Yesterday, the world got worse when the Embracer Group fired 97 people at Eidos Montreal and reportedly called off a Deus Ex game that the company had been working on for two years. It was very disappointing that people were laid off, especially since thousands of jobs had already been lost by the end of January. However, many of us were surprised to learn that a new Deus Ex game had been in development but then canceled.
A lot, but not all of them. Elias Toufexis, who provided the voice of Adam Jensen in Human Revolution and Mankind Divided, wasn’t surprised to hear about Deus Ex’s unsuccessful resurrection. “I told you guys it wasn’t happening,” Toufexis tweeted after hearing the news. He also told PC Gamer, “I gotta be honest; I gave up on it a long time ago.”
ifFor some reason, Toufexis is adamant that the Deus Ex project Eidos Montreal was working on wasn’t even going to be an extension of Adam Jensen’s story, which began with Human Revolution in 2011 and was left open with Mankind Divided in 2016. “I wasn’t under NDA and they never called me,” Toufexis told PCG, explaining on Twitter that “If they had been working on a #DeusEx for two years, and they still hadn’t contacted me, there’s a good chance it wasn’t a Jensen story anyway.”
That looks like another shot to the heart, and I don’t know what else it is. Even though it may be sacrilegious to say this, the Eidos Deus Ex games weren’t perfect, but they did have their charm, and I was excited to see where Jensen’s story went after Mankind Divided left off with some strange and interesting lost ends.
But it looks like we wouldn’t have gotten that even if Embracer’s rumored $2 billion deal with Saudi Arabia hadn’t fallen through and Eidos had been able to finish its now-canceled Deus Ex. This means that the Jensen trilogy as a whole is likely dead and buried. You should get better at those games and the whole Deus Ex series.