Welcome back to Franchise Festival, where we explore and discuss noteworthy video game series from the last four decades. Older entries can be found here.

This week we’ll be discussing the shadowy conspiracies of Deus Ex. Cover art, unless otherwise noted, is from MobyGames. Please consider supporting that website, as its volunteers tirelessly catalog key information and art assets for an often ephemeral medium. The header image is sourced from a great Kotaku article by Luke Plunkett featuring concept art from Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Background

Ion Storm was founded in 1996 by former id Software developers John Romero and Tom Hall along with Todd Porter and Jerry O’Flaherty. The Dallas-based studio quickly began work on Dominion: Storm Over Gift 3 (1998), a questionably-named real-time strategy game which had already been partially completed by Hall, but work dragged on and cost much more than anticipated. Romero’s Daikatana (2000) – a first-person shooter aggressively marketed with the notoriously claim that “John Romero’s about to make you his bitch” – also ran behind schedule and would not be released until three years after its original Christmas 1997 deadline. When combined with Ion Storm’s ludicrously extravagant office decor at its Chase Tower penthouse, these production hurdles ensured that the studio’s secondary Austin-based branch would feature a very different corporate culture following its 1997 founding under the direction of Warren Spector. 

Spector had begun his career with a brief stint as an archivist at the Harry Ransom Center in the early 1980s. He became an editor at Space Gamer magazine in late 1983 and used this experience to get a foothold in the growing tabletop role-playing game (RPG) industry by co-designing products for Steve Jackson Games, the company which owned Space Gamer. While at Steve Jackson Games, Spector would produce the highly influential GURPS (1986) role-playing system. Spector then briefly worked at TSR, the company which owned Dungeons and Dragons, before being hired by video game developer Origin in 1989.

Origin, famous primarily for its Ultima franchise, was a near-perfect fit for Spector’s systems-oriented approach to game design. While other developers were increasingly approaching design with a linear, cinematic approach to storytelling, Spector moved in the opposite direction. He led a team at Massachusetts-based Origin partner Blue Sky (rebranded in 1992 as Looking Glass Technologies) to produce the hugely influential immersive simulations Ultima Underworld (1992) and System Shock (1994) before becoming general manager of Looking Glass’ Austin branch. Spector then dissolved Looking Glass Austin in 1996 under a cloud of financial turmoil. Shortly before he would have signed a contract with Electronic Arts (EA), Spector was approached by Romero with an offer he couldn’t refuse: lead Ion Storm’s new Austin office with full creative control to produce whatever game he desired. The result was one of the first masterpieces of the medium’s second century.

Deus Ex (2000)

Deus Ex‘s origins lie in a proposal written by Warren Spector in 1994 for Origin. Troubleshooter was to be a first-person immersive sim along the lines of Ultima Underworld, though it would have featured a modern aesthetic rather than one rooted in high fantasy. In contrast to the final product, this early version was planned to heavily emphasize gunplay and even include a multiplayer mode using the IBM PC’s modem capabilities. Troubleshooter‘s rough sketch would inform The Rules of Role-playing, a manifesto written by Spector in the time between the dissolution of Looking Glass Austin and his arrival at Ion Storm. In early 1998, lead Deus Ex designer Harvey Smith produced the following Deus Ex Rules Amendments and Addenda based on Spector’s original document:

1. Problems will have multiple solutions. Locations will be reachable in several ways. All missions, locations, and problems will be specifically keyed to:
   • Skills (and skill levels)
   • Augmentations (and augmentation levels)
   • Objects
   • Weapons
2. Gameplay will rely on a variety of “tools,” rather than just one:
   • Character capabilities (skills/augmentations)
   • Resource management
   • Combat
   • Character interaction
3. Combat will require more thought than “What’s the biggest gun in my inventory?”:
   • A more relevant question might be, “How do I deal with this situation involving a few intelligent, dangerous enemies?”
4. Geometry should contribute to gameplay — Whenever possible, show players a goal or destination before they can get there. This encourages players to find the route:
   • The route should include cool stuff players want or should force players through an area they wants to avoid. (The latter is something we don’t want to do too often.)
   • Make sure there’s more than one way to get to all destinations.
   • Dead ends should be avoided unless tactically significant.
5. The overall mood and tone will be clear and consistent:
   • Fear
   • Paranoia
   • Tension
   • Release (through combat and/or reaching a predetermined goal or NPC conversation)

