During the constant sensory tornado that is PAX Australia, Stevivor had the chance to step into a quiet room for a chat with Mary DeMarle, Executive Narrative Director of the Deus Ex franchise.
Having joined the team under this role for 2011’s Deus Ex: Human Revolution, she joked about how hush-hush the role was at the time.
“There were rumours going around about what the game would be, but of course they were rumours! And so they were looking for a Narrative Director, and I applied,” she said. “The interview was pretty fun because first of all I’m in there with five guys, none of whom introduced themselves. We had this great interview where we’re talking about, ‘Well, if you were working on a… certain project… then I might kind of handle the narrative in this kind of way, nudge nudge wink wink.”
Speaking about the nature of writing a prequel that works towards an established future, Mary explained that she had spent most of her career working within established franchises.
“You’ve gotta become very familiar with what is existing so you can build off of it,” she explained, adding that in the instance of Human Revolution as a prequel, there was a level of knowledge to build moving towards the existing games. Still, it wasn’t as stressful to create as it could have been.
“Since we set it 25 years beforehand, I didn’t have to deal with the established character[s]. So that was kind of… But at the time it was like, wow, I’m creating a character from scratch, that’s kind of new. […] It’s very similar to working with any license, you have to get to know everything there is, and from there you kind of let your imagination go.”
On asking about nods to the series’ established future, DeMarle added, “That was one of the fun things with Human Revolution, because we spent so much time building the Jensen character and HIS storyline, because you kind of build it in layers… and then you get to the fun part, where for example you can put an email on David Sarif’s computer that’s related to DeBeers. And you go, ah, this is fun. This is the fun part where you can seed all those jokes.”
In Mankind Divided, Adam Jensen becomes the first Deus Ex protagonist to headline multiple games. Mary explained what brought her and the Mankind Divided writing team back to him for a new adventure.
“When we created him, we weren’t thinking about sequels; we just wanted to get the game done. For me, that was his story, and I wanted him dead. I did. Even though I love him I wanted him dead, because you know, tragic heroes are always the best,” she said. “But one of the things as we really started looking at it, we started to realise that we had really created something that resonated with people. He resonated with all of us too, so we realised that his story wasn’t really done. It did leave on a moment where he made the pivotal choice, but now we’ve gotta see the repercussions, we’ve gotta see what happened.”
Jensen himself has brought out strong opinions from fans and critics alike. Mary offered up one particular case from a reporter who had presented an interesting case on Jensen’s characterisation.
“He said he realised after playing the game that Adam Jensen could be a sociopath. Because he said, all the signs are there! He’s got the cracked mirror in his apartment that shows that he’s got all this pent-up frustration, he lives in this apartment surrounded by all these prostitutes and dark alleys where he can kill, and he could just turn him into a sociopath and a serial killer.”
Mary wasn’t prepared for that assessment.
“Of course I’m looking at this going, this is NOT the Adam Jensen I created,” she exclaimed. “But the very fact– he said he realised this after the fact, so he went back and played the game all over again pretending that he’s a serial killer to see how he could do it. And you know what? We succeeded in what we wanted to do,” referencing the game’s openness to player style. “It’s not how I would see Adam Jensen, but if someone can look at there’s enough there to play with to embody and role-play then I think we were successful.”
With the ability for Jensen to range from angelically non-lethal to brutally homicidal, it seemed one of the greatest challenges would be keeping the story and character of Adam Jensen consistent across the board.
“Yes, that is a big challenge. I know that one of the things that I learned on Human Revolution – and you always have to relearn it every time you’re writing, again and again – is that you have to be able to know that character so strongly that their voice will always be there, but the choices are different. So you can choose to play Adam as, for lack of a better word, a big asshole, and I have to write a dialogue in which he may be an asshole, but he’s still got Jensen’s personality coming through!
“You have to cater it that way to make each choice as valid as any other.” She went on to say that this same issue extends to the voice cast, especially for Jensen: “Elias [Toufexis] is often wanting to put more into it and push it in a certain direction. It’s like yeah, I understand why you want to do that, and you can on THIS choice, but on THIS choice you have to dial that back.”
Having helmed the story for both Human Revolution and now Mankind Divided, Mary was in a unique position to offer up lessons the team took away from writing the first game that informed their approach to its sequel.
“I don’t know if it was a lesson, but when we started in Human Revolution we were still thinking, as much as we were saying it’s about choice and consequences, we were still embracing a very linear experience,” DeMarle replied. “Even with dialogue, the first pass to the script we were having the dialogues REACT to the things you did but we weren’t giving YOU choices. Then we did a second draft and we started putting in those choices. So we really wanted to push it further with this one, and make it so the narrative is actually changing based on your decisions. We really tried to embrace that this time around; what we had learned on Human Revolution we were able to apply to this, but then push it even further.”
Moving on to influences to the story, Mary discussed the origin and influence of the Icarus myth on Human Revolution and its ongoing presence in Jensen’s story.
“The Icarus [influence] came actually through the art department. They were the first ones to bring up the Icarus myth and then we began embracing it within the writing itself. Making references like Sarif – the reason we chose Sarif was the ‘seraphim’ with the wings. And then Tai Yong actually means ‘the sun’, so that was there. On this one you can still see there’s, even in the trailer,” referencing the ending shot of the new trailer shown during the weekend’s Deus Ex panel. “When Jensen stands up, there’s the wings! We have a bunch of that in, but we are pushing into other directions as well.”
We’ll have more with Mary DeMarle in the coming days.
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