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‘Deus Ex: Mankind Divided’ Is Best When It’s Not Trying So Hard

Sometimes we just want to see the future because it’s terrifying and amazing, and Mankind Divided does a really amazing job of fulfilling this fantasy.
Image: Square Enix.

There aren't a whole lot of games that are doing what Deus Ex: Mankind Divided doing.

Warren Spector, who created the original Deus Ex in 2000, calls it an "immersive sim," which basically means that I as a player am able to come up with my own solution to a problem and execute on it. Obviously, the limits of the simulation won't allow me to follow through on any crazy plan I come up with, but open-ended level design, enemy AI, and the way I configured my character should allow me to play the game differently from other people.

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It's not unlike the basic quest design of Fallout 4, but whereas Fallout 4 emphasizes the scope of the world and quantity of things the player can do in it, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and other "immersive sims" prefer smaller, more detailed worlds that—in my opinion—make every path to the goal feel more special.

Image: Square Enix.

But besides being one of these immersive sims, Mankind Divided also presents itself as a game that's about something. To dig into some of those issues, I emailed Motherboard contributor Leif Johnson, who's also playing the game prior to release and who's a bigger science-fiction nerd than me. Our email correspondence about Mankind Divided follows below.

12:52 PM 8/20/2016

From: Emanuel Maiberg

To: Leif Johnson

Hey Leif,

The science fiction of Deus Ex: Mankind Divided is very dense and convoluted, so people who didn't play the previous game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, or completely forgot the details (I sure as hell did) can choose to watch a 12-minute video that recaps everything that happened there before they jump in.

It is the goofiest, most over-the-top collage of cyberpunk clichés I've seen in forever, and I really love it. We're talking people plugging their brains into computers and getting hacked, a television news network that's run by an AI that's also its star presenter, a city in China that's build on top of another city—it just goes on and on. I mean, the bad guys in this game are literally the illuminati. The way I pitched Mankind Divided to another Motherboard editor yesterday was: "It's all the best Motherboard headlines for the next 100 years, crammed into one game."

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I was surprised by this when I started the game, and I shouldn't have been because that's what the Deus Ex games have always been like, but the marketing distracted from this. Specifically, as I'm sure you know, I'm referring to the use of the term "Augs Lives Matter."

Image: Square Enix.

Mankind Divided, as its title implies, is story about a society split between augmented humans (who we cover regularly!), and those who fear them. The marketing for this game tried to map that division onto the very real race issues in the United States and the Black Lives Matter movement. The results, as we've pointed out, have been clumsy at best, and potentially offensive. So far I haven't seen as much of that in the game, but when it does come up, it's not great.

I'm wondering if you're also enjoying this particular flavor of cyberpunk, and if you've run into Black Lives Matter references, how they made you feel.

3:07 PM 8/20/2016

From: Leif Johnson

To: Emanuel Maiberg Within the context of the game's lore, the divide and the suspicion makes some sense. Back when we last saw Adam Jensen in 2011, the man who'd invented the very technique allowing for the game's augmentations made everyone who had augs go nuts and kill 50 million people. That's almost the entire population of the West Coast slaughtered by people with augmentations, some of whom just wanted to walk again after an accident rather than being a robo-badass like Jensen Considering some of the crazy shit we see in the headlines today, of course people are going to be suspicious and afraid in the aftermath of something like that. In that respect, there's some truth to the tale Mankind Divided tells.

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Image: Square Enix.

It's a great setup, especially since the question of where the human begins and ends once we start (literally) incorporating machines into our lives has long been a staple of cyberpunk and science fiction in general. No lesser a writer than Arthur C. Clarke said that science fiction speculates about why we may want to make new technologies, "and how their consequences might affect our lives and our planet." And that's what Mankind Divided does. But something about the way it so readily compared it to racism seems oversimplified and darkly laughable.

Rather than imagine any unique ways such a situation could play out in the finest of science fiction traditions, Mankind Divided seems content with leaning on comparisons to racism so heavily-handed that they could amount to mere cases of swapping names and situations. You have, of course, the slurs like "clank" scrawled on the walls. You have the separate lines and rooms for people with augmentations and those without. And so forth. Fortunately, "Augs Lives Matter" is kept to a minimum in the game itself. But its very appearance in a bit of marketing artwork speaks of that simplistic approach. The Black Lives Matter movement likely wasn't even a thing when Deus Ex: Mankind Divided started development, although the artwork almost certainly had to have been made comparatively recently despite the PR team's claims to the contrary. It's important and it has an ever-so-tenuous similarity to their narrative, and they sneak it in. Deus Ex wants to matter. It's about machines, humankind, and the future; it's the Motherboardiest game of all. It wants to remind us that science fiction should amount to more than tugging on nostalgia strings for Star Trek and Star Wars.

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Image: Square Enix.

And yet by leaning on racism so entirely and comically, it robs itself of any long-lasting meaning it could have. It doesn't achieve an identity of its own. It doesn't really make us think, and when it does, it distracts us with questions about how appropriate its comparisons are. I do enjoy the game, but I expected more from it. The details are fantastic—the settings of Dubai and Prague are all great, Jensen's troubles with his own augmentations, the perfect cyberpunk feel—but finish the game and it all kind of ends up feeling like cosplay.

