Over the past few years, open-world action game shave become more and more popular, everything from Batman to smaller budget zombie games like Dying Light going all out with massive game worlds. This is a trend EA certainly hasn’t failed to notice, and it sounds as if they plan to stop missing out on the open-world action love.
“If you look at the biggest segment in our industry, which is action, we don’t have a lot. EA is not known to make gigantic action games like Assassin’s Creed or Batman or GTA or those types of games that are really big,” Executive Vice President of EA Studios, Patrick Soderlund said, speaking with IGN.
In regards to EA’s response, he continued, “The strategic direction that we put in motion is to expand our portfolio more into that segment, to see what can we bring to gamers that maybe hasn’t been done before.”
When asked about the recently opened new EA studio, Motive Studio, headed by former Ubisoft Managing Director Jade Raymond, and whether such a new, gigantic project might be in the works there, Soderlund said, “Maybe. I’m not suggesting we’re going to go after GTA and sell 50 million units. We would love to! But what I’m saying is those types of absolutely AAA, big productions is what we want to do. And I think for us to do that, we need the right people.”
Likely referring to the fact that Raymond was an Executive Producer for the first three Assassin’s Creed games, Watch Dogs, and Splinter Cell: Blacklist, Soderlund continued, “You need a leadership and people that have done this in the best and they’ve done it successfully in the past. That, coupled with a large ambition to invest in new IP. We want to. We’re building a lot of new IPs today but we want to invest more money into new IP.”
Speaking of Raymond’s departure from Ubisoft and her new position at Motive, where she’s said to be heading development on a new Star Wars title from Amy Hennig, the creator of the Uncharted games, Soderlund concluded saying, “[She] wanted to try something different. She wanted to build action games and we were going in that direction…. It kind of came together, and that’s why we did it.”
As for further details about just what some of those new IP’s might be, we will just have to wait and see. Recently, EA and DICE wrapped up the Star Wars Battlefront Beta, the largest beta in EA history, and announced a $50 season pass for the game.
Are you excited about a more action oriented, gigantic game focus from EA? Or are the growing number of open world games just becoming overwhelming? One of our Senior Editors, Davis Hagen, recently shared his thoughts on just that very topic. And for more on new games coming from EA, keep checking back right here on Gamespresso.