That said, the interesting article is still not terribly enlightening, as it mainly conjectures about what a DX3 game could be like as made by a bunch of guys and gals who have done many games nothing like Deus Ex. I think we were already on that page, but at least we now know the page number and how many pages there are.

Coincidentally, he also answers a question I raised about the company size - they do plan on growing to be much, much larger than 80 people; four times that size in fact, but in fact plan on always keeping the team sizes down to 80.

What I have not read is Kieron's article about Harvey Smith, the man some blame for DX2's faults who just released a new game, Blacksite Area 51. I have not read this article, but note that it does contain a screenshot of System Shock 1, which instantly makes it awesome.

Thanks DX-455 for letting us know about the DX3 article.

The game seems to focus heavily on the sociopolitical impact of biomodification as seen in the Deus Ex series. There's religious iconography, political divisiveness, potential terrorism, and segregation. And a representation of the Fibonacci sequence.

It is true that the canceled DX3 in development at ION Storm was a prequel. There is no reason to believe (in fact I'd say that it's unlikely) that this team and project are using any material from the canceled one, but that does not rule out the possibility that it is indeed a prequel. For what it's worth, I hope that it is. Part of Deus Ex's appeal to me was how close to home it was in the form of themes, settings, and organizations - DX2 in contrast was a distant futuristic setting which seemed detached from present day reality. DX3 moving in the opposite direction - more towards the real world, seems like it would give more of a good thing. Let's just hope that it doesn't overflow into that dangerously obscure 'too much of a good thing' area which I am not even of liberty to define at the moment. We'll see! I look forward to it.

A Canadian Deus Ex. They chose an interesting subtitle: "3". Maybe it will have more in common with Deus Ex than the last two spinoffs: Invisible War and Project Snowblind.

We've got this gamasutra article on the topic.

D'Astous highlighted, "Montreal has low operational costs compared to other cities. Montreal has always been a city where the cost of living has been very reasonable, and this is also true for companies. So we can control our costs. The real estate is quite reasonable, the talent is there and that’s certainly an important point -- even though our dollar is going up, I think we are still very competitive on that side."

So it's a new studio, new goals, new ambitions, and this is their first project. Maybe that's fitting - Deus Ex started that way, after all. These guys don't have an 'idea guru' as their leader though, which may not be a bad thing. Oh look my coffee is done.

Actually they do have this Stéphane D’Astous guy in charge of things. Let's see what his online profile looks like. ... seems like he's got several upper-management credits for various console games listed under him. (Thanks henke and HellSing.) Well all of those games shipped, so I guess we have that!

Mmm, nothing like a hot cup of coffee at 7:38 am est on 11/27/2007.

So Gamasutra also said...

So how many developers will be working on the game? According to D'Astous, teams will stay small and dev cycles will be lengthier. He stressed, "We’re only working on AAA, major titles. We’re going to be developing only major AAA games, using only next-gen technology."

Therefore, he continued, "We will want to limit our dev teams to a human-sized team of 80 people at the very highest of the peak in the production cycle. We don’t want to become a huge studio where there’s over 100 people on a title. We want a smaller, multi-discipline group that are tightly knit together. But by doing so, we will give them at least 18 to 24 months for the production cycle."

This brings us to a website for the developer. What does this site teach us about this developer?