Electronic Arts, in the form of EA Studios Vice President Patrick Soderlund, said in October that it wanted to start making "gigantic action games" along the lines of Assassin's Creed, Batman, or Grand Theft Auto. It struck me as kind of an odd position to take—the definition of 'action' may be subject to interpretation but EA is hardly a stranger to "triple-A, big productions"—but it did dovetail nicely with the news from this summer that Assassin's Creed co-creator Jade Raymond is now flying the EA flag.
Soderlund didn't mention Raymond by name in that interview, but as reported by GameSpot, EA Chief Financial Officer Blake Jorgensen confirmed at the UBS Global Technology Conference in San Francisco that she is working on just that sort of project.
"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," he said. "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."
If open world action is what you want to get into, you could certainly do worse than hiring Jade Raymond to head up the effort. Raymond's new Motive studio is also working with Visceral on Amy Hennig's new Star Wars game, which still doesn't have a proper title.
