The deal between EA and Marvel (Disney) hasn’t been very successful so far, but we may have found out what could have been with the canceled Black Panther game.

Bloomberg editor Jason Schreier revealed more information about the recently canceled Black Panther game from Electronic Arts and Cliffhanger Studios. He discussed a number of challenges the game faced during its four-year development and provided details on what the game would have included if it had been completed. Schreier says that Electronic Arts canceled Black Panther and closed Cliffhanger Games because the game’s development was not progressing at the right pace.

Schreier’s sources say that Electronic Arts executives were frustrated that the game was still in pre-production, and, although it had recently gained momentum, management had lost patience. It was too late for the developers to turn things around. Schreier cites two key reasons for the game’s slow development. First, because Cliffhanger was founded in 2021, the studio was still expanding and scaling up to support developing a AAA game. The second factor is the studio’s ambition to create a system similar to Monolith’s famous Nemesis system and the associated problems of developing procedural narrative games and presenting them to executives.

According to Schreier, the game would have featured various playable heroes from the comic book universe, such as T’Challa, Killmonger, and Shuri, who would have competed to become the Black Panther. The heroes would have had the support of Marvel’s infamous shape-shifting aliens, the Skrulls. However, the Skrulls would only be partial allies because some of them could remember the player’s behavior and act accordingly (à la the Nemesis system).

Apparently, Electronic Arts management didn’t foresee the direction in which the game was heading, which led to the news earlier this week and, as we reported yesterday, the third wave of mass layoffs this year.

Source: WCCFTech, Bloomberg