Jade Raymond bigs up Ubisoft Toronto
Talks "future" tech and 5 "major" games.
Developer Jade Raymond will build five triple-A games at Ubisoft's new Toronto studio.
She's also overseeing a new technology division – one that could possibly be building a next generation game engine.
"We want to grow to 800 staff in 10 years, we're on two major projects now, and eventually we'll be working on five," she told Develop.
"I can't say specifics now, we don't want to get ahead of ourselves in our first year. But yeah, that's the plan.
"The bottom line is the way we are developing games today is changing.
"Games are growing into huge-scale triple-A projects. If you look at any big brand like GTA, the games are being done across multiple studios and multiple teams.
"Once your team reaches over 200 people – even if they're in the same studio – you need complex management methods to make sure everything is held together; the feature development, the communication, and everything else".
June last year it emerged that Raymond worked on Assassin's Creed 2 as executive producer.
In August Ubisoft gave her the Toronto gig.
Then in May Raymond revealed she was working on a new Splinter Cell project with the core Conviction team.
"I can't talk too much about it," Raymond said of Ubisoft's new technology division.
"But I will say that Toronto has a technology group, building central tech for Ubisoft, and that's going to be the team that starts looking towards the future. Real cutting-edge stuff."
Could Raymond be on about the successor to the Anvil engine, which is used to build Assassin's Creed and Prince of Persia?
If so, could it be in anticipation of the next generation of consoles?