Jade Raymond: Blacklist, VR, Evolve and more

As part of our ongoing coverage from last week's Gamelab, and continuing the list of industry figures we talk to about the medium, we talked to Ubisoft Toronto Jade Raymond about her work on the last Splinter Cell, how the team makeup is altering as they work on their latest project, and much more.

On the feedback to Splinter Cell: Blacklist

"Some of the core fans were worried that maybe we were going to make the game dumbed down and make the game easier, but that's definitely not the case; if you play on the Realistic, you're going to have a challenge, so a lot of fans were really happy to find kind of more of the Chaos Theory back in Blacklist".

On Ubisoft Toronto's latest project

"We're 350, so we're almost half way to our objective of 800 of course. I mean the studio might grow beyond that. I think the big focus for us right now is keeping that cultural feeling like it's a small studio even though we're continuing to grow and now we're working on multiple projects. So it's a whole different phase now, you know, everyone was working on one team before and now people are working on five different projects".

On her talk on videogame as a "constantly evolving medium"

"In terms of VR I would love to have ZERO-G kind of parkour game where you're actually in a space suit navigating around and having the experience just like Chris Hadfield gets to have - only a select few of astronauts really look down at the Earth from above and trying to do something in space with the pressure of ZERO-G and managing your oxygen and things like that".

On what she's personally looking forward to

"As a gamer I'm really looking forward to Evolve. I think it looks amazing. It's exactly my kind of game and I love, you know, it's a very simple concept of people in co-op with the traditional roles, but playing against one player, so that one player gets to sort of have that single player experience..."