Deus Ex: Mankind Divided "Adam Jensen 2.0" Interview
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Rock, Paper, Shotgun recently quizzed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided game director Jean-François Dugas and gameplay director Patrick Fortier at length about the development efforts they've put into Adam Jensen, specifically, in the forthcoming sci-fi RPG sequel, as well as how the world we'll be playing in perceives his augmentations and transhumanism as a whole. Bring on "Jensen 2.0":
The demo showed off a Tesla gun arm, a dash ability, a nano blade (which is essentially a sword thing which fires from your wrist like you're a stabby Spider-man) a Titan Shield which lets Jensen withstand heavy fire for brief periods of time by way of a cool polygon effect. I ask which augments Dugas and Fortier were most pleased with and why.
(I like the gun arms a lot but I have to be consistent so I'm going to talk about the Icarus Dash,) says Fortier. (It's a really interesting one because it's very versatile. Augmentations for me are basically tools of expression for players. That's how we think about them. How can you use them in creative ways and combine them in different settings and for stealth or combat? The Icarus Dash is a good example of that because you can use it to smash people and clear the way but you can dash straight into cover as well and combine it with the cloaking system and suddenly you have a really powerful tool to go across the environment stealthily or you can use it for exploration and reach hard-to-reach places and be really thorough.)
Dugas, however, is all about those gun arms. (Whether you're stealthy or combat-oriented you can easily use them on the fly. Those gun arms are not just lethal, they're also non-lethal so we're bringing more flexibility into the overall experience. You might want to play combat but it doesn't mean you want to kill. In the last game you were kind of forced if you were stealthy you have options to go non-lethally but if you were the combat kind of guy you couldn't do that so it has more flexibility with that. You can go full combat and still save human lives or you can decide to kill as well or use them in sleath fashion.)
He adds that (the fact that they're just like a one-two punch kind of thing is really really cool.)
I remember Graham sharing links to just a small fraction of the material the Deus Ex team had been inspired by as they created their game world so I asked about the tech research for Mankind Divided.
(A lot of what you're talking about that research was done on Human Revolution because we looked at a lot of material all over the place and a lot we didn't use in Human Revolution. The world of Mankind Divided is only 2 years after Human Revolution and in that sense we wanted to keep a continuity so there wouldn't be a huge gap in terms of what's new and totally crazy that wasn't there two years before. It's continuity and evolution of the things that were existing in Human Revolution. If eventually we do have another game in the series about 6 or 10 years in the future we would try to make that gap bigger to show that time has passed.)
