Square Enix is busy torturing a guy in a room somewhere to get fans frothing over its next game reveal, but someone has decided to spoil Square’s fun and leaked screenshots that almost certainly confirm that it is Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the hotly-anticipated sequel to 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Therein lies the danger of taunting your fans like this, especially about a game that involves so much hacking.
Updated on 4-8-2015 by Will Fulton: As expected, Square Enix has officially announced the game at the climax of the Can’t Kill Progress Twitch stream. There is still no release window, but the description of the announcement trailer below promises that it is “coming soon.”
The images were leaked on a Russian website and then posted to NeoGAF. According to the accompanying text, Mankind Divided will come out for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4. Human Revolution developer Eidos Montreal returns for the sequel. Game Informer will share more particulars in its May cover story. There is no release date yet.
On Monday, Square Enix began a three-day, interactive Twitch reveal for something called “Can’t Kill Progress,” in which a young man is being held and interrogated by men with Russian accents, at least one of whom has a robotic arm. The dehumanizing dangers of scientific progress is a major theme in the series, which led fans to speculate that Project CKP is in fact the new Deus Ex game, which had previously been announced as in the works.
Picking up where the last game left off, Mankind Divided will again follow angsty, white dude-borg Adam Jensen as he negotiates a future in which mankind is increasingly divided into castes of augmented and ordinary people. Tensions run high as augmented terrorists abuse their abilities for personal gain, stirring up increasing mistrust of all cyborgs among the normal population. Jensen will team up with an Interpol-backed task force to bring these terrorists down.
There will be new abilities like a blinding smokescreen or a short-term, bullet-deflecting nano-shield.
Like the previous game, Jensen will be able to acquire a wide variety of cybernetic enhancements and upgrades over the course of the game, catering to different tactical approaches to any given situation. In addition to familiar augments like increased jumping power and the ability to punch through walls, there will be new abilities like a blinding smokescreen or a short-term, bullet-deflecting nano-shield.
The developer is not planning to migrate save files from the previous game, and so the new story will be entirely agnostic to the possible choices and endings in Human Revolution. For instance, since it was possible that your pilot Malik died during a late game mission, you will necessarily have a new pilot, Elias, regardless of whether that happened in your particular game.
Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a fantastic return to one of the most sophisticated roleplaying games of all time, both thematically and gameplay-wise. While it is disappointing to see the return of boring, gravelly-voiced protagonist Adam Jensen instead of a woman and/or person of color, we are nonetheless very excited for a return to this particular gritty, cyberpunk future.
