Deus Ex: MD - Interview @ RPG Site

Alex Donaldson (RPG Site) has interviewed Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Producer Olivier Proulx - some snippets:

RPG Site: Human Revolution sounded like it was quite an iterative process during its development in how you figured out what a modern version of Deus Ex looked and felt like. How soon did you know what direction you wanted to take with the sequel?

Olivier Proulx: Well, the first thing we did was -- we started working on the project after The Missing Link, which was the DLC that we did for Human Revolution. The first thing we really worked on was our engine. That's the Dawn Engine - that's basically our own engine at Eidos Montreal.

We decided to work on the tech first to make sure that we could bring the Deus Ex world to the quality level you've seen today. We wanted to give ourselves the tools to build that world at that quality. So we worked on the tech first, but after that, we started working on the story and figuring out where in the lore and world we'd fit in.

We wanted to come back with Adam Jensen and we started setting up the world - two years after Human Revolution - building on the back of the huge aug incident that happened. That incident really divides the world and becomes a catalyst, with augmented people being segregated and naturals sort of fearing them. For us that was a really interesting premise and we've built upon that over the last few years.

RPG Site: Based on the demo I just saw, gunplay looks to have been a major development focus. Did you get a lot of feedback from Human Revolution that a lot of people played it like a shooter and thus, that had to be a priority for improvement?

Proulx: That wasn't the reason... We really invested in it because we felt that we weren't really happy ourselves with how shooting handled in the last game, or the combat in general.

A Deus Ex game is about playing the way you want. If you want to be a stealth player, great. If you want to be a combat player or a mix of both, we need to support it - it's about player choice. We wanted to bring the combat up to the same level that stealth was.

Now it's a far more viable option. For a player that likes a mix of both - for a stealth predator type - now I can have more fun with the game. The augmentations are much more fluid to use, easier to control, and well-integrated with Jensen.

Gameplay demo: