As expected, more information on the latest layoffs at Eidos Montreal is starting to surface, which includes details on just what the developer had in the oven before disaster struck.
According to a report from Insider Gaming, the Canadian studio had spent over seven years on a massive project that was only recently cancelled.
The problem was that this game — codenamed P11 — ended up spiralling out of control; it supposedly cost the company hundreds of millions of dollars, sucking funds away from other projects, like the previously outed Deus Ex title, which were then subsequently binned.
So what was P11? The report claims that it was an "open world third-person action adventure", featuring a teenage main character named River, who was part of a magic-wielding group known as Spiritbounds. You could apparently ride atop giant creatures in order to traverse the map at speed.
Insider Gaming goes on to say that, according to sources, P11 was "almost complete". It had gone as far as the debugging phase, and Eidos Montreal was potentially targeting a release date later in 2026.
Obviously, this report paints a particularly chaotic picture of the developer. The studio's been struggling for a long time — ever since Square Enix sold it off to Embracer Group in 2022, pretty much — and now we probably know why.
Questions will be asked of whether Eidos Montreal should have pushed on with P11, given that it was quite clearly a very troubled project. Indeed, it had apparently gone through four different game engines over the course of its development cycle, and there were "conflicts" over its narrative direction.
Still, to have it be cancelled on the cusp of it being finished, and to have 124 employees laid off as a result, is an especially awful fate for the studio.
What do you think is next for Eidos Montreal? Are you surprised to learn that such a project was in development? Let out a long sigh in the comments section below.