Medal of Honor developer Danger Close has been disbanded, EA has confirmed, with DICE LA taking its place and serving a support role for the main Swedish studio.
“Danger Close as it was doesn’t exist any more,” EA Games boss Patrick Söderlund told Eurogamer.
“There are people who left LA, people who work with DICE LA, and there are some who work in other parts of EA, as always when something gets dismantled.”
Presumably, there are also some who were laid off, in a series of cuts in February.
DICE LA, which was announced in May, is the natural successor to Daner Close, which boasted a couple of key members imported from DICE central in Sweden.
Söderlund said the LA office will play a support role for games made in Sweden, specifically the Star Wars: Battlefront game announced at E3 2013.
“Imagine stuff like potential expansion packs and premium services being managed and handled out of LA,” he said.
“But the main game, Battlefront, is being built in Sweden. And so is Mirror’s Edge. And so is Battlefield 4. It’s a way for us to expand the DICE universe, to be able to do more. They are helping. Who knows where this will take them long term? Right now they’re focused on helping.”
The executive said that having a DICE outpost in LA allows the developer to take advantage of a broader talent pool.
“Where can we find the right talent and people we think have critical skills we need? When you’re in Sweden, Stockholm is a gigantic gaming city with DICE and Mojang and all the other companies, but we realised we needed to extend our reach if we wanted to get to the breadth of talent we wanted,” he said.
“We also thought we could export some of the good things about DICE into here. Since the DICE LA announcement we had a lot of pressure on that studio from people who want to come work there. And after E3, as you can probably imagine, there will be more.”
Danger Close was founded in 1995 as DreamWorks Interactive. EA picked it up in 2000, and merged it with Command & Conquer developer Westwood Studios and EA Pacific in 2003, shedding much of its RTS talent in the process.
The studio’s new name, Danger Close, was attached to it in 2010, when EA announced the team would focus on rebooting the Medal of Honor series. It produced two games – 2010’s Medal of Honor and 2012’s Medal of Honor: Warfighter, the latter of which did so poorly that EA took the franchise “out of rotation”.
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