Gamers haven't heard much about Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex: Mankind recently, but the company recently released a new trailer promoting the video game.

This isn't a gameplay trailer or even something created with CGI, though. The promotional video is a live-action short film that shows the dawn of "the Mechanical Apartheid," when people with mechanical augments began to lose control of themselves in 2027.

This sets the scene for the background of Deus Ex: Mankind, which takes place two years after Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Adam Jensen is back, but this time, he has new technology and body augmentations. In the game, it turns out that augmented humans unwillingly received technology that puts them under the control of the Illuminati. Adam must work with Interpol to catch a group of augmented terrorists, all the while working with an underground hacker group that will help him finally take on and defeat the Illuminati.

"For Human Revolution, one of the things we dealt with in there was that it was all about how something terrible had happened to him and he had lost choice in his life and he had to regain it," Eidos Montreal's Leonid Melikhov said to Gaming Bolt last year. "At the end of that story he regained that choice for everyone in the world and he tried to do something. He tried to save the world, but he was a little bit late because the chaos had already started. In that one the theme was 'I never asked for this.' Now it's two years later and he's dealing with the fact that he feels that he failed. Because he feels that what he tried to do was buried by the Illuminati."

The short film looks at events that led up to this, as mechanically-augmented people begin to spin out of control and mankind becomes divided.

Eidos Montreal released gameplay footage at last year's E3, but it's likely fans will see even more footage at this year's event before Deus Ex: Mankind arrives on PC, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 on Aug. 23.