Almost a year on from reports that a new Deus Ex game had been canceled amid layoffs at Eidos-Montréal, fans have once again been reminded what could have been next for Adam Jensen, and his actor seems understandably disappointed, too.
In a recent interview on the From Script to Life YouTube channel (below), Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mankind Divided writer Mark Cecere has been giving some insight into what the next game could have looked like. In the interview, he mentions that players were initially meant to go to the city of Rabi’ah after what eventually became the ending of Mankind Divided. Based on that, he says: “I would suspect the plan was to go to this new city,” but “the story itself changed so much when we had to cut that I’m not sure where they would go with it after.”
Despite this, Cecere suggests that Adam Jensen could “never catch up to the Illuminati,” but “we did have one name that we could get rid of and that was the one that Jensen would have caught up to and done something. But the repercussions of it… by Jensen doing this, it causes Deus Ex, if that makes sense. And that’s the tragedy of Jensen, is that he causes what happens after by doing something. He causes Bob Page to become Bob Page. That was where we were heading.”
Cecere adds that he “was not involved” in the canceled project, although he was “in contact with people to try and get back in and be on the team,” but obviously, things didn’t end up working out for the game. “I would have loved to have been there to finish it off, but so far, no news since then,” he says.
Of course, he’s not the only one who’d have loved to have seen it completed, as fans reacting to the clip on Twitter are in immense pain thinking about what we’ve apparently lost. Adam Jensen actor Elias Toufexis himself has also chimed in, simply saying: “Hey this would have been fun huh?”
Toufexis hasn’t been shy to share his thoughts on the canceled game before, having previously suggested that “Embracer Group may have dropped the ball on this one.” Whether the game could ever see the light of day is another matter – it was reportedly in development for two years before its cancellation.