Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Will Have Multiple Endings, Can’t Change Ending By Reloading

During Comic Con, Attendees who made their way to the Microsoft Lounge had a chance to see the trailer and several minutes of gameplay from Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. The game wasn't playable, but I had a chance to interview the executive art director, Jonathan Jaques-Belletete, to find out more information about this much-anticipated sequel. You can also read our preview for the game from E3.

 

GameRevolution: Would you describe the method of obtaining skills in the game?

Jonathan Jaques-Belletete: Sure, the way it works is you have experience points from achieving objectives, finding secret locations, killing people, not killing people, but it's done evenly because we don't want to penalize anyone for their play style. With these experience points, you have Praxis kits that allow you to augment yourself. And there's a tech tree with cranium, arms, legs, and other parts, and each section has sub-sections… and each sub-section can be leveled up to give further customization.

GR: Most modern games allow players to buy every skill available, is it the same in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided?

Jonathan: Nope. It's pretty much impossible to do a full play through and finish it with all the augmentations. I think it takes a bit of the “gaminess” out of the system… You can specialize or be a jack-of-all-trades, but you can't get all the augmentations.

GR: I appreciate that because it seems like there's no sacrifice in a lot of games nowadays, plus it gives incentive to play through a game again.

Jonathan: It's cool you said “sacrifice,” because there's a lot of sacrifices in this game. It's a heavy word, but this game is all about choices and the consequences of choices, like the original Deus Ex. If your choice is “Do I turn right and open a door or turn left and get a bazooka?", everyone will make the same choice—that's not a real consequence and that's what we don't want to do. We try to make the choices very gray, so sometimes you're not even sure what the outcome is going to be. We try to make them lifelike choices.

GR: Can different social interactions change the outcome of the game?

Jonathan: Yes. All the four pillars—combat, hacking, stealth, and social—interact with each other. They altogether choose what you're going to see and not going to see in the game [and] how the game is going to end. Social is a big part of the game, so who you interact with, who you don't interact with, how you interact with them, how you behave, how they behave towards you, greatly affects you in the game. Even though there's a main narrative path, there's multiple endings, and they're not artificial multiple endings. If you reload the game before the end, you're still going to get the same end.

GR: What are some of the challenges in designing an A.I. that deals with both stealth and action?

Jonathan: The hardest thing is managing what we call “chaos.” You can kill whomever you want, even the main characters. Because you can start shooting at almost any time, we have A.I. that reacts accordingly, and that creates a whole lot of problems we had to deal with. Other things, like being able to carry the bodies wherever you want and even pile them up, all this creates memory issues, boundary issues. What happens if you go into the police station and start killing everybody? How does everyone react? Are the newspapers going to be talking about that in the game?

GR: Do you have any fan service in the game like Easter eggs, hidden items, inside jokes?

Jonathan: Yes. We work really hard on these things because the fans are always looking for them. I'll let you discover them. There are Easter eggs, fun stuff like that, and the lore of the franchise is so big. There's no way you can play Mankind Divided without hearing about Human Revolution. There are also post-it notes and troll faces.

GR: Some of the augmentations look realistic while others are obviously robotic. How do people in the game react to that?

Jonathan: It depends on where you are in the game. If you're in Golem City, they don't react as negatively as they do in Prague. If you're in Prague and you're augmented, you need papers, the cops are watching you—citizens don't like augmented people. Even Adam, the main character, is interesting because he has very high-tech augmentations, so when he's in the non-augmented part of the world, he's a victim of segregation…and when he's with the augs, he's seen as an outsider because he has super-nice augmentations and looks like he has the money to afford them.