Playground Games hires new talent from BioWare, EA Motive and Rocksteady, GamesIndustry.biz reports. These staff will be working at the second studio and bring a wide variety of experience and skills to the team.
Principal environment artist Scotty Brown is formerly from EA Motive, where he worked on Star Wars Battlefront II. Lead environment artist Noel Lukasewich hails from BioWare, having worked there for 13 years on all four Mass Effect games. Narrative director Martin Lancaster comes from Rocksteady, having worked as senior scriptwriter and lead scriptwriter on Batman: Arkham Knight and Batman: Arkham VR respectively.
Principal animator Chris Goodall arrives from Ninja Theory, having worked on such titles as Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, DmC: Devil May Cry and Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice. Lead technician Rob den Dekker joins the QA team, as he’s previously worked at Ninja Theory, Microsoft and Lionhead, testing games like Fable 2 and Forza Horizon 2. Lead UI artist Joe McKernan returns to Playground Games, having left in 2014 for Guerrila Games, where he worked on Horizon: Zero Dawn, then worked at Bungie on Destiny 2.
Studio Director Gavin Raeburn told GamesIndustry.biz that “I’m really pleased with the quality of the team we’re building here at Playground. We continue to attract world-class talent from around the world thanks to our exciting projects and the passion of our team. It’s been a fantastic start for our second studio and I look forward to seeing it continue to grow over the coming months.”
Playground Games has been extremely busy over the last couple of years. After developing Forza Horizon 3, they revealed they were opening a second studio to work on an open-world action RPG. Then, at the Xbox E3 2018 conference, it was revealed they were one of several new studios being bought by Microsoft to help bolster first-party content for Xbox.
Whatever action RPG Playground Games is working on, they’re developing an incredibly talented second studio. Hopefully we’ll learn more soon in the coming months.
