Square Enix Interview

Square Enix CEOs Yoichi Wada, Phil Rogers, and Mike Fischer discuss the company’s goals, global strategies, and studio acquisitions in a lengthy article-style interview on Develop. Most of it is industry-speak, but they also briefly cover the engine powering Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the department behind its impressive cinematic trailer:

There’s tremendous potential for saving costs and improving product through collaboration, says D’Astous. He explains that the Deus Ex project is being built with an engine made by Crystal Dynamics, but the studio received more than a good editor.

(There’s some really good tech there, but the best thing is that the whole project got a kick-start because the Crystal Dynamics team helped us figure out how to use it all. We’re sharing a lot of data, a lot of tech, and a lot of best-practices among each of the studios. That’s what happens at the start, and when a project’s in place we branch off from the group and do our own thing.)

He insists, however, that this engine share was Eidos Montréal’s preference, and not a case of enforced hand-me-downs from within the Square Enix group.

(Of course, as Eidos Montreal’s general manager, I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket. It’s risky if you focus too much on one technology, so Deus Ex uses Crystal Dynamics tech, while our other project, Thief 4, won’t.

…

How about that Deus Ex: Human Revolution trailer? The one that launched at E3 and single-handedly pushed the game’s hype to mountainous heights.

It was made, D’Astous explains, somewhere thousands of miles away from Eidos Montreal, within another segment of the Square Enix group.

(One of our first collaborative efforts with Square Enix was with Visual Works [the firm’s Tokyo-based CG movie production department], who made the trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution that everyone went crazy about,) he says.

(People loved the video, it won so many awards at E3, so as you might of guessed, so far I’ve been very happy to collaborate.)