Games

I'd almost prefer a reboot. Not to replace the originals - but to acknowledge, sequels to Deus Ex titles are really fucking hard. The whole idea is an inflection point where limitless potential hinges on one dude making a decision for the entire world. Invisible War tried to pretend all paths happened simultaneously, which is honestly the exact opposite of what the original game's ending was about.

Starting from a fixed point tells the player, your choices didn't matter.

Human Revolution got around this by being a prequel, but had the Phantom Menace problem, where the past feels more futuristic. Deus Ex's 2050s, seen from 2000, felt plausible. Only a few people have nearly-magical nanotech. You see your boss's boss getting an IT checkup for the batteries in his skull. Your coworkers include two mildly Frankensteined cyborgs with last-gen tech and dodgy accents. Outside of secret underground laboratories, the biggest change to the wider world is that New York City turned into 1990s Detroit. The grand symbolic loss was that some dickheads blew up a statue. Real life, real soon, was much worse than that detail.

But when you see Human Revolution's 2020s Detroit, in the 2010s, you know damn well it's not gonna look like that. (If only because the plague of blue LEDs was not about to switch over to sodium-vapor yellow.) You almost require the same retrofuturism of setting a new post-apocalyptic story in the 20th century, or of making a very direct sequel to something from umpteen years ago. Half-Life is a contemporary what-if. Half-Life 2 is an alternate reality.

And once again, Mankind Divided has to begin by ignoring the big crazy ending choices from the previous game. The central thrust of the game is ignored, every time there is a direct sequel. It's right there in the damn title: this character becomes like unto a god. Through circumstance and guile, you are granted immense power, for at least one shining moment. That's a fantastic way to end a story. But it's antithetical to sequel-bait.

So - make Deus Ex an anthology series. Not the continuing adventures of JC Denton, or Adam Jenson, or at this rate Solomon King and John Ecclesiastes. Just the immersive-sim formula, set in the near future, buoyed by an even mixture of wacky bullshit people take seriously and real events you can scarcely believe. Like if the shadowy fire-starting puppeteers from Batman Begins were responsible for the Tulsa race massacre and the great fire of Chicago. I would not go so far as to suggest you play a fireman being inculcated to their Mason-esque order... but that is the sort of divergence you'd do, for a Deus Ex (franchise) game that's not connected to the plot of Deus Ex (2000, PC).

We don't specifically need another story where your guy has an 'are we the baddies?' moment. The key is that a bunch of people with immense power and conflicting goals want to use someone like your guy to get what they want, and they're all dickish enough that you the player are inclined to blow it all up in their faces. Like Varys's riddle: a king, a priest, and a rich man each tell a sellsword to kill the other two. You're the guy with the sword. Each of these people has put you through hell. You get to decide who walks out of that room, yourself included, and you know what happens for any given choice. If a game can get there after a long linear campaign with a zillion branching paths, slap a subtitle on it and call it Deus Ex.