Thief 4 Developer Interview

Today's announcement of Thief 4 has been a long time coming, so we had plenty of time to plan our break in of the Eidos-Montreal castle to see what they were up to. Then we changed our minds and realised it'd be much easier to just ask Stéphane D'Astous, the general manager at Eidos-Montreal, all about the game.

Hello, Stéphane.

Hello! This weekend I was Googling a bit to see the activity on Thief 4 and you were always on the top.

We've been paying close attention to all of the teasers, but now it's finally announced! How do you feel?

It's a relief, let me tell you. We've been working on the concept phase for five or six months. The core team has delivered a proof of concept that was delivered to an executive meeting held in Montreal a couple of weeks ago, and since we got a full thumbs-up, we're able to announce it. We wanted to create some interest, so we had a couple of hints - easter eggs here and there - to say that we were going to be working on classic, classic franchises, and the first two are publicly known.

So how far along the development process are you at the moment?

In the world of gaming there are mainly three phases – the concept, pre-production, and production – and right now we've reached our goals with the conceptual base, the story. Obviously, the tough part is still to come, so the team will be ramping up, which is good news because even with the hard times in the financial world, videogames still have bright skies – at least in Montreal! So we'll be hiring approximately 40 people in the next six months: artists, programmers, designers, all the works. They'll be working on the next phase, which will be pre-production, so it's too early right now to mention any kind of a release window or SKUs that we'll be working on. The important thing is that we have a great team, a core team of maybe 20 people, and we're going to the next stage.

You can't confirm at the moment what systems this is going to be launching on?

No. With the fast evolving world of hardware, there's a lot of things that will be happening in the following years so we need to be close to that - but either way, there's a lot of work to be done. Presently the only asset that we're able to release is the logo, which we're pretty proud of as it's very respectful of the franchise and you can recognise it very rapidly, and once we have other types of assets we'll make them publicly available.

Speaking of the team that you've got, do you have any of the old Looking Glass Studios staff on board?

Well, no, but we've done our homework. We went through this a couple of years ago when we launched the Deus Ex 3 project, so we're pretty much in constant contact with a couple of people. These people are mainly based in Texas and they have their own lives and their own projects, and for now we've built our team with veterans that have worked on numerous triple-A titles. We have people that have worked on the Rainbow Six series, on Prince of Persia, on the Splinter Cell games – the list is very long and we'll soon release the pedigree of the team, and you'll notice that these guys have a lot of credentials. In terms of Looking Glass and Ion Storm, we're trying to be as close as possible to some of the original developers, but nothing's confirmed.