Why Are People Getting Augmented in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided?

As part of its coverage of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, Game Informer published an article on augmentation in the Deus Ex universe that focuses on the human angle, and specifically the reasons that push people to install augmentations on themselves and how they are perceived by society after the operation. The article includes some direct quotes from narrative director Mary DeMarle, who gives a brief rundown of the situation in the setting before and after the events of Deus Ex: Human Revolution:

(Sariff Industries had a plan that you could get augmented, but it’s almost like indentured servitude at that point,) says Mary DeMarle, Deus Ex’s narrative director. Afterward, some recipients realized that these implants gave them an advantage over their biologically pure counterparts. (We were having this new class emerge and they were getting more wealthy because they could do the jobs.)

Apparently, the incident at the end of Human Revolution triggered a fairly drastic change in how augmented people were treated, with governments going as far as to create prison camps for them:

(A lot of people in there were people who had no choice or they were correcting a defect,) DeMarle says. (They weren’t trying to become superhuman, they were just trying to live their lives. Those are some of the worst tragedies in this kind of a universe. Here are people who had to have a heart replacement, and suddenly the aug incident happens. Maybe they actually went crazy and did stuff that they can’t necessarily live with themselves today. Maybe they were lucky and that didn’t happen, but because they had this life-saving surgery, they’re being forced to be outcasts and shunned.

(Some of the people in there, too, are not augmented. Okay, say I was married [to an augmented person], and he’s being sent there. I’m going to go with him. It isn’t just the augmented, but even with that it adds an interesting layer. The augmented who are there may also look upon their spouses as, ‘˜You don’t understand this.’)

The decision to make augmented people the subject of discrimination rather than the discriminator is certainly not the obvious one, and I’m definitely interested to see how and how far Eidos Montreal will push this angle.