A number of videogaming press outlets had the chance to play a couple of missions from the upcoming Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and, as a result, there is a sizable number of previews and even some gameplay footage for those of us who are interested in the game to sample.
There are many ways in. A series of ladders lead to the rooftop (I killed a sniper, took his gun and cleared out the lobby from street-level in one playthrough). There’s a vent up there that drops you deep into the building. You can walk in through the front door if you want to fight. An open window presents a quieter route. I thought it would be remiss of me not to find a way to get in by stacking boxes, so I used a construction platform to carry a huge box onto a ledge, and then put it on top of another huge box to find another way up to the rooftop. Then I reached back and picked up the box, so I could throw it at a guard.
Once inside I had plenty of fun messing up the guards, luring them into the toilets and tranquilising them, creating distractions and cloaking around them. It’s now much easier to change your approach mid-mission. You can modify your guns to add or remove scopes, silencers and laser targeting systems without dipping into a menu screen. You can now hack some devices at range with the right upgrades, which means you can use it in the middle of a firefight. Complete a quick rhythm task and your target, whether a security camera or a guard bot, is temporarily disabled.
An enormous amount of care has gone into making the theatre feel like a natural place, where vents exist as parts of the architecture, with utility and purpose, rather than convenient shortcuts. It’s almost possible to move from the beginning of the level to the end without leaving cover but such a route is reliant on clever use of Jensen’s abilities rather than opportune waist-high walls. Given a few hours to play with, I even managed to gather thirty-six unconscious guards in one room (well, thirty-one unconscious and five dead mistakes were made) having nearly perfected my stealth run.
Gunplay is solid if unspectacular. There’s little in the way of visual feedback to communicate the chaos of an unexpected firefight, either through particle effects or enemy reactions, but the AI is effective, calling for assistance and tracking Jensen’s movement based on his last known position.
GamesRadar has talked with the developers about side-quests:
(Adam Jensen is on a very important mission,) explains executive narrative director, Mary DeMarle, (so anything that’s going to pull him away from that has to have weight. It has to be something so important personally that it’ll pull him aside, or something that will reflect the themes of the game in a different way or maybe shed light on some of the factions in the game that you can’t get from the critical path.)
The idea is that any detour will feel like it could help you understand Jensen, the main story, or the world a little better at the end of it, a recursive design that keeps you looking and moving simultaneously. And even if you do get bored, DeMarle emphasises that the quests can be stopped and left alone – which in itself will impact your story:
(Let’s say a side mission is a hundred page script. When I play it I get ten minutes of it because I decided that’s all I want. You on the other hand are like ‘˜Wait a minute, that’s intriguing, I want to follow up on that’, and you end up meeting new characters and have other things happen as a result.)
Task Force 29 is brought into Dubai to oversee a black-market augmentation deal, and the transaction goes awry when a group of augs uncloak themselves and start shooting. Clad in black with gold masks hiding their faces, these individuals are some of the key antagonists of Mankind Divided, according to Thisdale.
The second clip took us to Prague, where Jensen is hot on the trail of the Dvali organized crime family. Thisdale pointed out that unlike the warm hues of Dubai, the Czech capital is bathed in a cool bluish cast, highlighting the dominance of non-augmented humans. Just like Human Revolution’s Lower Hengsha and Upper Hengsha, the settings for Mankind Divided are designed to help tell the game’s story.
Here, Jensen alternates between stealth and a more guns-blazing approach. He kills some guards at the Dvali Theater with guns and with his Tesla gun arm. While sneaking around, he initiates takedowns directly from cover, a move that will usually hide an enemy’s unconscious body in the process. And he knocks out a group of thugs with a non-lethal version of the Typhoon Explosive System, a special attack seen in Human Revolution.
I opted for a combat playthrough first, assuming it would offer the most straightforward experience. After all, it was totally possible to play Human Revolution as a straight-up first-person shooter, so why not jump in and blow some stuff up? But even Mankind Divided’s baseline shooter gameplay demands strategy. Despite his mostly metal exterior, Jensen’s health depletes rapidly compared to other shooters, while enemies can generally withstand a fair amount of damage. Ammo also proved to be relatively scarce, and although I never ran out, I was forced to loot every enemy I killed in order to continue shooting back.
While this may sound like criticism, such restraints forced me to be creative and think strategically. Cover, for example, proved invaluable. Thankfully, the slightly revamped cover system was robust and intuitive, outside of a few fixable UI quirks. Once you snap to a piece of cover, the camera pulls back into a third-person view, where the game displays a few potential paths for Jensen to travel. You can maneuver a sort of hologram version of Jensen around until you’ve decided where to send him. After that, simply tap a button and Jensen nimbly maneuvers to this new position, making cover more about finding and levering a tactical advantage than fumbling with the controls.
The other way to stay alive in a firefight is to employ Jensen’s combat augments. In my case, these included the crowd-controlling Typhoon mini-grenades, the wall-hacking Smart Vision, and a new augment called the Titan Shield, which negates all damage for a brief period of time (and also materializes with a particularly slick animation). When I finally gave Jensen’s augments a shot, I noticed a crucial update that will undoubtedly impact your Deus Ex experience regardless of which playstyle you prefer.
My first impression is one of surprise, as so much about Mankind Divided feels very, very similar to Human Revolution, so much so that I wonder if Eidos have been timid about tinkering with something that has been such a big success. Creeping, hacking and blasting my way through two demonstration levels, I know exactly what’s expected of me. The patient, non-lethal approach works for a certain kind of play. A crafty, gadget-wielding philosophy cuts all sorts of corners and gunplay, of course, brings all the boys to the yard, but it also kills them in the yard. And then lets you drag all their bodies into one a big pile in the yard, since subtlety clearly isn’t your bag.
“You have to keep the DNA of a Deus Ex game,” Proulx tells me, describing Mankind Divided as a well-considered evolution which doesn’t intend to introduce a raft of new concepts or mechanics, instead presenting players with a deeper, more complex plot. There are many subtle advancements to be found, but what Eidos seems most invested in is telling a grander, grittier story with greater player choice. And telling it as well as they can.
“Early on we decided that we were going to be back with Adam Jensen,” Proulx continues. “He’s interesting to us because he’s an outcast to everyone, both to ‘naturals,’ because he’s augmented, but also to the augmented population, since Adam is the next level. He doesn’t need Neuropozyne [the drug that prevents the body from rejecting augmentations] to sustain himself.” Jensen is the perfect blank slate for players to project themselves onto, as he starts with few firm loyalties or affiliations and also experiences so many of the imperfections and alienations of his world.
Outside Xbox has a video preview:
While GameSpot published the gameplay footage they were provided without commentary (but with an additional music track mixed in):
