue the prequel story of Adam Jensen that began in Human Revolution and was left unresolved in Mankind Divided, or will be a sequel to the original two games, Deus Ex (2000) and Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003). It might even be a modern remake of the original game, which remains one of the most highly-acclaimed video games of all time but could do with a makeover in terms of graphics and UI (although, strictly, only if the original game's insane freedom and branching story are kept intact).

As the game is in its earliest stages and the last Deus Ex game took five years to make, it might be a fair while before we hear any more about the project. At least it's good to know the franchise will continue, eventually.

New DEUS EX games "on hold" after "disappointing" sales

Square Enix have put the Deus Ex video game series on indefinite hold following disappointing sales of the latest game in the series, Mankind Divided.

The official reason is that Square has signed a massive, multi-million dollar deal with Marvel to develop a series of new games based on their superheroes, with a major new Avengers game being the first out of the gate. Square has moved the Crystal Dynamics team (responsible for the latest Tomb Raider games) over to The Avengers and reassigned Eidos Montreal from the next Deus Ex game to pick up the next Tomb Raider title, provisionally entitled Shadows of the Tomb Raider, instead.

This move has attracted controversy. Unlike the previous Deus Ex game, Human Revolution, Mankind Divided was supposed to be the opening title in either a two or three-game series that would have completed the story of Adam Jensen and the rise of the world seen in the original Deus Ex games. Although the primary storyline of Mankind Divided is resolved in that game, there some dangling plot threads that were due to be picked up in the next game. Indeed, Eidos Montreal were several months into the development of the next game when Mankind Divided was released, suggesting the millions of dollars of work may have now been abandoned already.

However, Eidos Montreal does have two teams; their second team was working on the Thief reboot whilst the first was working on Mankind Divided. The possibility that one of these teams could continue working on Mankind Divided II has unfortunately been shot down: the second team is now working on a Guardians of the Galaxy game, part of the same Marvel deal.

Given the titanic money involved in the Marvel deal and the disappointing sales of Mankind Divided, it seems unlikely that we are going to see a new Deus Ex game in the near future. This is disappointing, but nothing new to fans of the franchise, which previously had an eight-year hiatus between Invisible War and Human Revolution. The game universe and fiction is compelling enough that, even if Adam Jensen's story is over, we will likely see it return at some distant point in the future.

It's also unclear if Mankind Divided's sales were disappointing, in that Eidos and Square lost money, or didn't meet unrealistic sales expectations. Apparently Square felt that the performance of the 2013 Tomb Raider reboot game was disappointing despite selling over a million copies in its first months on sale, which by any sane metric is actually very impressive. Mankind Divided's sales have been described as a bit less than Human Revolution's in a comparable time period, but harder figures have not been released.

In the meantime, dystopian SF RPG fans are holding out hope for CD Projekt Red's epic Cyberpunk 2077, although that is not expected for a couple more years.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Prague, 2029. Two years have passed since the Aug Incident, when almost every single one of the seventy million cybernetically-enhanced humans on Earth went insane for several minutes, killing millions of people and destroying trillions of dollars of worth of property. Although Adam Jensen and Sarif Industries successfully stopped those responsible for the Incident, the fear, hatred and paranoia of "augs" has increased to disastrous levels. Jensen, now an agent for Interpol working in the Czech Republic, is caught up in a terrorist bombing apparently carried out by an aug terrorist group...but soon discovers a far more complex and devious plan is in motion.

Mankind Divided is the fourth major game in the Deus Ex series and the second in a reboot prequel series which began with 2011's Human Revolution. Human Revolution was an exceptional game, offering a compelling plot and multiple ways of solving every problem thrown at the player. Mankind Divided is very much in the same vein, a cyberpunk roleplaying epic in which you play Adam Jensen and have to guide him to the resolution of a labyrinth conspiracy taking in themes such as discrimination, political corruption and media manipulation.

Mankind Divided is so close to Human Revolution in gameplay that it's a very easy game to recommend if you enjoyed the previous game in the series. It uses the same format, with a city hub area where you can pursue side-missions and the main plot, which occasionally takes you off to dedicated story locations such as an office block in London, a ghetto for cyborgs located outside Prague or a research outpost in the Swiss Alps. It would be wrong to call this a real open-world RPG, like Skyrim or The Witcher 3, but it's also not a strictly linear game either. At any one time you usually have a significant number of side-quests, storylines and optional activities to pursue.

