Interview: How Mankind Divided plays with the Deus Ex formula

At this year's New York Comic Con, I was fortunate enough to sit down with Fleur Marty, a producer for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided at Eidos Montreal. We talked about the history of the franchise, what makes a great Deus Ex game, and how the team handled the delay from February to August of 2016. Watch it in the video above, or read it in the transcription below!

Tom Caswell: How long have you been attached to the Deus Ex franchise?

Fleur Marty: I joined the team for Mankind Divided, specifically the live team for Deus Ex. We’re working on all the additional content for the game.

How concerned were you with reintroducing Adam Jensen and Deus Ex? Did you feel like it was necessary even though we had Human Revolution launch a few years ago?

It was not a major concern. We had a lot of success with Human Revolution. When the team embarked on that journey, everybody was saying “You’re crazy guys! That’s such a cult franchise. You’re never going to make it.” And then they proved they knew how to make a Deus Ex game. So when they started working on Mankind Divided, it was building on top of that success with Human Revolution, adding even more people to the franchise. Deus Ex is a cult franchise, and not many people have played those first games. Human Revolution helped to get the game more known with a casual playerbase.

Mankind Divided is set in Prague, not your typical location for a video game! What made you guys decide that would be the perfect setting for your game?

Human Revolution was a lot about North America, so the team wanted to go to Europe. There are several things that make Prague right for the setting. Building cities in Deus Ex, we’re always trying to mix the old and the new. It’s a sci-fi franchise, but it’s near future, so when artists are building the cities they’re trying to bring only a little bit of that sci-fi feel to [what already exists]. Prague is already a lot like that right now. It’s an old city but with new parts built on top of it. The mix was already there. It wasn’t that difficult to just [imagine it already] and push the envelope a little bit further. And also, there’s the myth of the golem. The golem is the ghetto where the augmented people are sent, but that myth came from the Czech Republic, so it also made sense on a symbolic level [to set the game in Prague].

What makes a Deus Ex game? What has to be at the core, and what can be manipulated and changed?

When we looked at what went well, and what maybe went not so well in Human Revolution, we already knew what feedback we’d received. When you develop a game, you already know. You put it out and you wish you’d had more time. We worked really hard on getting the action aspect of the game up to the par with stealth. We really had the feeling that in Human Revolution, the stealth was really satisfying and rewarding and maybe the action was too punishing. We worked on that. That comes through with how you control Adam. We have a new control scheme, and a lot of work went into that. Our game director spent days with the controller in his hand. At some point during production, he would come to the meeting with the controller in his hand. You could tell he wasn’t listening to a word you were saying; he was obsessed with figuring out the best control scheme. That’s important, because we added a lot of weapons inside Adam, like the gun arm. We wanted it to be super fluid switching between your weapons, augmentations, cover. It had to feel organic, and the control system is the base of that. So that was the big thing we worked on.

The second thing we wanted to do was push on the choice and consequences, which is at the core of Deus Ex. I think you can feel it, especially a lot on the side quests. You will have those beats in the story where you know you’re making a choice; it’s in your face. There are a lot of times though during the game where you’re going to say or do something and you won’t realize it, but it actually has a lot of impact on how things unfold. You’re going to meet characters or not meet them based on the way you play and the things you choose to do and say. It was really important for us to push that more.

Mankind Divided was originally meant to release in February. In fact, you guys had a preorder promotion which allowed players to play it four days earlier. And then it got pushed. What goes into the decision of having to delay a game? How long are you guys thinking about that?

When you’re working on a Deus Ex game, what you have to understand is you spend years developing systems and you can only play it when everything is done. Some other games, you can build mission A, polish it, then do mission B, polish it. But since Deus Ex is so systemic and there are so many branching [paths], everything has to be done. Then you sit down, and play the game. Then you’re able to figure out the amount of time to polish it. Basically that’s what Square Enix allowed us to do was have that time. We could have released in February, but we would not have been satisfied. We’re really happy we had that opportunity to just play the game, play the game, play the game. We put the game director and narrative director in a room, they’d play it, and give notes to the team. There was no major change, but all these little tweaks that make the magic happen. For instance, in the very begging of the game there’s a scene in Jensen’s safe house. You spend time with him. You can roam around the space. This scene was far later in the game originally, but we felt it needed to be earlier in the game to get used to Adam’s skin before you went on your adventures. Again, nothing major, but I think it made the difference between a so-so game and a great game. As far as timeline, I can’t remember when we asked for that push, but it was after everything was done.

Can you talk as much as you can to the future of the franchise?

We have a lot of additional content planned. We just put out our first narrative DLC, System Rift, which brings back Frank Pritchard from Human Revolution. He sends Jensen on a bank heist, and we also give players the opportunity to meet Shadow Child which is a character we introduced in Breach mode. So we’re tying the universe together. I think players will enjoy it; it’s a cool story. We’re going to release a lot of new content for Breach. We released an update on Monday with a whole new corporation to play. All that content is free for all players. Through the end of the year we have two major updates planned for Breach. The next narrative DLC will come early 2017, but no firm date on that yet. As for a future release, I cannot speak to that yet, but there’s still a lot left on the timeline before the start of the original game, so we’ll see.