OK, I feel the need to speak up. As a software developer (granted, not games, desktop apps), when EM makes comments such as To celebrate the opening of their brand new Montreal office, Eidos recently opened their doors to the press and the public alike and welcomed them with open arms into their new flagship in-house development headquarters in Quebec. Among those present was VGHeaven’s Ross O’Lochlainn, and he caught up with Eidos Montreal General Manager Stephane D'Astous for an insightful chat…

VGHeaven: Montreal is fast becoming one of the most prestigious and productive gaming hubs in the industry, with an ever increasing number of heavyweight titles coming out of the city in recent years by studios such as EA and Ubisoft... some of them under your guidance. Is there any particular reason for the success the city has experienced?
SD’A: Well that’s maybe one of the most asked questions in the industry. “Why is Montreal having such great success at the moment?” I think it’s a number of elements that bring Montreal into the spotlight of creating great video games. We have a great pool of talent here; I think we’re at about 6,000 people working here in Montreal in the gaming industry. This means that there’s a critical mass located in the city and these people are really talented. They come from all over the world to work here. There are great schools here also and that means that year after year we have good, fresh talent coming up the ranks.

In the more financial side of things, Montreal is a very inexpensive city to live and do business in, compared to Vancouver, London, Paris or San Francisco or Tokyo. I’m ready to match numbers with anyone and this is due to the tax credits we receive here. Obviously this tax credit system works really in favour of the city and it’s attracted a lot of the big players to come here. That combined with the talent we see and the European culture feel of a city that’s located in North America really means that we have the best of a lot of worlds. That creates a thriving atmosphere for our industry to boom in.

VGHeaven: What are you hoping to achieve here in Eidos Montreal and are there any particular values that you’re going to push with the games you make here?
SD’A: Well, you need to remember that the Eidos Montreal studio is the first internal growth studio Eidos has set up. Eidos’s growth in the past was through acquisitions. They acquired Crystal Dynamics and they acquired IO interactive in Denmark, but this time around they really wanted to do an internal growth project with this studio. Our mission and mandate here in Montreal is to create extremely high quality AAA games. You can see with our first two titles, Deus Ex 3 and Thief 4. (laughs) You can’t really ask more from the studio, especially with these being their first projects. This studio has really stepped up to the plate and really wants to bring these two classic titles to a new level.

I think the challenges lie in that they were very well recognised and appreciated before in the past, but they need to be taken to another level.

We need to make these games very attractive and accessible to a wider audience without diluting the content. So, our mission is to very rapidly become one of the very best studios around and we intend to do it by showing the quality of our products. And we’ve grown very quickly. We’re already the largest studio of the Eidos group, so in less than two years we’ve become the largest internal studio at Eidos, which is something I’m very proud of.

VGHeaven: The two titles currently being developed here (Thief 4 and Deus Ex 3 are much loved and critically acclaimed franchises. You’ve started fresh with the two teams for these games, but what are you hoping they’ll achieve?
SD’A: Well it’s for sure that I was able to attract very top, high quality talent because of these titles. Obviously all the core team, the lead teams, which normally comes out to 12-15 people, they all pretty much knew these projects inside out. My core team really played all of the previous games and they knew already that they wanted to revisit and look into these franchises to see what worked and what didn’t work. Then we asked ourselves, what should we do for the next addition? But we definitely looked at these franchises very closely

VGHeaven: What sort of traits did you look for in your staff?
SD’A: Well, basically I wanted to have people that had previous AAA experience in my senior staff. Obviously at Ubisoft and EA, there are a lot of available highly talented people. There are also people from outside of Canada who heard that we were working on these projects and applied to get on board. We have a healthy 20% of our staff coming from outside of Canada, which is something I’m very pleased about. It means that we’re an attractive studio that is doing things that people want to be part of. So, talent, passion and experience are what I am really looking for.

VGHeaven: In the current generation of gaming, we see the market being flooded with tried and tested formulas and often very little imagination is being reduced. This has led to a lot of gamers feeling that the industry is fast becoming stagnated and the overall gameplay experience is suffering because of this. What’s your opinion on the situation?
SD’A: Yes, the market has been flooded. In 2008, not a lot of people know about Eidos terminating 8 to 10 projects internally because we did a big reorganisation and wanted to refocus our efforts on quality. Quality is something that every studio publisher talks about, “quality, quality, quality”, but we actually put actions behind our words.

So we did terminate projects that we thought didn’t add value to our portfolio and we concentrated our efforts on to these major titles. We have Hitman, we have Thief, we have Deus Ex, we have Kain & Lynch as well as a lot of other projects, and we wanted to refocus and not try to do too much in the sense of trying to please a wide range of audience in the casual gaming audience. What we do best is high quality AAA games.

