EA Motive has shared an exciting new message about their upcoming Iron Man video game.
In a new statement on their website, EA Motive General Manager Patrick Klaus had this to say:
“…Our focus has switched to the Iron Man project, giving us the opportunity to work (and play!) with another extraordinary property. We’re still early in pre-production and taking our time to make sure we set the best possible foundation for development.
But already, we’re finding so many opportunities to explore story, design and gameplay with Iron Man, and it’s exciting to see the fantasy start coming alive.
Even this early in the process, we’ve put in place a Community Council made up of Iron Man and Marvel fans; as with Dead Space, they’ll be offering feedback on pretty much everything throughout the development process.
Meanwhile, we’ve chosen Unreal Engine 5 as our game engine, in order to empower the dev team to work their magic and create something really special.”
Just as a reminder, Motive had just released the very well received Dead Space Remake last January 27, 2023. It came to Steam, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, and earned a respectable 89 Metacritic. One could call Dead Space Remake an initial salvo in the gigantic year for video games that has been 2023.
This is the reason to be hopeful about their upcoming Iron Man game. While we don’t know what this game is going to end up looking like, it is very much a clean break from the recent run of Marvel related video games with Crystal Dynamics.
Motive’s decision to go with Unreal is also practical. It will make it easier for the team to make the game for multiple platforms. If the rumors about the Switch 2 turn out to be true, this game may even be brought to that platform as well.
But Motive will be facing completely different challenges. Iron Man has had a messy history in video games, with his best outings likely as a playable character in the Marvel versus Capcom fighting games.
Of particular interest to us now is 2008’s Iron Man, which was a huge disappointment when it came out on PlayStation 4 and Xbox 360, and guaranteed that there would be no video game series to match the movies.
Motive is going to have to come up with a new game design to imagine how to play Iron Man, something that other game developers before them were unable to come up with. Maybe they’re the team to live up to this challenge, but we can only hope for the best.
