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[IbizaPocholo]

Square Enix to Heavily Expand Its Montreal Studios; Eidos Also Getting Mocap and Photogrammetry Studios

Square Enix announced plans to massively expand its Montreal studios with 100+ new jobs. Eidos is also getting cutting edge technologies.

wccftech.com

Japanese publisher Square Enix announced today in a press release its planned expansion in Canada. Between Square Enix Montréal and Eidos Montréal, over a hundred new jobs for game developers will be created this year.

In addition to that, Eidos Montréal is getting the expansion (adding 10K square feet to the already huge 55K square feet office space) and renovation of its facilities. The studio that led the development of Shadow of the Tomb Raider (previously, it released Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Thief and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided) will now be able to exploit cutting-edge technologies such as photogrammetry and full performance motion capture studios. Furthermore, a user research laboratory and a mixing and voice recording studio will be added to the facilities.

 

[Strider311]

Cautiously optimistic that maybe Deus Ex will come back one day, and utilizing the new tech. Please?

 

[General Lee]

I thought they were making some Avengers shit these days? I guess it makes sense to grow the studdios if they're going the route of mass appeal games.

Mocap is obviously something they'll need, or needed like years back when Mankind Divided was under development. I think they used some third party Chinese animation studio or something like that to outsource most of that work, and it clearly showed in how janky some of it was. After ME Andromeda flop AAA studios have to really put a lot of effort into animation quality and that's a huge issue for more open world titles with potentially hundreds of characters. Mocapping all of it is cost prohibitive, but minimum cost outsourcing won't produce the required results either.

I just wish SE would do more with their current IP's. I love pretty much all of them, TR, DX and Thief but they seem all in some sort of limbo. SE's western IPs have such great potential but the end results have been half-baked.

 

[JoeyWestSide]

Good for them. Last Sunday I had just 100% shadow and dlc. Excited to see what they bring next especially with this new expansion.