The earliest version of Deus Ex at Ion Storm went under the name Shooter and, like Troubleshooter before it, foregrounded firearm combat. The first six months of development involved six employees strictly working on planning. The team more or less ignored their initial goal of shipping it to stores by December 1998, and instead spent over a year carefully iterating on their early designs. The script for the renamed game ballooned to a full 500 pages and the staff nearly tripled by April 1999 as the cyberpunk adventure grew to include 25 missions in locations as diverse as San Antonio, New York, Washington DC, London, Paris, Siberia, the US NORAD Facility, a sunken version of Los Angeles, and the Moon. 

Tests of the Unreal Engine-based prototype were carried out by friends of the team, including Looking Glass Studios and Irrational Games staff along with Valve’s Gabe Newell, and the game’s dense systems were refined as problems were identified. Allowing the production as much time as it needed gave Spector and his staff the opportunity to create a mind-bogglingly complex set of interconnecting mechanics which fulfilled the initial goals without falling victim to an overly ambitious scope. By May 1999, the 500-page design document was scaled back down to 270 and numerous planned missions were cut in favor of focusing on what worked. The unchanging core of the project’s identity, from beginning to end of the development process, was player choice. Deus Ex finally made its Windows PC debut to widespread critical acclaim in June 2000.

Players take on the role of JC Denton, a man augmented with nanotechnology that confers superhuman abilities. JC and his brother Paul work for the United Nations Anti-Terrorist Coalition (UNATCO) at the clandestine organization’s New York headquarters. The plot opens in 2052, in a world beset by numerous conspiracies and a lethal pandemic called Gray Death. Rampant economic inequality has made survival, via a Gray Death vaccine called Ambrosia, only accessible to the wealthy. Vigilante collectives, like the National Secessionist Forces (NSF), have organized to fight back against this injustice but are perceived as dangerous terrorists by UNATCO. JC is initially tasked with tracking down and securing shipments of Ambrosia that have been stolen by the NSF. Like the cyperpunk literary works which inspired it, Deus Ex‘s plot grows byzantine as JC works towards his goal and real-world conspiracy theories (including the Illuminati and Area 51 experimentation) are confirmed to be true in the game’s fiction.

Players experience Deux Ex from a first-person perspective as they engage with devious puzzles, environmental obstacles, and enemies. Areas and characters are comprised of textured polygons. While some narrative sequences play out in more or less real time, as the player chooses dialogue responses to non-player characters (NPCs), other portions of the plot are experienced as scripted cutscenes viewed from a third-person perspective. The world is divided into linear stages, though progression through each individual stage is non-linear. 

Gameplay is designed to offer a wide range of approaches to solving problems. JC can sneak past guards, gun them down, or incapacitate them non-lethally. Computers can be hacked and locks can be picked. All methods of traversal and confrontation are based on an RPG-like stat system in which the player can assign points to specific abilities (like demolition, electronics, swimming, and so on). JC accumulates these points as he levels up by completing tasks rather than, as in most contemporary RPGs, strictly by defeating enemies. The combination of open stage design and player choice in character development means that no two runs of the game are likely to be similar. 

Deus Ex was a watershed title when it was released on PC in 2000. Though its development had been influenced by games as diverse as Suikoden (1996) and Half-Life (1998), Deus Ex was an entirely singular vision. Ultima Underworld (1992) and System Shock (1994) had pointed towards a heavily systems-based experience which allowed players to overcome obstacles in a manner of their choosing, but Deus Ex truly delivered on that potential. Of course, it received a fair share of self-reflective criticism from its own creator for failing to deliver on what he intended; Spector noted in a later GameSpy interview that the game still included a handful of plot-based fail states and that obstacles could typically be reduced to either stealth, role-playing, or conversation elements rather than true systemic simulation. These concerns did not negatively impact fan perception of the game, though, and its ongoing popularity has been secured through an active modder community and a version available on CDProjektRed’s Good Old Games (GOG) digital distribution platform. 

