Earlier this week, EA did the thing they oh so frequently loves to do, which is making a bad decision. This time, it was cancelling Marvel’s Black Panther, alongside shutting down the two year old studio that was making it, Cliffhanger Games. As every single announcement like this over the past few years has been, it was an incredibly frustrating one that can’t be justified. Now, a new report from Bloomberg has shed a bit of light on why it was cancelled, as well as what the game might have been like.
For starters, according to the report, the announcement came as a shock to Cliffhanger staff. This was in part because the studio was actively hiring, and Black Panther had passed a “gate”, a term EA use for when executives look at how a game is doing and decide whether production should continue.
Some sources did also say that EA executives were still frustrated it hadn’t left pre-production despite being in the works for four years. That slowness was apparently due to the fact that a lot of now laid off staff were hired within the last year, even just the last few weeks and months.
The game itself sounded interesting too. Cliffhanger were being led by former Monolith head Kevin Stephens, the same studio behind the Middle-earth: Shadow series of games. Monolith’s beloved (and patented) Nemesis System was apparently going to be the basis of a new system in Black Panther expanding on those ideas. This included things like being able to play as T’Challa, Killmonger and Shuri, all of which would be competing for the Black Panther role.
You’d be able to play as one of them, with the other two becoming rivals that you could form relationships with. There would be Skrulls, shapeshifting aliens, that would have been trying to overtake Wakanda, some of which might pretend to be allies, others acting based on previous things you as the player might have done. You can see the similarities to the Nemesis System.
However, showing off this feature to executives was apparently difficult; building a game and a studio side by side was part of the struggle here, reportedly. On top of that, Cliffhanger were based in Kirkland, Washington, an expensive city that meant staff would need appropriate (and deserved) wages. EA also recently put in a return to office mandate, so it all seems to add up to the game not being far enough along with a studio that costs too much to run, in their eyes. Probably worth a reminder that EA CEO Andrew Wilson and EA Entertainment president Laura Miele took about $40 million home last year.
The whole thing is just tremendously unfair, and a massive shame. I would have loved to have seen a studio build upon the Nemesis System, easily one of the most interesting gameplay systems in the past decade locked behind something as stifling as a patent. As always, big solidarity to those affected by the layoffs.