EA has confirmed they are closing Ridgeline Games.
EA President of Entertainment and Technology Laura Miele made the announcement in a public statement:
“Marcus Lehto recently made a personal decision to leave the project. To ensure our work continues uninterrupted, we immediately appointed leadership at Criterion to oversee our single-player work.
As part of this change, we’ll be winding down Ridgeline as a standalone studio in Seattle, with some team members joining Ripple Effect.”
As Laura Miele alluded to, Ridgeline’s founder, Marcus Lehto, decided to leave EA last week. He also confirmed that it was his own decision to leave the company. In response to this news, Lehto made this tweet:
“Gut punched to see EA lay off my team. So many very talented devs who were incredibly valuable to the Battlefield franchise.”
We cannot help speculating on how this studio closure relates to Lehto’s exit from the company, because they may be directly related. EA may have decided to close the studio because Lehto left. On the completely opposite end, it’s possible that Lehto left because he knew, or suspected, that EA would be making this move against them.
In any case, there is a tragic element to this announcement that casual gamers may not even realize. A year after the release of Battlefield 2042, EA announced the formation of Ridgeline Games. Lehto was announced to be the studio’s founder, with a huge emphasis on his background on the Halo games.
In other words, Ridgeline Games was supposed to be the studio that would redeem Battlefield because of Battlefield 2042. They were part of the plans for Respawn’s Vince Zampella to oversee Battlefield moving forward, which has now evolved to long term plans to make an overarching Battlefield universe.
Laura Miele has now confirmed that Criterion Games will be the new head studio for Battlefield. Founded in 1993, the studio is best known for the Burnout driving/racing franchise, and worked on some Need for Speed games.
However, in 2006, Criterion did take a stab at the FPS genre for consoles with Black. While this shooter would not go on to become a real franchise, it did indicate that the studio had the chops to work on the genre.
Criterion was set to work on the Star Wars Battlefront games before getting on board Battlefield with Battlefield V, released in 2018. They have been working on the franchise for six years now, and they should be able to live up to the task, even in these difficult circumstances.
We wish the people at Ridgeline Games the best, and hope that they can find placement back in the video game industry.
