Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Interview

The folks over at RPG Site managed to corner Deus Ex: Mankind Divided producer Olivier Proulx during last month's E3 for a lengthy Q&A about the game, including such topics as the sequel's combat improvements, the enhancements being made to the stealth component, whether they'll be expanding the RPG mechanics, and more. A couple of questions and their answers:

RPG Site: How are you going to handle how Human Revolution could end? There's the big things, like the three major endings to the game - but there's also stuff like several key players in that game such as Malik who have a number of different fates...

Proulx: For specific characters, we're not going to comment right now - we're going to keep some surprises for later. As for the actual endings of Human Revolution... they're all canon, basically.

What happens is... whatever ending you pick ends up being such a huge incident for humanity that there's a lot of misinformation and people don't really know what actually happened.

Because of that, we kind of set up the world on that premise - we start with Adam Jensen, the way he plays at first could be supporting any of the different endings from Human Revolution.

That's part of the Deus Ex universe - there's all these conspiracies within politics - so it slots right in.

...

RPG Site: I'd feel a bit of a fraud if I didn't ask you about RPG mechanics, so what are you doing differently this time around and what can RPG players expect?

Proulx: Praxis points will be back obviously; it's a really tight balancing act to make sure that we give the right amount of Praxis points and experience points so that the player can use them to unlock different types of abilities without overpowering themselves.

We have a wide range abilities, and they're always all available to the player, so it's always down to player choice of what they want to spend their points on rather than us gating things behind one thing or another.

For us, it's really about balancing the game so that players can go deep enough into whatever particular play-style they want, but ensuring that by doing so they aren't locking themselves into that one play-style - we want to ensure throughout that the player has access to everything.