Marvel’s presence at San Diego Comic-Con is always massive, as people check in to see where the company’s many properties are going next, but this year is a special one for gamers. Marvel’s Avengers by Crystal Dynamics, Nintendo Switch exclusive Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order, and Iron Man VR were all in the spotlight during the Marvel Gaming panel and ComingSoon live-blogged all the announcements.
Marvel’s Avengers was revealed during E3 2019 but not much was said about it or shown. The Marvel Gaming panel at SDCC 2019 gave onlookers the first real look at gameplay and some additional details about the game. We don’t have the gameplay footage yet, but one of the ComingSoon reporters did share that the game will have a single-player campaign. Players will be able to jump out of it straight into multiplayer, which is built around that campaign.
We know that Marvel’s Avengers is a game Crystal Dynamics plans to unravel over multiple years, but what are the aspects that will keep players engaged? One such aspect is customization. You’ll play as the well-known characters from Marvel Comics, but you can also customize them to your liking. The gameplay of this was shown and should be released sometime in the near future. Ahead of the May 15, 2020, release date for the game, there will be a beta test as well.
If you were hoping for a release date for Iron Man VR, you’re out of luck. The development team spoke about the excitement of creating the suit for virtual reality and how Iron Man is perfect for VR, but that’s about it. The game is playable at SDCC, so, hopefully, players won’t have to wait terribly long to step into the Iron Man suit.
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order is the game we know the most about, so it makes sense that it was the first to be shown and had the least to reveal. The game comes out tonight on the Nintendo Switch, after all. Nevertheless, there were a couple of surprises. One is that Loki, the adopted brother of Thor, is an unlockable character in the game. Cyclops and Colossus, two popular X-Men, will be added to the game via a free update on August 30. Lastly, it was revealed that the first paid DLC pack for the game will be a Marvel Knights collection that includes Moon Knight, Punisher, Morbius, and Blade.
The Call of Duty franchise has held a special place in my heart ever since I played my first Black Ops game back in 2010. That game's campaign was something else, with twists and turns that culminated in a mind-blowing finale. We can all admit that compared to those older campaigns, the recent CODs have been lackluster at best, and a complete and utter disappointment at worst. The reboot of Modern Warfare did give me some hope, as the first two installments were actually quite good, but the third game left such a bad taste in my mouth that I wasn’t exactly expecting much from Modern Warfare 4.
After recently finishing the campaign, I can say that this installment is nothing like the recent releases and instead feels closer to the franchise’s roots. For the first time in a long while, the campaign comes across as well-crafted rather than rushed to hit a release date. It arrives three years after MW3, and you can see exactly where all that time went. It seems the studio finally made listening to player feedback a priority.
Epic Games has just announced the 2026 Epic AI MegaJam, which is looking to see how much game development can be squeezed into a very short window. This is running from November 12 through November 15.
Participants can work alone or in teams of up to five people, build in Unreal Engine or Unreal Editor for Fortnite, and bring along “as many AI agents as you want.” Epic explicitly encourages coding agents, AI-generated assets, audio tools, writing tools, and other AI systems. The official event page literally says "Vibe your way to $50k.”
It’s turning into a pretty good time to be a Monster Hunter fan who plays on a phone. Capcom has confirmed that Monster Hunter Outlanders will launch on Android and iOS on October 29, giving the series a new mobile-first game just as Monster Hunter Rise is also preparing to make the jump to smartphones through Netflix.
Outlanders is being developed by Tencent subsidiary TiMi Studio Group under license and supervision from Capcom. Unlike Rise, which appears to be the full console and PC game adapted for mobile, Outlanders is a free-to-play survival hunting game made specifically for phones.