Josef Fares, game director of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and prison-break adventure A Way Out, has confirmed that he will once again partner with Electronic Arts for the development of his next game. Fares, who made headlines earlier this year for his expletive-filled speech at The Game Awards, says Hazelight Studios has been working on the new title for a few weeks.
A Way Out was published as part of EA Originals, the company’s indie program. It’s not entirely clear whether or not the new title will be published under that label, or the partnership has changed in the wake of Hazelight’s success with A Way Out.
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In an interview with Eurogamer, Fares stated that “yeah, we’re with EA. It’s no problem. It’s super-good support. I don’t care what publisher I work with, it’s going to be the same. This is how I work: I respect the economical aspect but nobody fucks with the vision – it’s very, very important. And they know it at EA now, and they’re super supportive.” Fares spoke recently about just how much support EA offered during the development of A Way Out, which likely helped this new partnership develop.
Fares announced that he was working on a new game on Twitter back in April. Understandably, that means that Hazelight are “just in the early pre-production stuff,” but should “go full production” later this summer. Don’t expect to see the new game anytime soon though, as Fares says “maybe in two or three years we [sic] show something.”
That said, he did still have a few choice hints to share. The new game will be “very different” to either of the studio’s previous titles, but will be “bigger” and “longer” than A Way Out. The focus, however, will still be on making game mechanics tell a story or portray emotions, as players saw in both Brothers and A Way Out.
The next EA Original is Sea of Solitude, an adventure set in a world in which loneliness turns humans into monsters. There’s no release date just yet, but the game’s showing at E3 had a lot of promise.