The world got worse yesterday as the ever-spiralling Embracer Group laid off 97 people at Eidos Montreal and apparently cancelled an upcoming Deus Ex game the studio had been working on for two years. The layoffs were, in a year that has already seen thousands of job losses before the end of January, bitterly unsurprising, but the fact that a new Deus Ex had been in development only to be cast aside took many of us unawares.
Many, but not all. One person who wasn’t shocked by the news of Deus Ex’s aborted resurrection was Elias Toufexis, voice actor for Human Revolution and Mankind Divided’s Adam Jensen. In the wake of the news, Toufexis tweeted that “I told you guys it wasn’t happening,” and told PC Gamer that “I gotta be honest, I gave up on it a long time ago.”
In fact, Toufexis seems understandably convinced that whatever Deus Ex project Eidos Montreal was cooking up wasn’t even going to be a continuation of Adam Jensen’s story, which began all the way back in 2011 with Human Revolution and was left unfinished after 2016’s Mankind Divided. “I wasn’t under NDA and they never called me,” Toufexis told PCG, elaborating 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.”
Well if that isn’t another shot through the heart, I don’t know what is. The Eidos Deus Ex games weren’t perfect—then again, blasphemous as it may be to say it, neither was the original—but they had their own charm, and I’ll admit I was eager to see where it was taking Jensen’s story after laying down some weird and intriguing loose plot threads in Mankind Divided.
But it looks like we wouldn’t have gotten that even if Embracer’s $2 billion mystery deal (reportedly with Saudi Arabia) hadn’t fallen through and Eidos had been allowed to carry its now-cancelled Deus Ex to term, which suggests that the Jensen trilogy as a whole is simply dead and buried. Those games—and Deus Ex as a series—deserve better.