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In pictures: the Watch Dogs floor

A brief look inside Ubisoft Montreal.

There's a whole other section of the building at the back. It's huge.

This week we visited the offices of Ubisoft Montreal - ostensibly to find out more about Watch Dogs, but also for a brief tour of one of the largest gaming studios in the world.

Ubisoft Montreal is big. Its building now houses 2600 people across five floors - and there's a basement, too, a secretive bunker where Assassin's Creed games are made. We weren't allowed in there.

The Watch Dogs floor has got slightly quieter now that the game is so near to completion - the delay has negated the need for a frantic crunch.

Founded in 1997, Ubisoft Montreal inherited a building that had previously been a textile warehouse, with huge spaces that have since been converted into open-plan offices.

Miles of corridor lie beyond.

Some rooms house hundreds of people but there are smaller offices and other facilities too, including a mo-cap studio and a sound department for recording dialogue and foley.

Security is tight, as you would expect, and various areas are hidden away behind huge metal turnstiles.

But the office areas themselves are far more human. Ezio statues and Rabbids posters are a common sight among the office plants and typically cluttered desks, as is production art from Far Cry, Watch Dogs and Splinter Cell.

All in all, the studio has 250,000 square feet of office space - and that's not counting its in-house gym, its canteen and the break areas on each floor. It even has its own medical centre.

Welcome to Abstergo Entertainment, sorry Ubisoft Montreal.
Development can be a lonely business.
All the games that Ubi Montreal has made since 1997. Add in the ones from other Ubisoft studios and you'd need several more walls.

Our tour concluded after just a glimpse at the whole complex. Most floors lay out of bounds, but it's hardly surprising. Ubisoft Montreal lends a helping hand to numerous projects being collaborated on in studios the world over. All in all, "between 10 and 12" projects are currently being worked on within its cavernous walls.

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