VGHeaven: The word innovation is thrown around a lot in this industry and it’s become a buzzword of sorts. What’s the definition of innovation that’s being adopted in this studio and is there anything that makes Eidos Montreal’s approach different to your competitors who claim to champion innovation?
SD’A: Again, that’s a very good question, because it’s true that innovation is over used. With my dev teams though, I feel that you need to create an environment where people are at ease to take risks and try to new things. If you want to innovate you need to do new things in a different way and there’s always a risk of not succeeding. But if you incorporate a confidence based atmosphere within the studio and tell them “We have a big tough job in front of us, but we’re going to take risks and we won’t always succeed” this permits people to get into the right mindset to try different things and since my teams are, I would say, quite senior and they know what should be brought to the table for innovation. In Deus Ex we have choices and consequences and this is a very important base of the game. It’s a very deep project, there’s a lot of depth in the story behind it. In Thief we’re more focussing on the technical innovations. I can’t speak too much but we’re going to be doing something new. Obviously with these two titles they’re both coming at the end of the life cycle of the existing consoles so it’s at this time that you really need to push the existing technology. There are things in the works, but I can’t discuss.

VGHeaven: Deus Ex is a classic example of how a project can combine major gameplay elements from several different gaming genres - what’s the studios stance on genre definitions and how a game should conform to the genre it’s supposed to be in?
SD’A: A lot of my guys have worked on AAA titles before, mainly shooters. But when you enter the truly RPG genre, this is something that experienced developers really like because this is where the challenges are; to develop and create a complete, in depth experience with choice and consequences. I think this is certainly going to be our speciality in our studio. Deus Ex is a true “blue” RPG and obviously is, while Thief is also an RPG, but in a different sense. It’s possible to play differently in these two types of games but the genre is definitely RPG. In Deus Ex, shooting is very important but so is hacking and obviously dialogue.

Dialogue is going to be a huge part of this game along with stealth. We like to have a healthy portion of these elements that combine well.

VGHeaven: But in certain genres, particular titles tend to develop features that work extremely well. Does it not become tempting to adopt and adapt these features, and incorporate them into your game, rather than running the risk of trying to develop something original that may end up going against the grain?
SD’A: Yeah... well... that is a good point, but again, you need to come back to essence of your product and your title. If we want to inject a trendy feature that is not truly compatible it will show. If you aim to innovate and you want to incorporate special features, you have to ask yourself “Will it help the game? Will it help the player to have a richer experience?” To inject, I would say artificially, a nice cool feature, people will see it misplaced. You need to be careful.

VGHeaven: From listening to you talk about your two development teams you’re obviously very proud of them. Is there much interaction between the teams with regards to the projects that are being developed in house?
SD’A: Absolutely, absolutely! I mean every so often I’ve asked the teams to do a presentation to the whole studio staff, so not just the other dev teams, but to the QA guys and the administration people too, because I really wanted to have everyone aware of what we’re doing. Every day we work very hard but at a certain point, every quarter say, 4 times a year, I ask my teams to prepare an hour presentation to receive feedback if it’s dev-to-dev or dev-to-QA people, because they all have lots of experience. But yes, there are lots of exchanges. We do not work behind closed doors as you have seen in our studio. It’s very open spaced. Interaction between the development teams is encourage and already active. I don’t need to reinforce this because it comes perfectly naturally as team members have friends amongst the other dev teams so there’s a natural feedback loop formed.

VGHeaven: Audio played a huge part in the success of the Thief franchise, as its expert use helped create a new level of immersion for the player – is this something you have actively pursued with the new setup here? How seriously do you guys take sound?
SD’A: That is, again, a very good point. Sound in Thief really brought gaming to another level. Obviously this is one example of how we want to respect the heritage of the previous games, so we won’t neglect the audio side of Thief 4. We have an excellent audio lead designer right now that has a lot of experience. He knows very well how sound works in the Thief franchise, so we’re starting with a very solid base. As for the voice acting, I know again that Thief was very noticeable for Stephen Russell’s work as the voice of Garrett.

We’re contemplating this and considering this and looking at what we can do, because we’ve received a lot of feedback on the forums about the voice of Garrett. The script writer is also someone who has a lot of experience in the Thief franchise, so script wise that’s going to be taken care of. We’re putting together a group of people who do know and will pressure themselves on the audio side, because they know that Thief is not the ordinary, vanilla, middle of the road kind of project when it comes to audio, so we’re taking care of that and it will pay dividends for the company.

