A couple weeks ago, Eidos released a teaser trailer for the third installment of Deus Ex. Teaser trailers are notorious for being vague but some scrutinizing gamers have discovered a big clue that DX3 could be set before the events of the first two games.

As previously reported, the trailer featured a series of extremely quick shots toward the end. While most of the pictures were just thematically linked to the series (riot police, Dante’s Inferno, etc.), there was one very revealing picture – a hand dropping a piece of paper into a ballot box that said “Biopolitic Vote 2027” on the side. This would set the game over twenty years before the first Deus Ex game and forty years before Deus Ex: Invisible War. It could also point to some sort of large political upheaval in the setting– after all, 2027 isn’t an election year in the United States. Or is the game not set in the US at all?

The storyline of the series, which deals a lot with cybernetic enhancements, government conspiracies, and terrorism, was one of the strong points of the first two installments. The story, however, also made sequels tricky. Each of those games gave the player a choice of several different endings, each of which would result in global ramifications and usually had a lot of finality to them. For example, one of the first Deus Ex’s endings involved the player merging with an artificial intelligence to become a sort of benevolent dictator for the entire world. I would be very interested in seeing a prequel story that bridged our times with the chaotic world controlled by militant corporations and shadowy conspiracies depicted in the first Deus Ex. Maybe we’d see how the Statue of Liberty was destroyed?

CVG, however, reported earlier this week that the date “2027” was removed in a recent update to the trailer by Eidos. What does this mean? Is Eidos still undecided on the story of the third game, which by many estimates is at least two years away? If it’s actually going to be a prequel, why remove the date from the trailer now that every fan boy knows about it? For a game series that features conspiracy theories so prominently, I guess I shouldn’t surprised by pre-release intrigue.