EA Working On Their Own Open-World Action Game
Open-world murder simulators
The sheen of open-world murder simulators has worn off for me - Assassin's Creed is going down the pan, Far Cry's formulaic, Watch Dogs is daft, The Phantom Pain lost its magic half-way through, Batman's suffered shoddy porting, and even GTA V I didn't finish - but hey, apparently this is the time for Electronic Arts to enter the field.
They're either five years late to the trend, or have carefully calculated when folks will be bored of 'em and want something new. If they could liven open murderworlds back up, that would be exciting. They haven't announced a specific game yet, but say something's in the works at Motive Studios, their new studio headed by former Ubisoft Toronto managing director Jade Raymond.
EA have mentioned this hole in their lineup before but, GameSpot report, chief financial officer Blake Jorgensen said at a business-y tech conference yesterday that they're already plugging it:
"We've never really operated in the largest genre of gaming, and that's the action genre. That's the Assassin's Creed-style games; more open-world, more single-play versus multiplayer. It's not been an area that we've operated in. 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."
Ah, yes, the action genre. EA has been short on action games. Too many quiet, peaceful, inactive games with nary a murder to be found. I'll be interested to see EA moving into the action genre.
That's enough marvelling at that delightfully awkward language. If EA can bring something new to a genre that's now formulaic and stale, that would be jolly nice. I hope they don't just 'put a twist' on the same old tat. Now the technological novelty of open murderworlds has worn off, newcomers kinda need to have more at their heart. Sounds like it'll be a few years before they have much to show of what Motive are working on, though.