Deus Ex: MD - Interview with Mary DeMarle

At Red Bull they interview Mary DeMarle, lead writer for Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. They discuss the controversy present in the game and why shooting is necessarily a feature.

Even in its promotional materials, Mankind Divided is setting up exploration of some thorny issues. Besides the mechanical apartheid quote, its trailers focus on the radicals at the poles of its central conflict.

On the one hand, we have the police crackdowns - the shots of heavily armoured police beating down augmented civilians and dragging them off; the omnipresent AI newsreader, Eliza Cassan, warning of the dangers of enhanced citizens; the anti-Aug propaganda posters. But on the other, we have the terrorists delivering eloquent speeches defending violent uprising. "We will not sit idly by and allow our rights to be eroded... We will not be herded into ghettos."

In an echo of the original Deus Ex's twist, we're being shown terrorists and murderers not as interchangeable targets of Jensen's guns and nano-blades, but as freedom fighters, as three-dimensional. It's a bold, even provocative message in a time of real-world terror attacks.

"One thing we've always felt is that Deus Ex is supposed to be throwing up a mirror to today," says DeMarle. "We talk about the license being the near future, so we always want to look at themes that are relevant and that people are experiencing today. We want to show them to you from all different sides, and give you the opportunity to decide how you feel about it. So, as a writer, the one thing that you're very aware of is that you're dealing with a difficult subject and you're trying to show all sides of that issue, and allow the player to make up their own mind.

[...]

"The Aug Incident happened worldwide," she explains. "It was a tragedy for the whole world. But different areas of the world are dealing with it differently... We've focused our story on areas of the world that are having a very negative reaction, that were potentially more [badly] hit by the augmented catastrophe, and saw a lot of violence and death on that day."

It's a depressing picture of Humanity 2.0. The gameplay demo that was shown at last year's E3 ‒ in which Jensen arrives in Prague just in time to watch pro-enhancement terrorists blow up a train station ‒ is filled with tiny glints of environmental story reflecting public fear and irrationality. In the walk from the train to the station ticket hall, Jensen and another augmented agent are stopped not once, but twice, by police. As they walk, they pass rolling news screens running stories on the A.R.C. (the Augmented Rights Coalition) and augmented passengers being bag-searched on the platform.

The irony? The police conducting the checks are futuristic super soldiers. Some appear in bulky, heavily armed exosuits. In a sane, rational world, it would be the police enforcers, not a twenty-something traveller with a bionic leg, that would have people in uproar. But Mankind Divided's Prague is not a sane, rational place.

"One of the themes in the game is reason vs. emotion," says DeMarle. "When you look at it, one of the things that drives a lot of people is fear. And security is a very important issue for people, and having had this massive, unexplainable attack by people who were half-human or had had parts of their bodies changed, people see that as, 'We need security! How can we be safe? We don't want to enable humans to use the technology within their bodies, but we still have to be able to stop the awful power of someone who has that technology, so let's develop an alternative form of security, like technologically advanced combat suits'.