Jade Raymond Starts New EA Studio | MOUSE n JOYPAD

Jade Raymond, the former producer of Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs, has announced her next venture after leaving Ubisoft last October. She will be starting up a new EA studio, named Motive Studios, which will be partnered with Visceral and Amy Henning on an unannounced Star Wars IP.

Visceral’s next project has been described as “Star Wars in the style of Uncharted” and is led by the former game director of the Uncharted series. In a blog post to the new studio’s website, Raymond also noted that the new developer will also be “incubating entirely new IP” in addition to working on the Star Wars project.

Separately from the new studio, Raymond will also oversee the Visceral studio, working above Amy Henning, the creative director. She will work with Henning on the Star Wars project and ostensibly everything else that the developer will put out after the release of the Star Wars IP.

The new head of Visceral continued, “I’ve also known Amy for years and have admired her work on the Uncharted games! I’m thrilled that the first big project that we will work on in Montreal will have Amy as Creative Director.”

The  BioWare team will also partner with Motive Studios to do some “new and exciting things” with Mass Effect: Andromeda. Raymond emphasized in the blog post that “Motive will work in close quarters with the BioWare Team”. This is the most substantial news about the development of the new Mass Effect game and it has me hopeful that EA will put enough manpower behind its development to make Andromeda something special.

Raymond is balancing a full load of development oversight across multiple studios – EA is putting a fair amount of stock into trusting that her expertise can be the healing touch for so many games. EA is making a major push to support the development of some of its next marquee franchises, and it’s putting together a formidable studio in Montreal to do it. Before long, we will see other major publishers making similar moves as franchises from the old generation of consoles are phased out or adapted for the current generation.