Interestingly, an unassuming port signaled the direction forward for the franchise. Deus Ex was adapted to the PlayStation 2 by Ion Storm in 2002 through significant updates to the original’s keyboard-based user interface (UI) and level design. In particular, memory limitation on Sony’s hardware meant that loading zones had to be more frequent. The team’s experience subdividing the PC version’s often-vast environments would have serious implications on Ion Storm’s next project. 

Deus Ex: Invisible War (2003)

Development began on a sequel to Deus Ex shortly after the first game shipped to stores. Warren Spector took on a supervisory role, yielding the project director position to Deus Ex lead designer Harvey Smith. Ricardo Bare was brought in by Smith to serve as a new lead designer. Deus Ex writer Sheldon Pacotti returned, but his former collaborators Chris Todd and Austin Grossman were replaced with Sarah Paetsch. Paetsch, like many other Ion Storm employees developing Deus Ex: Invisible War, had gotten her start at the studio working on the PlayStation 2 port of the first game rather than its PC original. 

Two key factors influenced Invisible War taking on a distinct character from its predecessor during production. The first, as suggested above, was the hardware limitations of home consoles. Invisible War was designed from the start to launch simultaneously on PC and Microsoft’s then-new Xbox. While contemporary PCs could accommodate sprawling stages, Ion Storm’s experience porting Deus Ex to PlayStation 2 made the team wary of producing open environments that would need to be heavily chopped up in the Xbox version; consequently, Invisible War‘s stages were designed from the beginning to be much smaller and more modular than those of Deus Ex. 

The second major philosophical throughline that impacted Invisible War‘s evolution was accessibility. Warren Spector encouraged the team to produce a game more accessible to a wider variety of players, rather than catering exclusively to the highly technical immersive sim community. This would lead to a radically simplified UI and updates to the original game’s toolset. The lockpicks and hacking tools of the original game, in just one example, have been combined into a single multitool which alters its purpose based on context. 

Invisible War is set two decades after the events of Deus Ex. Its plot carefully combines the events of all three potential endings to the preceding game, as JC Denton merged his consciousness with an AI called Helios to transform into an omniscient being, the world was plunged into a technological dark age known as the Collapse, and the Illuminati re-established their control over society. Countries have reoriented themselves into city-states clustered within walled metropolises while humans have embraced body modification through the use of nanotechnology-based biomods. 

The story’s inciting event is the destruction of protagonist Alex Denton’s home city of Chicago in a nanobot attack by the Knights Templar, a radical anti-biomod group. Alex, a member of the Tarsus Academy who is male or female depending on the player’s choice, relocates along with the organization to Seattle as violence breaks out among the post-Collapse world’s opposing factions. In addition to the Knights Templar, these factions include the World Trade Organization (WTO), a de facto world government; the Order, a conglomerate of world religions in conflict with the WTO despite both being controlled by the Illuminati; and the Omar, a mentally-connected group of technologically-enhanced humans. Alex has the opportunity to align with each of these organizations while traveling through Seattle, Trier, Antarctica, and Cairo. 

While the gameplay superficially resembles Deus Ex, insofar as it is a real-time immersive sim played from a first-person perspective, it differs noticeably in the particulars. Main story and side missions are now accepted from NPCs in the game’s major hub areas to advance the plot. Individual missions are more linear and feature less expansive navigation options than the stages of Deus Ex, though Alex can still generally choose between stealth, combat, or other methods to advance. With regard to weaponry, all firearms draw from a universal ammunition pool; this makes using any individual weapon easier than in the preceding game, as the player is not limited by needing to find unique ammo, but also means that the player simultaneously loses access to all ranged weapons when their ammo supply is depleted. Ion Storm’s use of Unreal Engine 2 enhances Invisible War‘s presentation while allowing the implementation of more accurate physics, like rag-doll character bodies. 

