It would appear that EA is eager to expand its portfolio of games into the burgeoning action-adventure genre typified, these days, by games like Assassin’s Creed:

Executive Vice President of EA Studios Patrick Soderlund, sees the action genre as the biggest segment in the industry, and that EA doesn’t have a lot of them. That’s why their strategic direction is to expand their “portfolio,” and build more new action IPs.

“If you look at the biggest segment in our industry, which is action, we don’t have a lot, EA is not known to make gigantic action games like Assassin’s Creed or Batman or GTA or those types of games that are really big. The strategic direction that we put in motion is to expand our portfolio more into that segment, to see what can we bring to gamers that maybe hasn’t been done before.”

When Jade Raymond’s Motive studio was brought up as the one assigned to handle upcoming action projects, he replied with “maybe,” and that they aren’t aiming to “go after GTA” from the beginning.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: a massive, open-world action-adventure title in the style of Assassin’s Creed, bearing the Ultima name and set in Britannia, would be a really awesome thing.