Assassin’s Creed Valhalla’s director has joined Motive, the studio allegedly ‘rebooting Dead Space’

The game director behind Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed Valhalla has joined EA’s Motive studio.

As first reported by Axios and verified by VGC, Eric Baptizat joined the Star Wars Squadrons studio earlier this year to work on an unannounced project.

Baptizat had worked at Ubisoft for 16 years, most notably as the director of Valhalla, and the lead designer for other Assassin’s Creed entries Origins, and Black Flag.

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Motive has said it’s working on a new Star Wars action game and at least one other unannounced project, which is claimed to be a reboot of Dead Space, the sci-fi horror series by now-closed EA studio Visceral.

Although it’s not clear if Assassin’s Creed Valhalla director Baptizat is working on the alleged Dead Space reboot, his expertise with high-profile third-person action games would appear to make him a good fit.

According to an earlier Gematsu report, Motive’s new Dead Space game will be a “reimagining” of the series, rather than a straight sequel to the existing trilogy of games.

The Dead Space series first released in 2008 and has not seen a new instalment since 2013’s Dead Space 3. The series’ developer, Visceral Games, was closed by EA in 2017.

Following the closure of Visceral, which had spent two years developing a Star Wars heist game called Ragtag under prominent game director Amy Hennig (Uncharted), many of Dead Space’s senior developers formed a new PUBG Corporation development studio called Striking Distance in 2019.

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EA’s IP revival is reportedly a Dead Space ‘reimagining’

Star Wars: Squadrons studio Motive is reportedly leading a new instalment

Last year, Striking Distance announced a new sci-fi horror game, The Callisto Protocol, which could now end up going head-to-head with the series many of its leads helped create.

Among other Dead Space veterans, Callisto is being helmed by chief development officer Steve Papoutsis, who led the development of the EA franchise.