Actor Elias Topaksis has been busy in recent years, appearing as space spy Kenzo in The Expanse, delightful rubber-forehead alien L’ak in Star Trek: Discovery, and the Penguin in Gotham Knights, among others. According to the actor, he Heard nothing For reprising the role most gamers know him for: Deus Ex prequel hero Adam Jensen.
“Yes, as much as I’m happy to be busy, I wish I was even busier with a new Deus Ex,” Toufexis wrote on Twitter. “I’m not under any NDA for Deus Ex because nobody called me about it. Really.”
As PC Gamer news anchor Andy Chalk put it, “It hurts.” Like J. Anthony Franca as JC Denton in the original game, Toufexis did an amazing job of wringing warmth and humor out of night-coated sunglasses, knocking guys out and hiding them in vents for a living.
The black-and-gold renaissance of the Deus Ex prequels creates a mismatched continuity with the original games, but they’re a fantastic piece of sci-fi in their own right, and Toufexis as Jensen is the strange, terrifying connection for an ex-girlfriend who performed human experiments on him at the emotional core of each the experience.
Still, it’s not necessarily a death knell for Jensen — in November, sources told a Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier that a new Deus Ex was “very, very early” in development. Fast forward nine months and you can Maybe Screw just one of those “very” when it comes to Deus Ex’s alleged next development progress. While Toufexis would have a major role and a lot of lines to record if he were the protagonist of a new Deus Ex, actually recording voice lines comes quite late in the game’s development after the script is finished.
At the same time, it’s probably never too early to start going in and locking down a major, well-known talent, and who’s to say the next Deus Ex game won’t be a reboot? Given modern development cycles, there could well be a gap of ten years or more between the previous game, 2016’s Mankind Divided, and the launch of this next project (damn, that makes me feel old). But that would be a shame – Mankind Divided really felt like the middle part of a trilogy that shouldn’t have ended.
Eidos Montreal’s last release was Guardians of the Galaxy, a game that surprised us with its wit and warmth in a time of Marvel oversaturation (I’m sick of all that stuff anyway). The studio changed hands from Square Enix to The Embracer Group last August, and seems unaffected by a recent spate of layoffs and studio closings at the mega-publisher.