Deus Ex: Mankind Divided originally planned without Jensen

Deus Ex has become a renowned series ever since the first was released in 2000, with Elias Toufexis voicing Adam Jensen in games like Human Revolution. Toufexis has just revealed some interesting news though, as the original plan was to remove Jensen himself from Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the sequel to Human Revolution.

After Human Revolution launched, everything Deus Ex went a little quiet, since Toufexis was working on Splinter Cell and Assassin's Creed, however, he remembers getting the call to return for a sequel. In an interview with VG247 he said that "they called me for a sequel and it was a great thing to hear because initially - and I don't know if anybody knows this, I think its okay to say this now - initially they were going to make a sequel without Jensen."

Later in the interview he stated how the decision was reversed, saying "from what I remember when I was told, the marketing team said, 'No, you can't do that. Jensen has just bumped into this discussion of top video game characters ever. You can't just make a game without him, when you have him ready to go.' And they agreed, and they continued the story of Human Revolution. And we worked on that for two years, two and a half years." It seems, then, that we owe a debt of gratitude to the marketing team behind Deus Ex, as without them we might not have seen Jensen return for a second bout.

Further through the interview, Toufexis also shared some other insights behind the production of Mankind Divided, particularly with the direction the story ended up taking.

"Yeah, I'm not too ecstatic about that," he said. "What had happened was - and I don't want to step on anybody's toes, so I'm going to be vague - we had filmed about two months of an entire game, and it was going to be a completed game, if I remember correctly, and me and a couple other people had a big problem with where the story was going, and it wasn't working. So they rewrote the entire thing, and they made it much bigger."

What did you think of Toufexis' performance as Jensen in Deus Ex?