You might not instantly have heard of Amy Hennig. For whatever reason, our industry hasn’t deified her in the ways we have Neil Druckmann, Hideo Kojima, or Cory Barlog. But when you look at her catalogue of work, it’s hard to think she doesn’t deserve it - but perhaps she just doesn’t style herself as an auteur quite so much. Creative director and writer of the first three 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted games - plus game director of Jak 3 and writer of Soul Reaver - Hennig is one of the triple-A scene’s most interesting creative voices. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Now that 🤪she’s worki⛎ng on a Marvel game, we should be very excited.
I don’t necessarily want Hennig to be hailed as an auteur so much as I want the industry as a whole to get over our obsession with them. It’s galling that 2,000 people worked on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2, and yet it’s Druckmann’s game. Despite the fact Haley Gross co-wrote it, it’s Druckmann’s. I don’t want Uncharted or this new Marvel game to be that for Hennig, but if you do so praise Druckmann, you should ඣprobably be asking right now why Hennig isn’t in line for the same treatment.
These days, it’s easy to write the earliest Uncharted titles off as generic. It suffers from its own success - it’s only generic because so many things copied it. Like Halo, it took an existing genre and reinvented it so completely that every game afterwards was forced to pay homage, retroactively making the original less unique. While Uncharted borrows from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider (as Halo takes cues from GoldenEye), it in turn went on to influence 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin's Creed, Horizon, and even the Tomb Raider reboots. It built what Hennig herself describes as the 'traversal genre' - a fresh take on platforming that suited the more mature, more blockbuster approach games were beginning to take. If you wanted to be hyperbolic, you could even draw a fairly credible line between Hennig's team creating the 'traversal genre' and the free-spirited climbing of Breath of the Wild.
This isn't about whether or not Hennig gets the credit she deserves though. Nor is it an argument that some men tend to get far too much credit for the collective work of hundreds, if not thousands of staff. It's just a reminder that Amy Hennig is a name to get excited about, and that reputation makes her Marvel project very enticing indeed.
All we know right now is that it's a Marvel game, and that it's a single-player adventure - this means it'll be 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Spider-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy-style Marvel, and thankfully not Avengers-style Marvel. There are a few other guesses we can make, however. Namely, it won't be Spidey, or the Guardians, or Wolverine, since they're at other studios. While the licensing details for Marvel's Avengers are not known, it's safe to say Hennig's Skydance New Media won't be doing an Avengers game of its own - in fact, a braver gambler than I might predict that it's not an Avengers character adjacent at all.
My first choice would be Black Panther, given that Hennig's traversal work on both Uncharted and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the upcoming Forspoken complement T'Challa's movements and environments. But then again, Black Panther is one of the few post-launch heroes added to Avengers, and a white woman probably shouldn't be the face of a Black Panther game. Throw in someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates as lead writer, and suddenly I'd be interested again, but Black Panther is more than just cool traversal - and might even be unavailable anyway.
X-Men seem like the biggest names once you cut out Spidey and Avengers, but then Wolverine is already elsewhere. The original X-Men would make for a cool game - so much so tha𒊎t the Guardians devs want to make one - but an X-Men game and a Wolverine game launching at around the same time set in different universes might be toꦇo similar for the money holders to sign off on it.
That means we're looking at a Marvel hero with an action-packed past, as reliant on interesting traversal as they are fighting, who is not Spider-Man, Wolverine, Black Panther, nor a Guardian of the Galaxy or an Avenger... holy shit is Amy Hennig making a Daredevil game?
You'd struggle to think of a more perfect hero for her. Black Panther suits her style but for obvious reasons is a loaded choice, and while personal preference might lead me to point to Scarlet Witch, Jubilee, Thor, Squirrel Girl, Gambit, or even fellow Defender Jessica Jones first, Daredevil feels like the best choice, and it ticks all the boxes too. We probably won't hear much more for a little while now - a reveal at one of 2022's big showcases seems most likely - but whatever it is, we should be very excited.