Developer and publisher EA have expressed their desire to release a competitor franchise to the likes of Assassin’s Creed and Grand Theft Auto in the future. Speaking in an interview with IGN, EA’s executive vice president Patrick Soderlund said:
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.
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 pressed on the possibility that EA already had such projects in the works, Soderlund neither confirmed or denied the existence of such a game, instead stating that to make a title as big as Arkham Knight, GTA or Assassin’s Creed, you need to have the right people for the job:
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.
Interestingly, Jade Raymond – who just recently joined EA’s new Motive studio, had previously worked at Ubisoft as one of the main figureheads on the Assassin’s Creed series. Could Raymond and Motive have a new Action RPG in the works? It certainly looks that way, but we’ll just have to wait and see.