Total War developer founds Creative Assembly North in Newcastle

thesixthaxis.com:

Sega Europe and Creative Assembly have announced the founding a new studio: Creative Assembly North. The new team will make its home up in Newcastle with a plan to recruit over 100 developers in the region.

Creative Assembly North is led by Giselle Stewart OBE, who has joined Creative Assembly as Studio Director, bringing decades of experience in AAA development.

She said, “Starting a new development studio from scratch with the full support and insights of one of the UK’s oldest and largest studios is incredibly exciting. We are embracing flexibility, fast iteration, and creation, while fostering cross-location collaboration.”

Creative Assembly North will be something of a satellite studio for the company’s overarching efforts, set to work collaboratively with the main Creative Assembly studio in Sussex on an unannounced project. It will also be home to the Continuous Improvement Team that will seek to improve development tools, workflows and developer experience.

It means that Creative Assembly will be much more easily reach the talent available in the North of the UK, with Newcastle already home to studios like Ubisoft Reflections – in fact, this is where Stewart worked for nearly 20 years – and Sumo Newcastle, and able to cast a wider net across Yorkshire, Lancashire and Scotland for recruitment, without the kind of upheaval that moving to Sussex would require.

Creative Assembly is best known for the Total War series and other strategy games like Halo Wars 2, but has sought to broaden its portfolio on a number of occasions. There was the excellent Alien: Isolation, for example, while the company is also working on a multiplayer first person shooter Hyenas.

Source: press release