A new job opening has confirmed that Motive’s upcoming Iron Man game will be an open world title.
Electronic Arts has posted a job opening for a Senior Technical Artist, specifying that it will be for Iron Man. The job listing says this, directly:
“Motive Studios is looking for a Senior Technical Artist to help oversee the rendering related aspects of an open world action adventure AAA title. This position requires high-level artistic sensibilities and strong technical skills; the ability to work with the art and rendering teams to drive the development of new engine features and to guide the content creation to maximize what is available.”
Motive very recently proved their mettle on open world games with last year’s Dead Space Remake. As much as the game was popular with fans and critics, we should acknowledge that it was a flawed release. As Digital Foundry pointed out in this video nearly a year after release, it still has stuttering issues on PC, and it isn’t likely that Motive or EA will ever fix this.
We had recently reported on rumors about Motive trying to make a new Dead Space game. It seems that this was not a remake of Dead Space 2, but an attempt at making an original title. Motive missed milestones while making Dead Space Remake, and failed to bring together a pitch for a new Dead Space game that could move forward.
So, as things stand, the Dead Space franchise is back to being inactive, at least for now. Some staff at Motive are forming a new team to be part of the upcoming Battlefield reboot, while the rest of the studio will continue work on this Iron Man game.
Iron Man has had a spotty career in video games. Tony’s most popular incarnation could be somewhere between his appearance in Disney Infinity 2.0, and in the Marvel vs. Capcom video games. Sega’s Iron Man video game in 2008 rode the wave of the popularity of RDJ’s first outing as Copper Top, but did not turn out to be a worthy title in its own right. For all that it’s worth, Iron Man / X-O Manowar in Heavy Metal is not a good game at all, but it’s a wonderful time capsule.
That Motive chose to make Iron Man an open world game isn’t particularly unusual, but it’s hopefully a good sign that the studio is going in the right direction. Last February, EA CEO Andrew Wilson revealed that the company would be “moving away from development of future licensed IP that we do not believe will be successful in our changing industry.”
While EA has shown a willingness to take risks, they seem to have higher expectations on getting a return for their investments. Motive seems to be in a challenging position right now, they have to make sure this title is a guaranteed moneymaker.
