First Details on EA Chicago Marvel Fighter

On Friday, a group of game industry members took the stage at a San Diego Comic-Con panel to discuss the process of making video games with Marvel licenses. Along with representatives for Iron Man, Spider-Man: Friend or Foe, and the upcoming MMO from Cryptic, EA Chicago’s Kudo Tsunoda showed up to chat a bit about his just-announced Marvel fighting game. Here’s what we were able to pick up on the game.

“None of the games that have come out so far really have paid off what an epic superhero battle is all about,” explained Tsunoda. “Either the characters themselves don’t fight as the superheroes that they’re portraying, or you’re not getting the epic scale of the battles that take place. You know, most of the videogames that have come out take existing fighting mechanics, throw a couple of superheroes in it and call it a superhero fighting game. Marvel [Nemesis]: Rise of the Imperfects, you know, [from] EA — the company I work for — it was pretty much that same way.”

“At EA Chicago, we’re known for our innovative fighting series, be it Fight Night or Def Jam: Icon… EA is just tired of making that same old superhero fighting game,” he continued. “We figured we want to take a crack at delivering on the promise of what an epic superhero videogame is all about… we want to play off the abilities of the characters where each of them feel like a totally different play experience, and then open up the world a bit so it can play off of those character abilities and get an epic superhero battle going on, as opposed to a couple of guys in costumes running around.”

He later explained what this “epic scale” is meant to showcase — the game will take place in open areas such as cities that include several blocks. And since each superhero will be playing to their specific traits, it sounds like the developers will be in for some serious balancing work.

The look of the game is going to stay away from photo-realism, and try to capture the “Marvel style,” which isn’t necessarily cel-shaded, and not a dark and edgy look — just something Tsunoda described as a “hyper level of detail.” We’ll have to wait for the screenshots before we know what that means. For the number of characters, Tsunoda said it’s “more than two, and less than 50.” The last hint we picked up is that the game will likely incorporate downloadable content.

With a release scheduled for next year, it’s not surprising that EA’s not ready to reveal everything about the game just yet; we expect to hear a lot more in the next couple months.

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hmmm i think im tired of the marvel fighting games already.