This game improves on the previous one in several key ways. The first is that the reviled boss battles that blighted the previous game (although much improved in the definitive "Director's Cut Edition") are gone. There is a boss battle at the end of the game, but you are presented with a myriad number of options to resolve the encounter without having to resort to direct combat. This will be a relief for players focusing on stealth and hacking builds rather than combat ones. There are also more augments available and cleverer ones, allowing you to hack terminals from a distance, incapacitate several enemies simultaneously or use your wrist-mounted blades as ranged weapons.

I was also extremely impressed that Eidos Montreal reigned in the scope for this sequel. The first game had two hub areas - Detroit and Hengsha - and transformed from a small-scale story about corporate espionage into a massive, world-changing epic about the fate of the human race. Rather than ramping things up even further, Mankind Divided dials things down a notch. There's still big events and Jensen's actions will determine the fate of hundreds (maybe thousands), but he's not directly saving the world this time around. Adopting a smaller scale in a sequel is counter-intuitive, especially in an age which often demands increased and more pointless bluster and explosions in sequels, but it often provides game and film series with their best installments: Mass Effect 2, The Empire Strikes Back and so forth.

Mankind Divided doesn't quite hit those heights, and on reflection it's probably a marginally weaker game than its forebear (although there's not much in it). Human Revolution started with a dramatic showdown and presented the player with some memorable, well-acted characters like Malik, Pritchard and Sarif to deliver its storyline. Mankind Divided doesn't quite do that. It's characters are a bit less vital and interesting, at least to start with, and the reasons why Jensen is part of Interpol and what he has been doing since Human Revolution's ending are not explained at all in the game (this is left, frustratingly, to a tie-in novel). In addition, the game opens with Jensen able to wander at will around Prague. This is cool and I'd notched up five hours of side-missions and exploring before I even ventured into Jensen's headquarters to pick up his first assignment. But it does remove urgency from the narrative and the story is simply a bit less interesting than Human Revolution's, not gaining real urgency until near its conclusion.

But what Mankind Divided does do is paint its world of paranoia and mistrust in stark, convincing detail. It riffs off topical events without lazily exploiting them and examines its core issue from all sides: the prejudice faced by the augmented is terrible, but it is pointed out that they did all completely flip out due to an outside agency and cause untold damage, so some paranoia may be justified. At one point we are told that the number of augs in the world has been reduced from 70 million to under 7 million: 90% of the augmented population has been slaughtered as a result of the Incident, the greatest loss of human life since World War II, which is both a startling moment and also one that dovetails into the original Deus Ex game (in which augmented humans are quite rare, despite being set 25 years after these reboots). But Mankind Divided also doesn't dwell exclusively on the paranoia and fear rampant in the population (giving the game its name). It is also a rather humane game, touching on human relationships that can bridge the cybernetic divide and encouraging players to follow non-lethal routes through the game. Like it's forebears, you can complete the game without killing a single person.

Gameplay is mostly unchanged since Human Revolution, with you often having to infiltrate secure locations and achieve objectives. You can go in all guns blazing, but it's often more fun to knock out enemies and hide the unconscious bodies, or even "ghost" through levels using air vents and hacking computers without anyone being aware that you were ever there. This is just as much fun as it's ever been, and is even better with some improved and more inventive level design than the already-impressive Human Revolution. This results in some dynamic action set-pieces that evolve organically out of you using all the tools at your disposal, getting into a firefight one moment, vanishing into the air vents and sniping guards with tranquiliser guards a moment later, hacking the alarm system to head off reinforcements and then bursting through a wall to knock out a key enemy with a well-aimed punch. It's all fluid, fast and natural, rewarding careful exploration and reconnoitring of objectives and levels.

The negatives of the game are relatively minor. The supporting cast is a bit less well-characterised than in the first game and there isn't a huge amount of backstory for what Jensen has been up to. At roughly 30 hours (for the main quest and all the side-missions) the game is quite large, slightly bigger than its forebear, but it also feels like the introduction to a much bigger story rather than a complete story in itself like its predecessor. Although the main villain is defeated at the end of this game, the shadowing conspiracy that was backing him remains at large and a mid-credits sequence (because even games have to have these now) drops a couple of major plot revelations and sets up the inevitable sequel.

