Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Interview

The folks at Rocket Chainsaw had the chance to chat with Deus Ex: Mankind Divided executive narrative director Mary DeMarle about the themes and challenges of the franchise’s writing and the goals of the devs at Eidos Montreal with Mankind Divided. Here’s a short excerpt:

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.