We know EA’s Motive Studios has multiple projects in production. The Vancouver office is currently working on the revamped open-world Star Wars game, as well as the next entry in the Plants vs. Zombies series. The Montreal office is helping on Star Wars and also focused on a new open-world action-adventure IP, but an ambitious splinter group of developers has also gotten a second project greenlit.
“In Montreal, we have a big IP and then we have a second project, and the thing that I’m really excited about is that project was totally born from three passionate people who just worked on a pitch in their spare time,” said studio head Jade Raymond. “They were super passionate, saying ‘let us prototype it, let us do it,’ and we managed to give them some space to get it done because it was exciting. People saw what was going on and more people wanted to join their team. Now it’s a fully-fledged project, so we were able to get that going within Motive, which I think is one of the benefits of having a smaller studio.”
A lot of times you hear developers working at large studios lament the bureaucratic way creative ideas get stymied. Raymond wants to keep creativity at the center of the operations even after Motive expands its staff size as projects transition out of the conceptual stages and into full production.
“I want to create a more official and transparent way that we can get all of those ideas in,” Raymond said. “Kim Swift is working with us now; she’s design director at Motive. She’s is working with Justin Wiebe, who is a creative director on Plants vs. Zombies, so it’s a cool mix of totally different perspectives on things. They’re working on a process so that anyone can pitch and that we can have a format for the pitches. They go into a backlog where we can get input from publishing and marketing and other people in the company on what they think the potential of those pitches is. That way we have a bunch of creative ideas that are more or less approved by business, and once we have some time in gaps between projects or we can let little teams form and get to the next level of prototype, and hopefully get the best ones to the point where they can be real projects. That’s something I’m really excited about and we’re working on putting in place.”
To read more of our recent interview with Jade Raymond, click here to learn about the creative team building the new open-world Star Wars game, and click here to get some early details on Motive’s new action-adventure IP.
Source: Game Informer EA's Motive Montreal Studio Has A Second Project In The Works