There was no way out of production hell: Jason Schreier revealed the reasons behind Black Panther's cancellation and Cliffhanger Games' studio closure
A few days ago it became known that Electronic Arts decided to completely cancel the development of superhero action game Black Panther based on Marvel comics and close the studio Cliffhanger Games, specially created for this project.
In the network immediately appeared a lot of speculations and to clarify the situation, one of the most authoritative journalists of the game industry Jason Schreier shared his information.
Here's What We Know
In his material in Bloomberg Schreier explained that "Black Panther" fell into a real production art, from which there was almost no chance to get out. According to him, the Cliffhanger team worked on the game for four years, but the project never got beyond pre-production.
The developers faced huge difficulties at all stages of pre-production, from hiring qualified employees to presenting their ideas to the management. On top of that, the studio didn't have a clear vision for the game's final concept.
Schreier also revealed some details about the Black Panther storyline: Tʼ Challa, Killmonger and Shuri were to be at the centre of the story, battling other characters to become the new Black Panther.
The core gameplay of the cancelled game was planned to have a system that resembled Nemesis from the Middle-earth: Shadow of ... dileogy, which would have affected the characters' behaviour depending on the player's actions. They would receive weaknesses, reinforcements, form alliances, feud with each other, ambush each other and, in general, behave like Orcs from the game based on "The Lord of the Rings".
This system was chosen for a reason, as Cliffhanger was made up of former employees of Monolith Productions, who were the authors of Middle-earth and Nemesis technology.
In March, the team was hopeful that they would still be able to get to the stage of full production, but EA was extremely disappointed with the lack of results, cancelled the game and closed the studio.
Source: Bloomberg
