Creative Assembly, the developer behind the Total War series of games, has opened its third studio based in the U.K., it announced today through a new blog post.
Creative Assembly’s third development studio is located in Newcastle, U.K. It will work alongside the company’s other studios in Sussex, U.K. and Sofia, Bulgaria for an unannounced project. The Newcastle studio is also dubbed as the “home to our newly formed Continuous Improvement Team.”
“The newly established Creative Assembly (CA) North is home to a growing flexible working team developing a project in collaboration with the studio’s Sussex team,” the company said. “While the project is yet to be announced it promises to give players an unforgettable experience. CA North is also home to a newly formed team focused on continuous improvement. This team is dedicated to collaborating across Creative Assembly with the goal of sustained continuous improvement in tools, workflows and development experience.”
The studio will be led by Giselle Stewart, who will serve as the studio director. Creative Assembly said Stewart has over 26 years of experience with AAA developers. She also had previous positions as a board member of The Independent Games Developers Association (TIGA), as well as the games developer’s trade association, the Creative Industries Federation, and Ukie.
“We are bringing new job opportunities to the North-East, building a studio which amplifies the fantastic culture and values of Creative Assembly,” Stewart said. “We will also extend the reach of the studio’s award-winning outreach program, the Legacy Project, to support excellence in industry education in the region.”
Sega Europe chief studio officer Tim Heaton expressed his excitement in seeing “what new experiences Creative Assembly North will contribute to.” Creative Assembly’s studio director Gareth Edmondson, on the other hand, pointed out “the establishment of a new continuous improvement team” who according to him will “see sustained benefit across all our teams for many years to come, contributing to a continually improving development experience for our people.”
The blog post ended with Creative Assembly announcing that it will be hiring around 100 new developers for both technical and creative roles “over the coming years.” The company also gave a brief teaser for its unannounced project, saying that it is already in its early prototyping phase.
This follows the news earlier this week about the new studio of Hitman developer IO Interactive based in Turkey. The company announced that it will be working on a bunch of new projects, such as Project 007, Project Fantasy, and, of course, the Hitman franchise.
