Director of cancelled Battlefield game doesn’t “have anything positive to say about EA” amid layoffs

Evidently, no one is free from the waves of layoffs that have been rocking the gaming industry as of late. Marcus Lehto has the kind of pedigree most studios would kill for, racking up art director, creative director and project lead credits on every game in the legendary Halo series—but even his team wasn’t immune, leaving a bad taste in Lehto’s mouth that he’s been none too shy about expressing.

Lehto’s team, which was working on the next single-player Battlefield game, was among those affected by EA’s far-reaching layoffs, fostering no small amount of discontent in the veteran game developer, who posted his thoughts on X, formerly Twitter, on March 16.

Until very recently, Lehto was the head of Ridgeline Games, an EA subsidiary studio opened in 2022 with the stated aim of “developing a narrative campaign” for Battlefield while DICE continued to handle the multiplayer in the form of Battlefield 2042. EA was evidently gambling on his game dev experience, hoping that someone so involved in creating some of the most influential first-person shooters of all time would be able to lend a bit of that magic to Battlefield as well.

Ridgeline Games’ single-player take on Battlefield would have launched sometime after Battlefield 2042—the operative phrase there being “would have”. EA recently laid off a good five percent of its workforce, resulting in the closure of Ridgeline and the cancellation of whatever they were working on. Lehto chose to side with his team and leave EA as a result rather than be reassigned to another studio, summing up his feelings in a succinct post wherein he states he doesn’t “have anything positive to say about EA” and how his team is “suffering.”

For those left rudderless as a result of EA cutting them loose, it’s a gesture of solidarity that shows not everyone in a senior position is okay with this recent and worrying trend. Lehto’s frustrations, as it happens, mirror those of many players as EA shuffles teams around and kills projects internally. Its canceled Mandalorian game, in particular, developed by the team behind Titanfall, held a great deal of promise. It could have served as a spiritual successor to the excellent Star Wars: Bounty Hunter but was simply another casualty of these layoffs. The only major projects left on the horizon for EA are the new entries in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age franchises, with anything else either canceled in development or as yet unrevealed.

As for that single-player Battlefield project, it’s been handed off to Criterion Games, the team behind Need for Speed: Unbound. Only time will tell whether anything good comes of it or if it will instead become a mere bullet point on its developers’ resumes.