‘Deus Ex: Mankind Divided': Everything You Need To Know Before Playing (Photos)
There’s a lot of baggage to keep up with the “Deus Ex” franchise of video games — “Mankind Divided” is the fourth main game in the series, but in the timeline it’s the second. That creates a delightful mess of important stuff to remember that took place before and after the events of this specific game.
You could, of course, play “Deus Ex: Mankind Divided” without thinking about what comes later, but that will suck out some of the fun when characters like Bob Page and Joseph Manderley pop up.
So in case you’re rusty on your “Deus Ex” history (or just never played the old games), we’ve got you covered with our primer on all the story stuff you really ought to know before delving into the latest entry in the series.
The year is 2029
That puts “Deus Ex: Mankind Divided” two years after the events of the last game, 2011’s “Human Revolution,” and 23 years before the original game. That “human revolution” fueled by mechanical augmentations (think: robot arms) didn’t end up happening because an intentional glitch in those augmentations caused everyone who had them to violently attack everyone around them for a couple hours at the end of .
That incident is referred to as, uh, The Incident, because nobody really knew what happened or why. And the world it left in its wake is not pretty. “Unaugmented” people are pretty much terrified of the “augs,” and institutional segregation has become a regular thing. In some places, like Prague, where much of the game is set, there are even aug ghettos set up by the government.
The Human Restoration Act
This United Nations resolution would formalize that segregation in member nations and require augmented individuals to receive a control chip — a kill switch, basically — and submit to, like, a remarkable and irritating amount of personal scrutiny.
The Illuminati
Paranoid conspiracies form the heart of “Deus Ex,” and so this secret ruling class naturally has a hand in events. In the past, augmentation, albeit regulated, was see by the Illuminati as a boon because one of its members was responsible for the creation of the tech and they planned to use it as a means of controlling the population via a control chip they’d designed and has surreptitiously installed in most augmented people back in 2027. The Incident was the result of that plan going very, very wrong.
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