Deus Ex: Mankind Divided Boss Fights Explained

In a recent interview with Eurogamer, Square Enix’ Patrick Fortier and Olivier Proulx have tried to clear up the confusion regarding boss fights in the upcoming cyberpunk action RPG, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided.


After seeing the E3 demo, some people drew the conclusion that we’ll be able to talk our way through boss fights. The short answer is “No”. The long answer is:

In the classical sense of the boss fight, it’s not a debate, it’s not an opportunity to have the same mechanic, the debate mechanic that we have using your CASIE [Computer Assisted Social Interaction Enhancer] augmentation to read the body language and the heartbeat and all of that – that’s not happening in a classic boss fight. Having said that, if you’ve equipped yourself in a particular way then maybe specific solutions are offered to you and that will result in some dialogue of some sort, but it’s not debate gameplay.

So no, we won’t be able to talk our way out of a beating. But there will be non-lethal solutions this time around, and every possible character build should have the opportunity to rely on its strongest skills during a boss fight.

The heart of the issue in Human Revolution is really the idea that we’ve given you an augmentation tree and you might have invested a lot in the hacking and cloaking and things like that, and then you find yourself in the situation where you’re like, ‘Wait, what the hell?! I don’t have any augmentations to deal with this, what am I going to do against this guy? I’m just forced in a head-on conflict and I’ve got to take him down and I have no other means at my disposal.’ That’s the situation we’re trying to address.

So yes, you’re forced in a situation where narratively there’s an awareness that you’re there, but you can still – once we give the control back – you can still exploit the tools you have for your Jensen. I could know you’re here, but I don’t know specifically where you are, and then when the control comes back to the player, he’s in the situation where he’s still hidden, so to speak, and the player has an option to keep that, to go further, to exploit the environment, to exploit some of his tools, take everybody out as they’re patrolling the area.

The boss fights were the main problem of the previous game, Deus Ex: Human Revolution – while you could build your character to be a sneaky, pro-life hacker, the bosses required you to come out of the shadows and fight them head-on. It seems the developers have taken the criticism to heart, so hopefully Mankind Divided will be more considerate of player choices.