Still, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (****½) is a big, freeform, free-flowing RPG that rewards player intelligence and ingenuity. If it doesn't quite hit the same level of quality as its forebear, that doesn't stop it from being a compelling game. It is available now on PC, X-Box One (UK, USA) and PlayStation 4 (UK,  USA). A sequel has already been in development for over a year, so hopefully we won't have to wait so long for the next game in the series.

Technical Notes: I played this game on my five-year-old quad-core PC, recently upgraded to an nVidia 760 graphics card, so hardly a cutting edge system. I ran everything on High (the third-highest setting) and the game looked great. I did switch off advanced shadows to increase framerate later on. The only technical issue I encountered after that was area transitions, such as using the subway in Prague, seemed to take a slightly too long time to load. Gamers with more memory than 8GB should see that speed up pretty quickly. I also completely ignored the odious microtransactions completely and didn't feel penalised in any way: in fact, the game is a little too generous in the ammo, experience and upgrades it gives you in the main story, to the point where I barely used any of the actual in-game stores, let alone having to use the pointless Square store stuff.

Live-action trailer for DEUS EX: MANKIND DIVIDED

Square Enix have released a well-made, live-action trailer for the forthcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. This is the sequel to the excellent 2011 CRPG Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Mankind Divided is set in 2029 and develops a plot point from the preceding game, where a terrorist organisation triggered a signal which sent every person in the world with upgraded, augmented technology insane for a few minutes. Millions of people were killed as the hacked augments went on the rampage. In the aftermath of the bloodbath, people are understandably weary of augmented individuals. Their civil rights have been revoked and the great "mechanical apartheid" has begun. Augmented civil rights protests have been ruthlessly quashed, and less restrained groups have sprung up, prepared to fight for equality and freedom.

The player controls Adam Jensen, an augmented law-enforcement agent who now works with Interpol to bring down the most dangerous augmented terrorist groups. However, Jensen is also working to expose the shadowy group who deliberately sent the augmented insane with outlawed technology. Jensen hopes that by doing this had begin repairing the trust between augmented and non-augmented humans.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will be released on PC, PS4 and XB1 on 23 August.

DEUS EX: MANKIND DIVIDED officially announced

Eidos and Square have announced the existence of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (formerly rumoured as Deus Ex Universe). This is the official sequel to 2011's superb Deus Ex: Human Revolution. They've put together a pretty snazzy trailer for it:

Mankind Divided takes place in 2029, two years after the events of Human Revolution. That game revolved around the growing schism between augmented humans - cyborgs and people with artificial body parts - and normal humans. The end of Human Revolution, which saw millions of augmented people killed or driven insane, has sparked this schism into open conflict. Security agent Adam Jensen, the augmented human who pretty much saved the human race in the original game, is once again called upon to help resolve the growing crisis.

Like its forebear, the new game is expected to allow you to control and develop Jensen's character as he resolves missions through means stealthy, technical, violent or some combination of the approaches (the trailer suggests homicidal ultraviolence will still be available as an option). Expect more between-mission angst and tactical deployment of built-in mirror shades at moments of maximum dramatic impact.

The spiel:

DEUS EX: MANKIND DIVIDED takes place in 2029, two years after the events of HUMAN REVOLUTION and the infamous ‘Aug Incident’ in Panchaea that resulted in the death of millions at the hands of those who had installed augmentations. This event has created a huge divide between those who have augmentations, and those who do not. Amongst this emotional turmoil are various factions looking to manipulate the public by twisting public opinion of augmentation to further their own agenda and hide the truth of what really happened.

As the social and political chaos reaches boiling point, super-augmented anti-terrorist agent Adam Jensen re-enters the fray. Empowered by brand new augmentations that bolster his formidable, strategic arsenal, Jensen will visit multiple new locations to uncover the truths that are hidden by a cloak of new conspiracies. With more choice at the player’s disposal than ever before, DEUS EX: MANKIND DIVIDED is the ultimate DEUS EX experience.

Adam Jensen may not have asked for this. But Adam Whitehead certainly has. The game is expected in late 2015 (but I wouldn't be surprised to see a slip into 2016).