What you need to know
- Marvel's Blade is a third-person superhero game being developed by Arkane Lyon, one of the studios under ZeniMax Media.
- Marvel's Blade was announced with a teaser trailer during the Game Awards 2023.
- Co-creative director Sebastien Mitton shared the first official concept art for the game, showing Paris under siege by vampires with Arkane's classic style.
- Marvel's Blade is still early in development.
Arkane Lyon is known for striking, unique art direction, and we've got our first look at some concept art for the team's next game.
Co-creative director Sebastien Mitton shared three pieces of artwork for Marvel's Blade on Thursday, giving a glimpse at how the French branch of Arkane Studios is imagining this upcoming superhero game. You can see all three pieces of art below (tap the bottom-right corner to enlarge the images:
This art was done by Sergey Kolesov and Jean-Luc Monnet, a freelance artist who previously worked on Dishonored 2 and the lead concept artist at Arkane Lyon, respectively.
When will we be playing Marvel's Blade?
First announced during the Game Awards 2023, Marvel's Blade is still fairly early in development. The trailer was pointedly a teaser, and various members of the team like studio head Dinga Bakaba have indicated that the work is really just beginning. Work listed on various LinkedIn profiles and other comments indicate it's been in some stage of development for over a year, but with how long big games take to make now, it's definitely a ways off.
Right now, it's probably best to just enjoy the announcement and not think to hard about when the game will be available. Assuming things go smoothly, a release date in 2026 doesn't seem impossible, but we'll have to wait and see.
Marvel's Blade doesn't have platforms announced yet, but as it's being developed by an Xbox first-party studio, it seems overwhelmingly likely it will at least launch on Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC.
While the superhero license from Marvel makes things more complicated, it's also seemingly likely that it'll be available day one on Xbox Game Pass, as we know that the upcoming Indiana Jones game from MachineGames is an Xbox console exclusive and will be in Xbox Game Pass day one after Microsoft amended the original contract with Disney.
Analysis: Arkane's style is a perfect fit
Obviously artwork isn't a final presentation of what a game will look like, but seeing the streets of Paris and the Daywalker drawn in Arkane's iconic style is just awesome. I always love seeing concept art and how it evolves over time, sometimes in subtle ways and at other points more radically. Arkane has confirmed that Marvel's Blade is a third-person game, which is a big shift.
With all of the team's past games being built as first-person titles, a third-person game will require different level design and an adjustment to how the art guides a player around. It'll be fascinating to see how the team tackles this challenge, even if we're probably not going to see anything besides more concept art for the next year or so.
