Deus Ex: Mankind Divided – Tips and Tricks for Beginners

Upgrade Your Hacking, and Hack Everything

Hacking is one of the best and most reliable ways of getting you experience points in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. When you first start off in the game, Jensen will only be able to hack devices with security clearance level 1. However, you’ll find that the clearance levels go up pretty quickly as you progress through the game, and if you don’t upgrade your hacking skills, you’ll be locked out of a lot of good information. You don’t have to upgrade your clearance access all at once, but make sure to save some Praxis points for those when the need arises.

Whenever you see a hackable device, go for it. It can lead you to a room full of supplies, or even give you access codes to open up shortcuts that can make your life easier. Just make sure that there aren’t any police milling about when you hack – hacking is illegal, you know.

Stay On Top of Your Augmentations

At the beginning of the game, you’ll have access to experimental augmentations. However, Koller will inform you that you can’t just activate any augmentations you want without risk. You have to make sure Jensen’s system doesn’t overload due to the overabundance of activated augmentations. Keep an eye on the stability meter at the bottom of your screen in the augmentations menu. If it’s over 100%, you’ll have to deactivate something. But you also have to be careful with what you deactivate. Once you choose to deactivate an augmentation, that particular aug’ and its tree will be permanently sealed off to you. Unless you complete certain side missions.

If you do need to deactivate augmentations in favor of more useful ones, I recommend deactivating some of the retinal ones. Tracking and marking aren’t particularly useful, especially when compared to other augmentations that boost your hacking abilities and stealth. Deactivate the ones that don’t suit your play style.

Find Merchants and Clear Your Inventory

You’ll find that your inventory can fill up pretty quickly in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and yes, you do have a storage limit. Along the way, you’ll pick up tons of valuable items like Neuropozyne and various gyroscopes. These can take up quite a bit of space, and they don’t help you in battle. What you want to do is find a merchant who will buy all this junk off you for a good amount of credits. The game doesn’t explicitly tell you this, but if you pull up your map, you can activate the legend and look out for green icons with shopping carts on them. These indicate the locations of various merchants.

Merchants will sell different things. Some merchants specialize in hacking software, some in weapons, and some in consumables – but all of them will buy your useless items. Whenever your inventory fills up, make sure to stop by a merchant and unload all of your junk before setting off. It’s also a good idea to stock up whenever you can, too.

Always Look for Terminals

If you want to be stealthy, you’ll want to keep an eye out for computer terminals and wall terminals in restricted areas. These will give you access to the enemy’s cameras, alarms, and security bots. Be sure to upgrade your hacking abilities so that Jensen will be able to manipulate these machines to his advantage.

Once you find a terminal, hack it, and you should get access to some of the enemy’s tech. Shutting down their alarms and robots will save you a ton of headache when you’re trying to sneak through a crowded base. If things go south, at least those giant robots won’t be able to fire their machine guns at you anymore either.

Find an Alternate Path

Whenever Deus Ex: Mankind Divided tasks you with entering a restricted area, there are almost always at least two points of entry. One is the main entrance, which is usually heavy guarded. The other is a side entrance that will let you sneak in undetected. This should go without saying, but you should definitely always look for side paths to make your job easier.

Try moving objects around to see if they might be concealing a hidden path, and look for vents that will let you bypass hordes of enemies. Trying to get through the front entrance is never a good idea because there will usually be tons of sentries milling around, and it won’t be easy to out gun them all.

Get the Speech Augmentation

The speech augmentation is one of the most useful upgrades you can get in the game, and I recommend picking this one up as soon as you can. There’s only one upgrade to purchase, and it will definitely come in handy in many of your NPC encounters. Whenever the game requires you to negotiate or make a deal with another character, the augmentation will analyze their speech patterns and their personality traits. This will give you a good idea of what kinds of responses they will take well to, and what will set them off.

Unless you want a full-blown gun fight on your hands, be sure to make good use of the speech augmentation to choose the best responses and coax your enemies into seeing things your way.

Talk to Koller Whenever He Calls

You didn’t think the game would force you to micromanage your augmentations the entire way, did you? Well technically, it could, if you choose to skip some of your side missions, but you can activate all of Jensen’s augmentations without consequences if you complete one of the game’s early side missions. When Koller calls you up to meet in Prague, he’ll tell you that he needs a calibrator from a man named Otar. Go to him, and convince him to hand you the calibrator. The speech augmentation will come in very handy here if you need help reading his personality. Once he hands it to you, you can proceed with the game normally.

About midway through the game, Koller will give you a ring again and ask you to see him. This is marked as a side mission on your menu, but be sure to follow your objective marker back to Koller’s base. This time, you can hand him the calibrator, and he’ll make some adjustments so that you can access all of your augmentations with no trouble. And yes, that includes any augmentations you might have previously deactivated.