EA to introduce persistant player profiles

EA's Peter Moore has outlined the publisher's plans for persistent online identities.

"Today we're looking at a seamless experience across all our franchises," the EA Sports president said, speaking at the MI6 conference in San Francisco, as reported by Joystiq, referring to persistant, cloud-based player profiles.

"Regardless of where you are, what platform you have, what game you're playing, that you're constantly connected."

Moore said this connectivity, which recognises the same player identity across multiple titles, will reward players for playing various EA games.

"Their presence there gets its achievements and carries them from iteration to iteration,"he said.

"It's no longer 'buy Madden 11 and then buy Madden 12 and start from scratch,' it is 'take everything that you've done and migrate it and move it along.'"

EA's plans go further than taking some of the frustration out of annual iterations.

"This is how we at EA Sports individualize and personalize this as the future of our brand," Moore said, "And ultimately the future of what Electronic Arts as a whole is going to do across all of its titles."

EA has already dabbled in this area with its EA Profiles. Registering a new copy of Dead Space 2 unlocks special items in Dragon Age 2, while flagging both games nets rewards in Facebook game Dragon Age: Legends. Dragon Age uses player's EA profiles to push character data out to the BioWare Social Network. Need for Speed's Autolog social network is available on mobile devices.

EA head John Riccitiello has said in the past that the publisher wants to push its social networks as a platform.