Perhaps the most noteworthy mechanical update concerns skill advancement. Rather than having a variety of skills that are upgraded through the accumulation of points, Alex can only alter his or her abilities by attaching biomod canisters to one of five body regions: arm, cranial, eye, leg, and skeletal. These canisters, which are bought in hub locations or found on missions, confer stat enhancements or new abilities which can be further augmented through the accumulation and application of additional biomod canisters. Biomods had already appeared in Deus Ex but take on greater importance in the absence of experience points.

Invisible War was a critical success when it was published in December 2003. In spite of contemporary praise directed towards its improved shooting mechanics and implementation of consequences for player choices, though, the game’s mainstream reputation has soured over the following 17 years. More recent retrospectives have criticized the reduced scale of its customization options and level design in contrast to the series’ debut. Even Harvey Smith subsequently lamented the game’s unrefined AI and heightened science fiction elements, attributing many of these issues to a rushed development cycle. In the face of behind-the-scenes turmoil, the franchise would go into a prolonged hibernation following its second entry. 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011)

Poor sales of Invisible War precipitated the decline of Ion Storm. The studio had already gone through a handful of major upheavals, beginning with its 1999 acquisition by Eidos Interactive and the closure of its Dallas branch in 2001. Warren Spector departed Ion Storm’s Austin headquarters in 2004 and was soon followed by Harvey Smith. The studio was shuttered in 2005 by its parent company following the commercial failure of Thief: Deadly Shadows (2004), the last release in its six game contract with Eidos Interactive. 

During this fraught period, three distinct Deus Ex sequels were in production. The first was a Crystal Dynamics-designed tactical first-person shooter called Deus Ex: Clan Wars. This title outlasted Ion Storm and was eventually released by Eidos Interactive under the name Project: Snowblind on the PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2005. Though the game did not make a lasting impression, it was notable for allowing up to 16 players to participate in online multiplayer using the sixth console generation’s still-nascent internet connectivity. 

The second proposed Deus Ex sequel, a narrative-oriented experience called Deus Ex: Insurrection, was developed from 2003 to 2004 under the direction of Invisible War programmer and former Valve employee Art Min; this game was initially planned to feature more linear missions than Invisible War and four separate storylines but evolved into a prequel to Deus Ex during production. Warren Spector’s last note on the project is a cryptic “Online?” Unfortunately, Insurrection never made it beyond the prototyping phase. 

The third Deus Ex game under development after Invisible War was, perhaps unimaginatively, titled Deus Ex 3. This project was led by Jordan Thomas and narrowly survived Spector’s departure from the studio. Deus Ex 3 would have been the series’ first genuinely open-world sandbox and was set entirely within New Orleans. Thomas’ team proposed a mechanic called Dixie Flatlining, which would have allowed the player character to access memories of NPCs even if they were killed. As with Insurrection before it, however, Deus Ex 3 was canceled before any images or demos circulated to the public. This would be the last series entry to be worked on by the franchise’s original studio as ownership of the intellectual property passed to Eidos Interactive with the closure of Ion Storm. 

Eidos Interactive entered a period of its own financial challenges in the mid-2000s, bought first by private equity firm Elevation Partners in 2005 and then by London-based game developer SCi in 2006. SCi would rebrand itself Eidos in 2008 before being taken over by Japanese video game juggernaut Square Enix in 2009. In the midst of this tumultuous period, Eidos established a Montreal studio that would go on to play a pivotal role in the Deus Ex franchise. 

Eidos Montreal announced Deus Ex: Human Revolution under the working title Deus Ex 3 shortly after opening in November 2007. The initial staff size was 80 individuals, a team exponentially larger than those which had worked on Deus Ex and Invisible War, and was led by director Jean-Francois Dugas. No former Ion Storm employees were involved in development. 

