It looks like the upcoming Avengers title might be an online exclusive. As many companies begin to shift their focus onto a more online-centric play style, like BioWare, Rockstar, and Ubisoft (to name a few), it’s not that surprising that the team behind the Deus Ex series has begun to look more into that direction as well.
Eidos Montreal, with titles like Tomb Raider and Deus Ex under their belt, has recently made blog post detailing future plans. The studio as a whole decided that they were ready to make the commitment to online play, and that this will play a huge focal role in future development. Up until now, they’ve primarily been a single-player driven company, but after Deus Ex: Mankind Divided massively underperformed, they are looking to capitalise on perceived market trends.
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David Anfossi, Head of Eidos Montreal, had this to say:
“At Eidos-Montréal, we’re constantly working towards creating innovative and exciting experiences for gamers everywhere. In turn, we are placing an added emphasis on the online experiences in our games, striving to continually provide players with content that is memorable and impactful.
Through the inherent interactivity of online play, our universes will have the chance to thrive both now and into the future. To achieve this, we are building the teams and tools capable of supporting our ambitions. We hope you will join us on this journey!”
The Director of Online Technology, Sebastien Bessette, added on to the original statement on how they plan to implement this shift:
“On the tech side, we’re working to empower our content creators and promote an iterative game creation process. To achieve this, we’ve created an engineering strategy that greatly encourages communication between team members, allowing us to efficiently design, implement, and test our game architecture.
We’re also structuring the DAWN engine, our proprietary technology, to interface with modern online solutions, which gives us the ability to take advantage of existing technologies. All of these efforts unify our teams towards one single goal, that being to deliver the best online gaming experience to our players.”
Since the team is currently hard at work on a The Avengers game, it’s safe to assume that the primary focus will be turned towards a multiplayer experience, versus a strong single-player support. But we could be wrong, the studio has been very tight-lipped about their plans so far. We’ll just have to wait and see how this will affects their overall game style.
UPDATE: David Anfossi has issued a clarification to the above message, which can be found here.
