The Upcoming Black Panther Game Will Be Open-World, Suggests Job Listing

Last week, EA announced the creation of Cliffhanger Games, a new studio based in Seattle with offices in Austin, Orlando, LA, and Vancouver. It was also announced that the studio was working with Marvel to develop a single-player game based on the Black Panther IP. 

We have found some new information about the upcoming game, based on job postings from the studio. A job posting for a Senior Game Designer for Encounters mentions that the game will be open-world, something that has been rumored for at least a year, although finally confirmed.

There are some other interesting things we have found in the studio’s job postings. A posting for a Senior Software Engineer – Tools and Systems states that the Black Panther game is being developed with Unreal Engine 5. A job posting for a gameplay/narrative software engineer mentions that the game is an action RPG, and will have a unique dialogue system. 

It is interesting to see more EA studios abandon the internally developed Frostbite engine in favor of Unreal Engine 5. The wording of an open-world action RPG with a complex dialogue system reminds me of games like Red Dead Redemption. Being single-player, I would expect this Black Panther game to have a very heavy focus on the story, perhaps the story will also have branching paths. 

EA is no stranger to the Marvel IP. Cliffhanger’s sister studio Motive is currently working on an open-world Iron Man game. It is also interesting to see EA’s strong pivot to single-player games after a long period of shunning them. The success of other EA SP games like the Star Wars: Jedi series and the Dead Space remake have shown that single-player games are here to stay.