While the game was planned for an 18-24 month development cycle, it would require twice that time investment. Human Revolution was originally built on Crystal Dynamics’ proprietary Crystal Engine, then being used to create Tomb Raider: Underworld (2008), but struggles to adapt it led to the engine being highly modified during production. While the core game designers looked to the series debut as their primary reference point, their other inspirations were startlingly diverse: combat was informed by Rainbow Six: Vegas, Metal Gear Solid, F. E. A. R., BioShock, Call of Duty, Resident Evil 4, and even the movie Die Hard 4; stealth took its cues from The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and Metal Gear Solid; and the hacking system was derived from similar mechanics in the Shadowrun tabletop game. Its heavily gilded color palette and refined fashion, on the other hand, were influenced by the Renaissance and the myth of Icarus. 

The world of Human Revolution, set 25 years before the original game, is less technologically advanced than those of its predecessors. The planet’s nation-states are in decline as private military organizations have supplanted their monopoly on violence, and societies are divided between those who have begun to augment themselves using newly-available biotechnology and “purists” who reject this transhuman future. Biotechnology remains in its infancy, and so-called “augs” must maintain a steady supply of immunosuppressive drug Neoropozine lest their bodies reject their augmentations. Economic stratification and the heavy manipulation of mysterious conspiratorial forces, including the Illuminati, threaten to plunge the planet into chaos. 

Players take on the role of Sarif Industries security manager Adam Jensen. Badly wounded in an attack by anti-augmentation extremist group Purity First during his first day on the job, Jensen is saved through biomechanical augmentation provided by his employer. Jensen the hunts down his attackers at the request of CEO David Sarif and, as in earlier series entries, slowly reveals a vast conspiracy as he explores Detroit, Shanghai, and Montreal. 

Gameplay represents a major step forward for the series. Jensen is typically controlled from a first-person perspective, though the view shifts to a third-person perspective when the player character takes cover behind a wall or obstacle. These environmental objects protect Jensen from enemy bullets or hide him from discovery during stealth sequences. Numerous physical augmentations to one of several body categories – including powerful melee combat techniques, invisibility, and the ability to bust through designated walls among others – can be selected by the player as Jensen accumulates experience points through completing quests and defeating enemies. Alternately, the player can instantly assign points to any given ability by using Praxis Kits bought or found during exploration. Augmentations combine to give the player more choices in battle, exploration, or conversation. 

With regard to the latter, Human Revolution offers opportunities to engage in what is effectively verbal combat. During tense conversations with hostile NPCs, Jensen can respond using one of several voiced phrases based on tones like “humble” or “empathize.” The trajectory of the conversation determines a confrontation’s outcome for better or worse. In an early mission, for example, Jensen must negotiate with Purity First leader Zeke Sanders as Sanders holds a hostage at gunpoint. Careful responses allow the player to avoid bloodshed entirely and determine how Sanders acts towards Jensen when he reappears later in the narrative (if he survives the initial encounter at all). 

Though the game was intended to feature the same open-ended progression of its predecessors, circumstances conspired to undermine this goal during development. The nature of a world crafted from high-definition assets meant that the team could not offer as many physics-based objects in stages as were present in the original Deus Ex. In spite of the game’s lengthy production cycle, time crunch also forced Eidos Montreal to outsource boss battles to a third-party studio called Grip Interactive. These controversial encounters lack any resolution aside from direct lethal violence, putting the player in a difficult situation if he or she has been favoring non-lethal weapons and stealth or conversation-oriented skill upgrades. 

Deus Ex: Human Revolution launched on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows PC on August 23, 2011. All versions were well-received, though long-time series fans lamented the limitations on player choice and stages which emphasize puzzle-solving rather than system simulation. A downloadable content (DLC) package called The Missing Link, which includes a new story-based mission set on a ship and oil rig, was made available to purchase two months after the game’s initial publication. 

In 2013, a Director’s Cut was released for all aforementioned platforms and Nintendo’s Wii U. This version of the game integrates The Missing Link into the main story and features developer commentary. Perhaps most significantly, the Director’s Cut introduces new environmental details in boss encounters that let players engage in alternative methods to defeat their opponent. While it had not sanded off all of Human Revolution‘s rough edges, the 2013 Director’s Cut had revealed that Eidos Montreal was listening to fans and attempting to fulfill Warren Spector’s original vision. The newly rebooted series seemed to be in good hands. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided (2016)

Though Eidos Montreal had not planned to produce more than one Deus Ex game, the overnight success of their 2011 release made it inevitable. Square Enix initially pitched the project to Obsidian Entertainment with a planned 2014 release window before returning to the team which had created Human Revolution. Challenges associated with designing for a new hardware generation would slow production to a crawl, however, necessitating a full five years between series entries. 

