Deus Ex 3 Interview

The guys at VGHeaven managed to corner Eidos Montreal’s Stephane D’Astous for a Q&A about their current projects, including Deus Ex 3 and Thief 4. The interview appears to have been taken down at the moment, but one of the members over on the Through the Looking Glass forums has posted the original contents:

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.

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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.

Here’s to hoping this sequel lives up to its heritage. If not, the Deus Ex franchise will simply fall into obscurity.