VentureBeat interviewed Shaun Escayg, who previously worked at Naughty Dog as the creative director of Uncharted: The Lost Legacy. He is now the writer and director of Marvel’s Avengers.
„A lot of the story is about the human element of these heroes. How do they deal with guilt? How do they deal with loss? Can they put their differences aside? Bruce Banner is one of my favourite characters because he’s always in conflict with who he is. He’s a scientist, very intelligent, and very docile in a way. Then all of a sudden he has this part of himself that’s enraged, that can destroy anything with a flick of his hand. Is he dangerous? Is he really a hero? He’s battled that his whole life. Then you have someone like Iron Man who’s also very smart, very dependent on technology, very much about saving and protecting the world using technology, but he’s also very arrogant. He takes chances where other Avengers won’t. There’s conflict because of that.
It’s all about the conflict, right? What happened on A-Day? [when the Avengers revealed their new headquarters that quickly turned into a catastrophe – the editor] Who was at fault? Black Widow was in charge of the bridge. Did she fail? Should we have gone back and helped Cap? These are the human things that we wrestle with as well, and that’s what grounds this and makes this different from any other Avengers story. Also, it affects some of our heroes in other ways. I can’t give away details, but they’re affected by their mental state,” Escayg said.
Meanwhile, Scott Amos, the head of Crystal Dynamics, told Gamesindustry that Marvel is very closely working together with them on the game. „Marvel showed up and said, ‘What do you want to do?’ That’s how it started. They really looked at us and said, ‘Crystal, you guys are experts at making games, we’re experts at The Avengers. What do you want to do? What’s the original take you want to do on visuals, on the story?’ They’re not just collaborators, they’re partners. They’re embedded with us as a team. We talk to them daily. We send them everything we’re working on, we have builds they play and get feedback. We bring them to the studio and go through it together. Bill Rosemann [Marvel’s vice president of creative development] is 25 years at Marvel. He knows everybody. We’re like, ‘So we have a character, and this storyline we saw in issue x,’ and he’s like, ‘I can get you the writer, let’s go see what that person thinks’… We have this amazing collaboration with them that lets us do a little of the iconic fan service and a lot of doing an original take that makes it feel fresh and familiar,” Amos said.
Marvel’s Avengers, which will be playable offline according to Amos (saying that whoever buys a disc should never have to go online), will launch on May 15 on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Google Stadia, and PC.
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