Electronic Arts decided to stop the development of another game called Gaia that has been in development for years. It happened shortly after the company canceled the revision of Anthem.
The decision was part of a recent resource shift at EA, according to a Bloomberg report. The game with a code name Gaia was never officially announced but has been in development for almost six years.
The project was first teased in 2015 after EA founded the new studio Motive run by famous producer Jade Raymond (she is known for her work on Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs series). In 2017, former employees of BioWare’s Montreal office, which was dismissed after releasing Mass Effect Andromeda, joined the studio.
Gaia was described as a “highly ambitious, innovative new game that puts the power and creativity in your hands.” Motive wanted to make an open-world title, similar to the projects that Raymond worked on at Ubisoft.
According to Bloomberg, the cancellation of Gaia happened after EA recently reviewed in-progress games, including Anthem NEXT (the development of the revision was also stopped). However, the company still has a lot of projects in making.
“We have a deep and robust pipeline of new content with more than 35 new games in various levels of incubation and development,” EA spokesperson John Reseburg told Bloomberg.
The next Dragon Age is one of these games. Jason Schreier also notes that EA allowed BioWare to remove all multiplayer elements from the project to make it a single-player-only game. It’s an unusual move from the company known for its previous statements on the death of single-player titles.
According to the sources, there were two main reasons behind the decision. First is the success of Jedi Fallen Order, which reached more than 10 million players in a few months, and the second is the failure of BioWare’s online game Anthem. With that being said, it seems like EA now has more faith in single-player games than it had in the past years.