EA has open world titles and it has single-player games driven by story. It doesn't, however, have open-world single player games, though a Ubisoft expat, and co-creator of Assassin's Creed, is being tasked with helping the company change that.
EA hired Assassin's Creed co-creator Jade Raymond back in July of this year. Her Motive games development studio has been collaborating on Star Wars game, yet to be detailed, with EA studio Visceral. But EA has other plans for Raymond.
EA hasn't truly operated in the open-world action space, gaming's largest genre, stated EA CFO Blake Jorgensen at the UBS Global Technology Conference in San Francisco on Monday.
"That's the Assassin's Creed-style games; more open-world, more single-play versus multiplayer," said Jorgensen. We recently hired Jade Raymond, who was behind the Assassin's Creed franchise for Ubisoft and she will be building an action genre for us through a studio we're building out in Montreal right now. So a lot of excitement around the action genre."
Jorgensen's words echoed those uttered by EA Studios head Patrick Soderlund last month, who also called the action genre the "biggest segment" in the games industry.
"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," Soderlund said. "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."
Using Assassin's Creed as an example of the type of action games EA wants to build may have rubbed some gamers the wrong way, considering that the open-world adventure franchises cranks out new titles annually instead of affording the games longer development cycles.
However, Assassin's Creed is what Raymond is known for and EA has gotten its point across about what type of games it hopes to build.