Many of the developers from Human Revolution returned for its sequel. Series veterans Jean-Francois Dugas and Mary DeMarle respectively directed the game and wrote its script. Composer Michael McCann likewise reprised his role, though he was aided in his second Deus Ex score by Sascha Dikiciyan. Human Revolution art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête was promoted to Executive Art Director while his former role was filled by Martin Dubeau. René-Martin Pauzé, Lead Level Designer for Human Revolution, similarly moved up into the position of Executive Gameplay Director on Mankind Divided. As was typical for 2010s AAA game development, extensive work under this leadership team was carried out by hundreds of Square Enix employees and contractors across multiple continents. 

Players again control Adam Jensen from a first-person perspective in a story set two years after that of its direct predecessor. Human Revolution‘s climactic Aug Incident, in which humans with augmentations were driven into temporary violent insanity by a signal maliciously broadcasted from an Arctic base, has prompted societies to impose harsh apartheid systems. While Augs were comparatively privileged in the world of Human Revolution, they are now oppressed by non-augmented humans. 

Opening in medias res, Mankind Divided sees Adam Jensen working for Interpol’s anti-terrorist organization Task Force 29 (TF29) while seeking to expose an Illuminati conspiracy. The Illuminati is seeking to enact the Human Restoration Act, a law which would permanently confine Augs to the city of Rabi’ah. A host of additional factions – including the Augmented Rights Coalition (ARC) and the Illuminati-opposed Juggernaut Collective – play major roles in the game’s characteristically conspiracy-laden plot. 

In an echo of the canceled Deus Ex 3, Jensen explores a single large hub area rather than a handful of smaller locations. Some missions are set in discrete stages around the world, including Dubai and the Swiss Alps, but most of Jensen’s time is confined to TF29’s home city of Prague. This area features numerous NPCs, side quests, and hidden spaces enhanced by a granularity of detail which had been absent in Human Revolution. Boss battles are omitted following criticism received on the prior release.

Gameplay is otherwise very similar to the previous series entry. Missions involve navigating relatively complex stages using various methods of ingress, including stealth and combat. Jensen’s augmentations offer him an increasingly diverse verbset as the player assigns points to these abilities by accumulating experience points or Praxis Kits. In addition to customizing Jensen’s abilities, the player can also now customize guns as well. Human Revolution‘s top-down hacking minigame is enhanced with new visuals while a visually stylized first-person shooter mode called Breach, in which Jensen explores low-poly environments to gather intelligence within a virtual world called the Neural SubNet, has been added to the game’s mechanical palette. 

Mankind Divided‘s generally strong gameplay and narrative experience, however, was obscured by a spectacularly tone-deaf promotional campaign. The studio opted to draw direct parallels between the condition of Augs in the Deus Ex universe and the real-world racial oppression, which had become increasingly visible throughout the 2010s due to the proliferation of videos depicting police violence and the advocacy of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. As is often the case with mainstream entertainment, the game proved unable to meaningfully engage with this fraught subject. Contemporary interviews reveal that the developers sought to present a wide variety of opinions on the topic without guiding the player towards recognizing any as the morally correct path. Though this reflects the approach of earlier Deus Ex games, it is less successful when applied to real-world oppression rather than the franchise’s historically futuristic themes. 

