Revision 5

Career at Ubisoft

Patrik Méthé spent over 17 years at Ubisoft Montréal, working across three of the company's biggest franchises. He was Game Director on Far Cry 3, Far Cry 4, Far Cry 5, and Far Cry New Dawn. He also directed Rainbow Six: Extraction and worked as Game Designer on Splinter Cell: Conviction.

Before entering game development, Méthé owned a game store and was deeply involved in tabletop role-playing games, including Dungeons & Dragons and Warhammer. That background in pen-and-paper worldbuilding shows up in how he talks about Project Windless.

Founding KRAFTON Montréal

Méthé became KRAFTON Montréal's first employee in October 2022. He had spent eight months in discussions with KRAFTON before making the move from Ubisoft. The studio was officially announced in February 2023 as KRAFTON's first Canadian AAA game studio, with a target of 150 employees over three years.

In an early hiring story Méthé has retold often, the studio did not yet have a public website when he began recruiting. He showed candidates physical copies of concept art for the four races. Every interviewee told him, on the way out, that they wanted to play as the Rekon. Méthé described the unanimity directly: "All of them. All of them. And we were like, OK." That feedback shaped the choice of the Hero King as the player character.

The Montréal office assembled a senior team almost entirely from Ubisoft veterans:

• Benoit Frappier, Producer

• Frédéric Duroc, Game Director

• Martin Paradis, Technology Director

• Iain McCaig, Design Director (Hollywood veteran who designed Darth Maul for Star Wars, with credits on The Avengers, Terminator, and Harry Potter)

• Son Kwangjae, Art Director

Vision for Project Windless

Méthé has described Project Windless as a game where "legend is not something you observe, it is something you actively create through play." In the post accompanying the State of Play reveal, he wrote: "For us, that meant giving players real agency, not just in combat, but in how wars unfold, how alliances are formed, and how history is written."

His design philosophy emphasizes minimal hand-holding, organic exploration without glowing trails or cluttered HUDs, and a world that feels like it belongs to the player rather than the developers.

On The Hero King

Méthé has emphasized that the Hero King is a mythical figure rather than a contemporary character from the source novels. "He's remembered, but no one is still alive who was there," Méthé said. "It gives us a level of flexibility, because the worst thing for us would have been to try to emulate too closely what's in the novel at the expense of the game."

On the Hero King's design, Méthé said the character "visually stands out from the typical action adventure RPG, but it needs to be more than an eight-foot, 600-pound guy. It's not a guy in a suit. It's a race, and the race has specific skills and attributes you don't find in a human."

On The Title

Méthé has clarified that the Hero King is not literally the bird that drinks tears from the title of the source novel series. The phrase, he explained, is a metaphor for the responsibility of being a leader. In that metaphorical sense, the Hero King "will drink tears" as he shoulders the weight of uniting four races at war.