Eidos Montreal's D'Astous Talks Deus Ex 3 Team, Plans

As part of an in-depth Eidos Montreal studio tour posted on Gamasutra, Eidos Montreal GM Stephane D'Astous has been discussing development of Deus Ex 3, revealing team size, fan feedback, and discussions with Warren Spector on the game. At the time of Gamasutra's visit [in November], the "proof of concept" for Deus Ex 3, which took four months of development, had just passed its milestone to continue into pre-production. "We were quite pleased," beamed D'Astous. "The whole team worked very hard. We're taking the franchise very seriously. We know how important it is for the fans. And everyone has an opinion, everyone will want to make it heard, we're going to be criticized just for making it, but one thing we want people to know is we did our homework. We went through everything, and we planted it as a seed, and it's beginning to grow into a tree. And we want the tree to grow straight. The proof of concept broke the ground, and we're continuing to grow that." Given the game's planned 24-month development cycle, we asked D'Astous how large the Deus Ex 3 team was. "Right now the team is about 38, and we're looking to grow to around 80 during production. Sticking to that is very important to us. I came from Ubisoft, where a lot of projects ended up with a team of 200+ people. Why? Because the schedule got compressed or changed. Over here, we want to avoid all of that. We want to keep to a human size and we've identified 80 people to work on this next-gen project." With such an important franchise in the hands of a new studio, the staff at Eidos Montreal is keenly aware of the fan base. "On our website we already have a forum, and we want feedback from the fans. We want to give them the ability to participate and communicate to us what they want, and do not want, as early as possible in the development. And that's a valuable tool for our development -- not just our PR," said D'Astous. "Every single comment" was being read by Anfossi while he still had the time to read them. "I've been very interested to see their comments so far on what they want and don't want," he noted. Of course, the biggest question in fans' minds had to be the creation of a title in a franchise deeply associated with Warren Spector, by a new studio. We asked if Warren Spector had been consulted before the project had begun in earnest. "We spoke with Warren Spector, we had a good exchange, but we can't really talk about it," said D'Astous. He returned to the refrain from earlier: "We did our homework." "Since he sold his studio to Disney and is working hard on other projects, it was unfortunately a matter of timing. It really wasn't a matter of disinterest -- far from that. Ultimately, he just couldn't be involved. He was very positive in our discussion, however." Even without the direct input of Warren Spector, Anfossi argued that the history of the titles was hugely important to their development. "I've played the two games I don't know how many times. A crazy amount. We wanted to learn exactly what Deus Ex was so we could imbue this project with those values. We spent months on that alone." "If you really read the history of the titles, the development of them was very chaotic," D'Astous said. Although they succeeded in many ways, they felt they failed in many others. If there's something we hope for this studio, it's that we don't want to obtain success through chaos." [The above was an extract from the full Gamasutra studio tour, which includes plenty more information on Montreal game development, the establishment of Eidos' studio in Quebec, and expansion plans.]