Mankind Divided launched on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC in August 2016. Critical opinion was mixed. Its minute-to-minute gameplay retained the strengths of its predecessor, but the tension between the genre’s power fantasy elements and Mankind Divided‘s thematic content undermined its narrative. A rushed development cycle was likewise reflected in the game’s comparatively short length and lack of a meaningful resolution. Bafflingly, microtransactions offering in-game upgrades for real-world currency harm the balance of the game economy. On a more positive note, DLC chapters fleshed out the story over the following year under the overarching title Jensen’s Stories: Desperate Measures features a scenario set after the end of the main story, System Rift provides background on the Breach mode, and A Criminal Past serves as a prequel depicting Jensen’s first mission with TF29. 

Spinoffs

Though no Deus Ex spinoffs were produced while the IP was owned by Ion Storm, three have been released since the series revival under Eidos Montreal in 2011. The first, Deus Ex: The Fall (2013), was created by an independent team at N-Fusion Interactive in consultation with the core series developers. The Fall centers on mercenary Ben Saxon and ex-federal agent Anna Kelso as they seek out a supply of Neuropozine in Central America during a worldwide shortage of the immunosuppresant drug in 2027. 

Gameplay articulates as a first-person shooter with RPG and stealth mechanics in the style of the core franchise, though stages are much more linear than in Human Revolution. The iOS game was poorly received, due to its clumsy mechanics and incomplete narrative, and plans for ongoing episodic entries were quickly canceled. A similarly disappointing PC port in 2014 featured a preponderance of bugs and poor performance. 

Deus Ex‘s next spinoff, a standalone version of Breach, was published as free DLC for Mankind Divided. The player returns to Mankind Divided‘s Neural SubNet as the Ripper, a software avatar attempting to harvest and sell corporate data on the black market. Experience points and funds accumulated from successful runs through stages can be used to acquire and improve augmentations to tackle tougher challenges.

The third and final video game spinoff in the Deus Ex series at the time of writing is a second mobile release called Deus Ex Go (2016). Unlike The Fall, Go is a turn-based puzzle game which successfully conforms to the limitations of a touch-screen interface. The Square Enix Montreal-developed game, like Hitman Go (2014) and Lara Croft Go (2015), is presented in a stylized third-person perspective that resembles a board game. Players take on the role of Adam Jensen as they move him around nodes, stealthily defeat enemies, and hack electronic devices. New stages can also be created and shared between players. 

Conclusion

Deus Ex was not the first immersive sim, but it was among the most important. Warren Spector, Harvey Smith, and their team at Ion Storm Austin successfully brought Spector’s vision of a truly player-driven cyberpunk role-playing experience to life in 2000 with the help of an uncharacteristically laissez-faire development cycle. Concessions to the realities of home console hardware, on the other hand, saw its sequel fall short of the original game’s pedigree. Happily, the franchise survived the closure of its original studio and the departure of creator Warren Spector for a role running video game studio Junction Point under Disney. 

Eidos Montreal rebooted Deus Ex in 2011 following a protracted development cycle. Though all the time in the world could not keep Human Revolution and Mankind Divided from failing to recapture the extraordinarily complex systems of the series debut, both offered impressively player-friendly takes on the increasingly popular immersive sim genre. The latter was beleaguered by controversy and poor sales, however, and a planned sequel was quietly canceled. 
Reports that the franchise had been put on indefinite hiatus were contradicted by Square Enix CEO Yosuke Matsuda in 2017. While no follow up to Mankind Divided was in development at that time, Matsuda remained committed to the series as a key IP in his studio’s portfolio. Only time will tell if Deus Ex rises from the ashes once again or, like the mythical Greek hero from which it often drew inspiration, flew too close to the sun.

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What do you think about Deus Ex? Which is your favorite entry? How about your favorite dystopic future setting? How much would you pay for a pair of Adam Jensen’s super-cool sunglasses? Let’s discuss below.

Here is a tentative list of upcoming Franchise Festival articles:

• #84: Style Savvy – March 27
• #85: Sonic the Hedgehog (2D) – April 3
• #86: Sonic the Hedgehog (3D) – April 10
• #87: Masters of Orion – April 17
• #88: The Witcher – April 24

Please also be sure to check out the Franchise Festival podcast, in which I discuss the history of The Legend of Zelda franchise entry by entry with my co-hosts Spencer and Hamilton. Check it out using your preferred podcast app or online.