I think if Mankind Divided tackled some of the real issues these days, it'd come off even more silly. Considering recent events both here and abroad, its insistence that the world is run by a group of hyper-intelligent people is almost charming. While Deus Ex does a decent job with the politics of fear, it often can't consider the dogged, stubborn ignorance in the face of facts that characterizes a lot of what we see today. Did you find any elements of modern culture in the game that you wish it had explored more thoroughly?

5:25 PM 8/20/2016

From: Emanuel Maiberg

To: Leif Johnson

I think you hit the nail on the head when you said it's obvious that the "Augs Lives Matter" thing made it into the game late in development. Someone will make the argument that story stuff can often be added far into development, but it doesn't change the fact that it feels like an afterthought, which is really the most offensive thing about it.

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To your question, however, the answer is no, I think the less Mankind Divided tries to engage with "real issues," the better it is. And this is not to say that I don't want games to tackle difficult issues. I'd usually make the opposite argument, but since the team at Eidos Montreal clearly doesn't have the chops for it, it's better not to do it at all than to do it poorly. On top of that, and I feel a little bad saying this, but I kind of like how superficial it can be.

Image: Square Enix.

There's something to be said for a game that's content in exploring the surface of the future rather than how said vision of the future reflects our current anxieties.

I know that this is fundamental to the tradition of science fiction, but maybe it's okay to admit our interest in technology for technology's sake?

I want to know what the next iPhone will look like. I want to know what the PlayStation 9 will look like. I want to know what Tesla Motors, as a company, looks like 50 years from now. I want to know what it means, eventually, yes yes, it's all very important…but mostly I just wish I could see it. Sometimes we want to see the future because it's terrifying and amazing, and I think Mankind Divided does a really amazing job of fulfilling this fantasy.

It's also fun to speculate on the future in simplistic terms: what roles will hackers play in an increasingly connected world? What's going to happen to the Middle East? Will we see the rise of some kind of machine cultist religion? (of course we will!). If you and I got really high and had an idiotic discussion about the future, that's what Mankind Divided feels like at its best, and I like that.

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The trouble, as you say, is when the game applies the same mentality to very real, painful, problems we're dealing with today.

I think we talked this aspect of Deus Ex into the ground, so I'd like to end by getting your thoughts on it as a game. You're a big role-playing game person, is this scratching that itch for you at all? Do you like it as a simulation?

7:10 AM 8/21/2016

From: Leif Johnson

To: Emanuel Maiberg

It usually delivers. In Prague, the city bustles with life (however dejected). Eidos captures the tension well. The earliest moments kick off with a subway station filled with people I might have seen on any of my daily train commutes in Chicago, and armored cops fill the uncomfortable spaces in between them. In Czech, they ask for my papers with that insistency that suggests you're going to get in trouble no matter what you do. You survive the next such encounter, passing through checkpoints split for "augs" and "naturals," and then more cops hit you up for more papers.

Up on the street, the buildings wear the signs of long life and sometimes their interiors manage to surprise with individualized details, too. Sometimes the story shifts the setting to night and the already forbidding streets take on a new menace. Side quests pop up almost organically from passersby. The "clank" graffiti itself might feel hackneyed, but there's little doubt that most of it looks properly placed, as though there's an offensive scrawl somewhere out in the real Prague that this one replaced. And all throughout the police continued to patrol, their lights flashing and their squadmates yelling at someone I'm always a little worried is me.

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Image: Square Enix.

It works so well, in fact, that I was a little scared. Not nightmare scared, but there was such a heavy police influence that I initially found myself focusing on the stealth elements not out of a wish for a challenge, but because I thought the police would pile on me if I tried something a little more aggressive. Again, whatever the deficiencies of the actual story, Eidos Montreal wasted no talent in bringing the vision of the world around it to life.

A little sadly, the illusion gets shattered quickly and it's clear we're playing a Video Game. I'd struggled with figuring out how to get past some thugs to find a man who could fix my augments for several minutes, when finally, in frustration, I decided to knock out the guy guarding the way. His friend noticed, and I killed him. Shot him dead in the alley. Problem solved. And the cops around the corner apparently didn't give a damn that a full-on gun battle in a bookstore took place right after. (They did attack me for other stuff later.)

And from there it gets fun. Mankind Divided introduces a few new augments for Jensen that let him do things like dash forward quickly, slow time (ahem, accelerate his movements), and blast enemies and walls with a pulse weapons that knocks everybody down. Of course there's a catch: Jensen will overheat if he runs this new augments with the old ones, so you have to disable an old one to use a new one. In time, appropriately for the game's title, he's practically a god.

So yeah, I admire it as a roleplaying game, particularly when I'm out there as Jensen, making decisions either as an Interpol operative or an aug out to help other augs. I'm still convinced there's a greater game here with greater things to say if they'd been able to shove the stuff about the Illuminati (which always seems forced) off to the side, but what I've played counts as one of the best roleplaying experiences I've had from a new released in months.

***

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided will release on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC on August 23.

Editor's note: In the interest of full disclosure, Motherboard is currently airing a season of our transhumanism show Humans+ that is sponsored by Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Square Enix was not involved in this story.