The fans of the movies, fans of the comic books, and of course fans of video games in general all have their eyes on the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers, which finally debuted on the Square Enix E3 stage after years in development. We still have another year to wait as the game prepares for a May 2020 release.
Marvel’s Avengers is expected to be Crystal Dynamics' biggest title to date, as the studio moves on from the commercially successful Tomb Raider reboot. However, if I’m being honest, I was less than impressed with what the developer has shown thus far, being that what was on display at E3 for Marvel’s Avengers was quite bland – although this could be chalked up to the game being early in development.
Now it seems we have new updates on development for Marvel's Avengers which could point to either its massive success or disappointing failure. Crystal Dynamics head of studio Scott Amos shared some of this information during an exclusive with GamesIndustry.biz, and it is very enlightening, to say the least.
"From our side, it's the biggest thing that we've ever done," Amos told GamesIndustry.biz. “We now have five studios working together to pull this off. Crystal Dynamics at Redwood Shores, we opened a new studio in Bellevue called Crystal North West. We have our partners in the Netherlands, Nixxes, which has a big team of people who we've worked with for 20 years. Eidos Montreal was our sister studio for all of Tomb Raider, so they're working on this. And even Square Enix Japan has folks from the tech group working with us.”
This is not even counting Marvel, who holds the franchise IP. Amos went on to say that working with them is like having Marvel as part of the actual development team.
Now, of course, this extra manpower and creative talent is a welcome one for a project this big, but it could also be the cause of mismanagement if handled poorly. Stretching out development across multiple studios is an endeavor that’s filled with as much possibilities as it is with dangers, as even the slightest of creative decisions can be the cause of a project's degradation.
That’s not to say that this will be successful as well, though we can all hope it does succeed. However, licensed video games aren’t exactly the big successes they’re often made out to be. Marvel’s Spider-Man is an exception, but keep in mind that Insomniac Games was basically given free rein for that title by Marvel, which meant that everything you see on that game is theirs. Time would tell if we’ll see a Crystal Dynamics-style game or something else entirely.
Marvel’s Avengers will be released on the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Google Stadia on May 15, 2020.
