EA and Marvel announced a AAA Iron Man game is being developed by EA Motive.
While few details were revealed, VP and Creative Director at Marvel Games, Bill Rosemann spoke to Game Industry.biz about that and what the future holds in regards to Marvel games.
The biggest thing revealed is that the current plan is not to have an interconnected game universe, similar to the absurdly successful Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“The world is, amazingly, very familiar and accepting of the multiverse,” Rosemann explains. “We have all these different realities. Now they’re all real, and we want to give everyone the freedom to tell their story. We don’t want to say ‘you can’t blow up the moon, because this game over here by another studio needs the moon’. We want to give everyone the freedom and the clear lane to tell their story.”
Game Industry.biz
Rosemann furthered this by explaining the core concept, which they refer to as Marvel building blocks.
“Every decision [the Motive team] are making about their Marvel universe, their Tony Stark, their Iron Man… they’re building it from the ground-up,” Rosemann explains. “But it is being built with what we call Marvel building blocks. When you play the game, it may not be the Iron Man story that you’ve experienced before, but there will be many similar things. What would you expect in a Marvel story? There are things, there are institutions, certain companies, groups… I don’t want to say what is and isn’t in this game, but for example, there is S.H.I.E.L.D, Hydra, there’s the Daily Bugle, there’s these different countries that exist. These are building blocks that make the Marvel universe. They make it feel like a real Marvel story. Now with that, [Motive is] going to tell its story, and we will give them that freedom.”
Game Industry.biz
Oliver Proulx, executive producer at Motive, also touched on how they approached creating an experience based off one of the most well known Marvel heroes of all time.
“It’s about understanding the characters,” Proulx tells us. “What drives these characters? And building a great story from there. Of course, not only from a story perspective, but also a gameplay mechanics perspective, how does that translate to the nature of the characters? With Guardians of the Galaxy it was all about team play, so we built a lot of narrative systems around that. And with Iron Man, having that visceral experience of flying around as Iron Man is going to be supremely important, and of course building a great story around Tony Stark and tapping into his character. He is a creative genius, that is his superpower, so there are great narrative opportunities there. But then it’s about how that translates to the gameplay experience as well.”
Game Industry.biz
The article notes Iron Man is still in the early pre-production stage, with notable journalist and insider, Jeff Grubb, adding that the current plan is to complete Dead Space before moving to Iron Man. He also mentioned a Black Panther game, which was not revealed, is being worked on by former Shadow of Mordor developers.
