I'm relieved that here at Eidos we have two great internal engines - one from IO Interactive and one from Crystal. We chose the Crystal engine because we plan to help develop this engine more and then share it back with the rest of the company, the other Eidos studios. Having that technology from the start gives us a great advantage and foundation for our coders - there are no doubts about the approach, and we have few uncertainties. We just want to all work together on improving the same technology as we develop our game.

If you're like me and only peripherally aware of the Tomb Raider games and what the engine can do, aside from the obvious knack for curved surface meshes, you may want to take a browse ... just make sure you have safesearch turned on.

Naturally TR has nothing of the look/feel that DX would require, but that is purely an art-direction enigma, not a rendering technology one. My only concern, or in this case lack thereof, is the Crysis-factor which eidos is possibly avoiding by choosing this engine. I don't know about everyone else, but a new game that does not require hardware upgrades to run is music to my ears.

Edit ---

It turns out that this engine is not a stranger to dark urban environments, and in fact one of the TR games which uses it did present us with a Deus-Exish Tokyo level. The thumbnails are cropped, but the screens are not. Both have been de-Lara'd. These shots are several generations of the engine old of course, but I think the idea that it's capable of rendering these types of environments has been made plain. However, it still falls upon the art direction and level designers to make it happen. On the other hand, these shots look far more true to Deus Ex than Invisible War did.

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?

Gamespot is reporting that Ion Storm's Warren Spector has quit the company to "to pursue personal interests". It is rumoured that he is in negotiations with Midway to head up an Austin based studio or work with Eidos as an IP consultant.

Good luck to Mr. Spector with whatever he chooses!

TTLG Forums visitor Walton Simons (how appropriate) has written up a nice couple-pages report derived from all of the available information present in Deus Ex regarding the Series P agents. Most interesting, probably, is conflicting reports about their internals, and mention that the P agents, according to in-game texts, are allegedly not modified. Interesting.

You can read that here. And by the way, if you saw anything in the game about MIB agents having an air filtration system in their augmented bodies, stop by this TTLG forums thread and help Mr. Simons out with his report. He is looking for this rumored information in the game.

Steve Tack, long-time community member and project leader of the Zodiac mission set posted a small update last week regarding the progress of his work. According to him, work on part three is 75% done! This is definitely good evidence, along with the ever-progressing Nameless mod, among others, that the original Deus Ex is nowhere near dead silent yet.

Stay tuned to Steve's Zodiac site for the latest skinny on his work, and break out that old copy of Deus Ex and fire up his missions if you haven't already. While you're at it, grab Redsun (a few news items down).

As it turns out, the similarities between Snowblind and Deus Ex are no coincidence. Sources close to the game's development confirmed today that the game began as Deus Ex: Clan Wars, the tactical "Deus Ex 'Action' game" mentioned in an Eidos financial report in April. "It did begin as Clan Wars," they said, "but it began to take a direction of its own."

• A 4 minute trailer video
• New information & improvements to every site section
• News (!)
• A recruitment announcement

It improves performance, corrects an issue with GeForce FX 5950 cards and removes the 'fuzzy-vision' effect when using Bloom, Sniper Scope and viewing other full-screen effects.