VGHeaven: I’ve read that Eidos Montreal takes a firm belief that staff should be multi-faceted and be able to fill the roles of multiple positions on a team. Could you explain briefly what the mentality is behind that approach?
SD’A: Well, you can very rapidly lose control of the number of people within a team... this is apparent when you look at some studios that boast about having over 200-300-400 people on the dev team. That is exactly what we do not want to do. We want to keep our team sizes to a human scale, meaning 100-120, even though it’s a AAA title. But in return we have a prolonged production cycle. A lot of studios and publishing companies have realised how true the old expression is, “to bring 9 women together with one month of pregnancy each won’t give you a child” (laughs). Loosely translated, of course... (laughs again). These things require time. You cannot put the oven at 700 degrees to make it cook faster. It doesn’t work like that. We’re trying to keep the good old fashioned human sized teams with a healthy production cycle.

If all your development staff are specialists they will work on their speciality for a certain while, but they need to have other types of duties executed and if they can’t do that, what happens? If you have too many specialists you need to artificially increase your dev count and this is something that we do not want to do. Anyway, a lot of staff members like to do different tasks during the cycle of the game. I’m not asking them to do 3 different tasks in a week, but depending on the different milestones in the production process a modeller can be a level artist or can create textures, for example.

Good rounded experienced individuals are invaluable to have on your team. Obviously everyone can’t do everything, but artists, designers and coders should be able to have more than one specialty.

VGHeaven: Do you provide for the enhancement and advancement of your staff here?
SD’A: Yes, very much so. We have a continuous training program in effect here. We had somebody from Pixar for a two day master class recently. So, yes we do invest a lot in training.

VGHeaven: You obviously have a very proficient QA department here who’ve tested big games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and you do have a prolonged development cycle, but what’s your stance on delaying a game? As Valve says “A game can be delayed for a while, but it can suck forever”!
SD’A: (Laughs) Well... yes. I would like to be in the position like Valve where they can decide when it will come out. Valve has a great track record and they have a mentality that I really admire. That said I think there’s a healthy mixture of constraint on the business and development side here from one another. I think that what truly is needed to resolve such conflicts is good management. I sit down with my producers quite often to see the progress and the planning of the games.

My producers and I have a quite an experienced background in project management. We take this quite seriously – we don’t like to improvise work. I do not want to micro manage and micro schedule my producers, but we really keep an eye on the schedule that’s laid out. That said - you really need to be open to delaying a game, especially with these sorts of games that we have in house at the moment, where high quality really needs to be reached. We have already adjusted our schedule, I can admit this, but you need to be careful about over adjusting for the quality aspect.

Sometimes people are lured and attracted to the idea of ‘Let’s add 6 months of polish’. Hmm... Ok, but what will this bring to the title and what will it bring it terms of more sold units? There’s always a fine line and it’s one that needs to be walked by the producers and myself.

VGHeaven: Modding has been a huge part of the Thief series. Do you plan on allowing the PC community to create and add to the title like they have done in the past?
SD’A: I don’t have much information about that. We’re thinking about different things at this moment. I can’t talk too much because it hasn’t been decided yet, but we need to duplicate things that have been appreciated by the PC user base as much as possible for the future title.

VGHeaven: So will Eidos Montreal be focussing on any new IPs or franchises, or will we be seeing any of the back catalogue of games coming back to be revitalised like we’re seeing with Thief and Deus Ex?
SD’A: All good questions! You have to stop now! (Laughs) But seriously, we’re not in position to confirm a third project yet. We haven’t closed any doors on any type of alternatives, so an old or a new IP has just a good a chance at making it through.

VGHeaven: And finally, there are obviously a lot of young people here today at the open day. I’ve seen a lot of them walking around with their resumes and talking with the developers here. Do you have any advice for anyone looking to break into the industry?
SD’A: You need to be very determined.

Up to now, in the past 3 years, we have received 13,000 CVs. The interest is really there. We will always be on the lookout for people that are talented and passionate. If I had to encapsulate two great qualities that will help you in this industry, these would be them. But you also need to be patient. These games are mainly developed by senior staff, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t want to keep a well balanced group.

I need young people to come in and push the older guys with new ideas. So I suggest that you need to have good training and work on your portfolio. If you’re in code then you need to be able to multitask as well as possible. We’re always looking for good AI programmers and physics programmers – these are two positions that are always hard find good people for. But most importantly, don’t be afraid to bang on the door (laughs), your chance will come eventually.

VGHeaven: Stephane thank much for your time!
SD’A: My pleasure.

"In Thief we’re more focussing on the technical innovations. I can’t speak too much but we’re going to be doing something new. Obviously with these two titles they’re both coming at the end of the life cycle of the existing consoles so it’s at this time that you really need to push the existing technology."

VGHeaven: Modding has been a huge part of the Thief series. Do you plan on allowing the PC community to create and add to the title like they have done in the past?
SD’A: I don’t have much information about that. We’re thinking about different things at this moment. I can’t talk too much because it hasn’t been decided yet, but we need to duplicate things that have been appreciated by the PC user base as much as possible for the future title.

We need to make these games very attractive and accessible to a wider audience without diluting the content