Crunch Time

Returning to the 24-month development cycle, we asked Deus Ex 3 producer David Anfossi if he felt that the longer development cycle was going to remove "crunch time" from the culture at Eidos Montreal. "Of course, we have to reach a few milestones, Alpha, Beta, and so on," Anfossi explained. "There will be crunch time. You can't say you're not going to have crunch time! It's impossible. But we're doing a lot of planning and I think that's the key to avoiding that as much as possible. I'm very confident we can minimize it."

D'Astous expanded on this. "We're not keeping all of the 'crunch' to the end. We did a 'mini' crunch for the end of our proof of concept. We'll mini-crunch for the end of pre-production. We're not going to head into production and just crunch all the time."

With Deus Ex 3, the amount of time for pre-production seems key, with the troubled development of Invisible War -- including changes in scope right up until release. D'Astous claims that isn't going to be a problem at Eidos Montreal. "The team knows there is no bullshit. The management isn't going to come and disrupt the project. Planning for a 24-month production cycle is hard. But if you set people a deadline and let them work to it, they will deliver. But if you meddle, and make scope changes, add this, delete that, they won't. If you read the postmortems on your site, you see that mistakes come when the schedule isn't respected. We won't make that mistake."

Anfossi agreed, feeling his team was up to the challenge. "We spent four months on the proof of concept and we're spending eight months on the pre-production. So we've got time to work on the technology and to prototype all of the mechanics. We're going to test all of the features and develop the design fully before production. We've got time to do that. We want to minimize the risk for production."

"We're also setting aside time for the tweak and polish at the end," Added D'Astous.

The Looming Spector

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."