Assassin's Creed producer Jade Raymond has teased the first game from his new studio, Haven, which has made itself compatible with PlayStation only. The game certainly has some very lofty goals, including potentially being a "terabyte" game, meaning it may require extensive streaming to complete local files.
In an interview with GI.biz, Raymond spoke highly of Haven's passions for his debut game, a new IP, and also talked about why aligning with Sony was the right decision.
Raymond said Haven's first game will be "really ambitious" and show what the PS5 is capable of. He also said that the file size of the game could be really huge and that the game streaming technology could play a role in the execution of the game. Raymond takes what he learned from his time at Google with the Stadia team and apparently applies it to Haven.
“What does it mean to support the first terabyte of game? What does it mean to support this level of data? All these things we've learned to enable this generation's game flow are interesting to get to the next level of quality." said. "So there are a few things we've learned as we apply our technology stack."
Raymond isn't ready to share details about Haven's first game, but he said it will have an important social element. “The pandemic has proven that gaming is the social glue that binds communities together. It's what you do, especially for the younger generation, the way you make friends and hang out. This is something we really want to build and design.” I said.
Raymond added that Haven is taking a close look at the "remix generation" and creating his new game for that audience. “It started a while ago, there's an era of self-expression where we design our NikeID shoes, where we read our friends' blogs rather than what our professional journalists write,” he said. “And I think that just kept getting further with things like TikTok. This is another thing we consider at the heart of this IP. Beyond user-generated content, it's about self-expression and taking the concept of remixes. to the next level.”
Haven's first game is a new IP, and Raymond said the goal is to create a world that "could last for generations and become meaningful to people on a deeper level."
“But how do we create an IP that has this depth but is designed to be fan-owned from the start? When we created Assassin's Creed, we were really thinking of creating an IP that could belong to the creative teams. will come,” he said. “We thought that if we create a framework for anything that takes place at a time in history and has the Assassins behind it, [it] would be consistent with the brand so teams can develop it and own it.”
On the deal with PlayStation for Haven's debut game, Raymond said Sony stands out as a company that "really understands the creative process." He also mentioned that Sony is known to give autonomy to game studios, which is a "big draw".
“Also, we've all been big fans of Sony since childhood. There's something really cool about starting work on a first-party PlayStation game. "For many people, it's a dream of what they want to do," he said. I said.
After producing the original Assassin's Creed games at Ubisoft, Raymond moved to EA where he worked on a new Star Wars game that never came out. He joined Google in 2019 to set up a new internal Stadia development team and left Google when the company decided to shut down its game development studios.
