EA has spun up a new studio called Cliffhanger Games, which will be responsible for a new title centered around Marvel’s Black Panther. In collaboration with Marvel Games, the title will be an open-world, third-person and single player experience that the team hopes will “build an expansive and reactive world that empowers players to experience what it is like to take on the mantle of Wakanda’s protector, the Black Panther.”
Not to be confused with the Skydance Marvel game that features Captain America and T’challa’s grandfather as the WWII-era Black Panther, this Cliffhanger title is being led by Kevin Stephens, whose previous credits include overseeing Monolith Productions on the development of the Middle-Earth series (Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War). According to the announcement’s press release, the team has amassed talent from Monolith, 343, Sony Santa Monica and more. Stephens left Monolith back in 2021 to join EA and head up the studio that’d eventually become Cliffhanger, which is meant to lead development on internally made open-world action-adventure games for the publisher.
The title is still in early development, so there’s few clear details in place, but some key things come up in the press release worth keeping an eye on. First is the “reactiveness” of the world, which could be denoting choice-based gameplay or dialogue that may inform how the world of Wakanda shifts around your character. Doubling down on this idea, the release also states that the game’s focused on “giving [players] more agency and control over their narrative than they have ever experienced in a story-driven video game.” Given the success of Marvel’s Spider-Man over at Insomniac, it’s little surprise that this game is also going to be an open-world game, but the choice to call Wakanda a “rich Super Hero sandbox” suggests that how you get around might be similarly important and that we should expect an absolute bevy of skills, abilities, and the like to mess around with.
Importantly, the game’s announcement makes mention of the importance of diversity to the team, with Stephens going so far as to say, “It’s an incredibly rare opportunity to build a new team around the values of diversity, collaboration, and empowerment.” This Black Panther title could and should be a moment for EA to empower a whole host of Black creatives and developers to bring this character and world to life, and while the team admits it’s still early days for the project (and that they’re recruiting) only time will tell if they really follow through on this commitment.