I honestly don’t know how EA would be so secretive on who’s working on the game. Sure, the evasion can help with preventing (temporarily) anyone wanting to criticize who is better at making “this” or “that” type of game, but it’s like they feel it’s going to destroy sales if they tell the truth.
Considering that they’re going to get part of the profits in the first place, why in the world would they need to give evasions with “Respawn hand-picked the team?” It seems to me that the representative they asked has yet to be informed of what’s going on in their own work field, or they're just afraid to respond to the truth in a bad manner. And since the article writer is going Detective Noir in cracking down the development team working on this, either this is just sensationalism and the article writer knows, and is probably just doing this to reap in more views. Or they need to broaden their contacts exponentially, especially when IGN should already be brimming with contacts that have contacts within contacts, seriously!