Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo announces Montreal studio for paranormal project

Genshin Impact developer MiHoYo is expanding in North America. The company confirmed via LinkedIn it’s opening a new studio in Montreal, Canada to work on its upcoming shooter set in a paranormal world. 

Their new game remains nameless for now, but MiHoYo describes it as a “brand-new AAA open-world action-adventure game featuring shooting-based gameplay within a living, breathing paranormal world.” The team in Canada will work alongside MiHoYo’s other global offices as it focuses on research and development. 

The Canadian office is currently hiring, too. Their recruitment page lists openings for positions like a gameplay network programmer, level designer, 3D environmental artist, and technical designer. Detailed postings for the level designer role mention creating a “whole road network in an openworld with urban area and wilderness” and “vehicle tracks for racing, chasing, or other kinds of gameplay.”

Industry analyst Daniel Ahmad noted this isn’t the first time we’ve heard MiHoYo mention its shooter, as Nvidia actually revealed the game in 2019 as Project X. It sounds like their next adventure will keep its anime cinematic style but experiment with a new genre. MiHoYo’s current action titles, Honkai Impact 3rd and Genshin Impact, share a few systems and hone striking art style similarities, but they ultimately play quite different. Tears of Themis is arguably the biggest departure from their ‘usual’ style as an Ace Attorney-like otome adventure. 

MiHoYo currently has offices in Shanghai, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, and Los Angeles—which the latter of the two are also hiring—but this is the company’s first expansion into Canada. As Ahmad also noted, the studio went from just three employees in 2014 to 3,500 in 2021, so it’s not a major surprise the boom of success has led MiHoYo to another central gaming hub.

Genshin Impact continues to do exceedingly well for the company. Just last Friday, MiHoYo announced it would close out this month with yet another update for the open-world RPG, welcoming version 2.3 on November 23.