savannah posts

When Electronic Arts shut down Pandemic Studios last month, one of the reasons cities was that their California location was simply getting too expensive to support. Even though EA is supposedly going through a restructuring that will result in another 1,500 of their team members losing their jobs, they are apparently looking to build a new game development studio in a cheaper setting.

The Atlanta Business Journal reports that EA is looking at a site in the metro Atlanta, Georgia area for a possible studio that could hire up to 300 people. Sites in Savannah, Georgia as well as Louisiana and Florida are also being considered. Georgia already has a tax credit program in place that saves game developers up to 30 percent. The metro Atlanta area is already home to game developers like Hi-Rez Studios, Tripwire Interactive and CCP.

[Via GamePolitics]

Ubisoft released a three minute "introduction trailer" (also available in HD) for Far Cry 2 today, embedded above. It includes glimpses of the Montreal development studio, a small amount of gameplay footage, anecdotes about the team's African research safari, and commentary by the developers (one of whom looks suspiciously like Paul Rudd) about their vision for the gameplay and setting.

Note that the studio behind the original Far Cry -- Crytek -- is not involved with this sequel. Instead, the team that put together the Far Cry Instincts games -- the Xbox and Xbox 360 iterations of the series -- is cooking this one up. Those games were a little more focused than the original title, but also less progressive.

We witnessed a live presentation of Far Cry 2 on the floor at GDC this year and were impressed by the technology. The open-world approach to gameplay sounds exciting, but past attempts at open world FPSes have been hit-and-miss in terms of quality. We'll see if Ubisoft can pull it off when the game launches this fall.