In light of the recent lay-offs having taken place at Eidos Montreal, quite a few details about several of the studio’s cancelled projects have been coming to light. Among these, according to Insider Gaming’s Tom Henderson, was a game based on The Lord of the Rings that would have featured card-based mechanics as well as Telltale-styled narrative gameplay. Henderson spoke about this while noting the reasons behind the studio’s recent lay-offs.
“This round of lay-offs is due to two individual things,” said Henderson in a recent video. “First of all, [Eidos Montreal] are working internally on quite a big project.” He went on to describe this big project as an open world third-person action adventure title, with the team working on this being the same one that did Shadow of the Tomb Raider. This game, he noted, has been in development since 2019, and is known internally as P11 – marking it as the eleventh project in development at Eidos Montreal.
Henderson then confirmed that the studio is now on P22, which indicates that 11 different projects had been conceptualised since 2019. It is worth noting that, since then, Eidos Montreal has only released a single title – 2021’s Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. This means that the studio has worked on at least 10 other projects in the time since then without having released any game since 2021.
The lay-offs, Henderson noted, were specifically related to P11, with the studio now beginning to ramp down the project’s headcount. “So you know like conceptualisation, and all of the systems and all that kind of stuff has been complete and they’re gearing up for beta and that game is scheduled tor release next year,” explained Henderson.
The Lord of the Rings game, according to Henderson, was the other big project in the works at Eidos Montreal. This comes down to the fact that the studio’s parent company, Embracer Group, has the rights to make games based on The Lord of the Rings. “So it seems like they’re just trying to cash in on that particular IP,” he said. “I don’t blame them or whatever, but it was related to that project. It didn’t really go far in development. It was a Lord of the Rings card game with like a Telltale spin, like a story spin on it is how it was described to me. The cancellations were related to that particular project.”
Henderson also reiterated the fact that Eidos Montreal had some of its employees – numbered at “around” 20 – working on Kojima Productions’ upcoming horror title OD.
Since the lay-offs at Eidos Montreal, reports started coming up of some of the projects that the studio had worked on before they got cancelled. These reports cited the CV of one of the now-former employees at the studio, with one of the more interesting cancelled projects having been a reboot of Legacy of Kain. However, this project was noted as having been cancelled several years ago, shortly after the studio was acquired by its current parent company Embracer Group. This cancelled project was noted as not being too far into development before being cancelled.
