Hello, PlayStation fans! We just released our biggest Expansion yet to Marvel’s Avengers – War for Wakanda. It features Black Panther, our new playable Hero, a slew of dangerous new enemy types, and hours of new multiplayer content, but today we want to share a little bit about the story and offer some insight into how we crafted it.
Just like our main campaign, War for Wakanda tells an original story set in our Marvel’s Avengers universe. T’Challa rules over the sovereign nation of Wakanda, a technologically advanced country with a stockpile of a rare meteoric alloy called Vibranium. When the nefarious Ulysses Klaue breaches Wakanda’s borders, T’Challa will have to confront his distrust of others and work alongside the Avengers to defeat his foe.
When crafting this story, our narrative team (Narrative Director Nicole Martinez, Game Writer Hannah MacLeod, Game Writer Jessica Krause, and Narrative Designer Keano Raubun) reflected on Black Panther’s comic history in order to differentiate between the essential and non-essential elements of his persona and narrative. The death of T’Challa’s father T’Chaka, for example, is one of those essential beats that always happens in some form in Black Panther stories – much like Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben – and so that was an element we knew we had to maintain in our lore as well.
Klaue’s origins are an example of an element we got to play with though. In the comics, he’s the son of a war criminal who enters Wakanda to steal technology. In War for Wakanda, we rewrote his origins in a way that opened the door to some exciting new combat scenarios for the game, including two new Villains and the addition of a variety of new enemy types.
In our retelling, Klaue is still a sonic physicist like he is in the comics, allowing us to introduce enemies with sonic-powered weapons into the game. It also meant we could transform the human Ulysses Klaue into his sonic-monster alter ego, Klaw.
Another little wrinkle we added to the lore was the inclusion of the infamous Crossbones as Klaue’s head lieutenant. The Crossbones fight is one of our exciting new villain encounters players get to experience, dealing with his impenetrable shield tech and his heavy assault weaponry.
Like Klaue, we drew a lot of inspiration from the comics for our characterization of Shuri. We loved her youthfulness, her presence, and her ability to lead in these stories, and you’ll see these characteristics in our version as well. Shuri and T’Challa are at odds in War for Wakanda on how to deal with Klaue, and we think that conflict will make our take on these characters feel distinct from other incarnations. We think it’s fun to experience our favorite characters in new ways, which is why we spend so much time making each of our cast members feel distinct from their comic book and film incarnations rather than just copying and pasting their personas in other media into our game.
Our version of T’Challa should feel distinct too. While the Black Panther from the films is new to the throne, War for Wakanda depicts a version of T’Challa who’s been leading for years. He exudes a surety and confidence that you don’t get to see in the film.
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