Jade Raymond, director and cofounder of EA Motive, has left the company, per Gamespot. Replacing Raymond is Samantha Ryan, who’s also currently heading up EA’s mobile, Maxis and BioWare studios. In a statement, EA cited Ryan’s experience as ranging from Sims titles, all the way to the Arkham games and even Anthem.
Raymond’s impressive track record includes production on Assassin’s Creed titles and Watch Dogs at Ubisoft. Recently, her team at Motive has been working on an untitled Star Wars game—it’s the same one that began life at Visceral Studios, with Uncharted veteran Amy Hennig at the helm. The game, codenamed Ragtag, was never released, though—Hennig left and afterwards, the studio closed entirely. That’s why many were thrilled to hear that Ragtag was picked up again by Motive.
The similarities are a bit frightening for those still holding a candle for that Star Wars title, especially in the wake of issues with EA’s Battlefront II. As far as gameplay, it didn’t garner much more than a shrug and, worse yet, its handling of microtransactions tied multiplayer progression with loot boxes. Although it was eventually changed, the move seemed like a cash-grab.
That checkered history, along with this new development, could spell bad news for this highly anticipated game. Check out EA’s statement regarding the change in leadership below.
EA Studios is focused on bringing more creative new games and content to players. Laura Miele and her team have taken several steps internally to better support our game makers in this pursuit, such as expanding Samantha Ryan’s portfolio to lead additional studios, including Motive. Samantha is known for driving creative design and supporting game teams so they can bring their visions to life. She is a deeply experienced game-maker with a gameography that spans from The Sims to Batman: Arkham City to No One Lives Forever to the highly-anticipated Anthem.
With this change, Jade Raymond has decided to leave Electronic Arts. In her time with us, Jade helped to build great teams, and our projects underway at Motive and other studios continue unchanged. We’re appreciative of all of her efforts, and we wish Jade all the best as she moves on to her next adventure. We are driving greater creativity into everything we do across EA Studios, and we’ll look forward to sharing more in the months to come.