Deus Ex: MD - About Jensen 2.0 @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Philippa Warr (Rock, Paper, Shotgun) has interviewed Jean-François Dugas, Patrick Fortier at the E3:

“Deus Ex meets District 9″ is how the company described Deus Ex: Mankind Divided during a demo I attended at E3. Set two years after Human Revolution, Mankind Divided showcases a society still deeply fearful after the Aug Incident where mechanically augmented people turned violent, stripped of self-control after a signal deliberately interfered with their in-built bio-chips. The scale of the incident means augmentations are now viewed with suspicion and augmented people treated as outcasts. Adam Jensen himself is working as a counter-terrorist agent fighting some of the resultant crime. Well. That’s his day job. He secretly believes the task force was set up by the Illuminti for a different purpose and is working to take them down.

“He’s a tool and a weapon,” is executive game director Jean-François Dugas’ analysis of this Adam Jensen.

“In the first game he was more a blue collar kind of guy who got caught in something way bigger than him. Like the famous meme ‘I never asked for this’. But it’s true. The guy was not necessarily going to get augmented, to jump on the band wagon, even though his former employer David Sarif wanted him to do so.

“A big important choice was removed from him. It’s not that he hates [being augmented] but he didn’t choose it. He had to go through a journey to take back what he lost and take responsibility and do something about it. This time around we go for an Adam Jensen that’s fully embracing what he is today. He has a lot of possibilities. He’s a tool and a weapon so what does he choose to do? You know you are a weapon so how are you going to use that.”

According to Dugas the shift towards ownership of his augmentations should be reflected in increased fluidity of gameplay using Jensen’s new abilities. None of what I saw during my trip was hands-on so I couldn’t get a sense of that but it’s an interesting idea and one which was picked up by gameplay director Patrick Fortier.

“He’s the Jensen 2.0 and we have all these cool augmentations,” says Fortier. “How do we make that a little more visceral? A little bit more reactive so you can use a lot of these things really fluidly into combat? There’s a lot of work put into that. Even the low-level stuff like how we frame the weapon and what’s the recoil and the muzzle flash and all those little things that make it feel right. But also moving through the environment, cover to cover, or doing takedowns from cover – all these things so you never have to start fighting with the controller to do what you want to do and to push a little further from Human Revolution.” [...]