Jade Raymond is certainly one of the most famous female producers in the gaming industry. Known mainly for her work on the first entries in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, she also worked on Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Watch Dogs as Executive Producer before leaving Ubisoft. A few months later, she was revealed to be the founder of EA Motive, a new studio owned by Electronic Arts and headquartered in Montréal, Canada.
Since its foundation, EA Motive’s mission was to create a new IP in the open world action genre, which has been historically a gap in EA’s lineups. However, it’s been a few years and we haven’t seen anything concrete about it yet (though the studio did work on the single player campaign of Star Wars Battlefront II in the meantime). In the latest MCV magazine (issue 936), Raymond was interviewed and spoke a bit about what she wants to achieve with this new IP.
Related Raymond: EA Motive Is Looking To Innovate; An Action/Adventure That’s Also Social Could Be The Holy Grail of Games
The other thing that’s important to me is I’ve loved creating original IP because I think it’s an opportunity to create games and brands in the games industry that have meaning. And it’s even more so now. How are we making sure that we are impacting people’s lives and enriching them, rather than just being fun? Fun is great! But how do we have a positive impact? “I really believe that it’s time for us to be taking that seriously as game developers. And I think a new brand is a really good way to do that, because it’s not only in terms of the context you choose and what the brand is about but what you choose to reinforce in the game mechanics. I’ve always loved science fiction because I feel like it’s a great highlighter of the human condition. It makes people think about where we’re going, why we do things, what are the things that are fundamentally true about humanity. I think we can and should make some points within gaming and they can be made even more meaningfully because game mechanics reinforce them and the story. So I’m really passionate about that.
With Assassin’s Creed, we were trying to enrich people’s lives and have a message. Being able to inspire people to think a little more about history and maybe get excited about that and look into different countries and maybe get some enrichment there. There were some messages also about the original assassins and their different beliefs and ‘nothing is true, everything is permitted’. We touched on different ideologies there. With Watch Dogs we spent some time thinking about that too, but with this new brand, I really want to create a positive story about humanity. That’s really important to me.
While EA Play this Saturday will be mostly focused on Battlefield V and Anthem (as well as the annual EA Sports games), there’s a chance we could get a teaser trailer for EA Motive’s new IP.
In related news, the studio has officially expanded to two offices (EA Vancouver was merged into EA Motive and is now supposedly reworking Visceral’s Star Wars game).
This is really cool. Motive has officially expanded to two offices!
Montreal and Vancouver are hiring for Star Wars, Plants vs. Zombies, and new IP. https://t.co/P010eZjriS pic.twitter.com/dKWomMVRGR
— Mitch Dyer (@MitchyD) June 1, 2018
