Blade Video Game Announced

Video Games

The Daywalker is coming to consoles. At tonight’s Game Awards, Arkane Studios announced that a Blade video game, based on the Marvel Comics character, is being developed by them and Bethesda. Marvel’s Blade will be a single-player game set in Paris, part of which has been quarantined due to a “supernatural emergency,” which presumably involves vampires. Arkane Studios is behind video game series Dishonored and Prey, as well as Deathloop and Redfall. Marvel’s Blade is very early in its development, so there’s no release date right now or even announced platforms (though I imagine it’ll be on all the big-name next-gen ones), but Arkane did show a short cinematic trailer:

Marvel is staking a claim on the video game market in the wake of Spider-Man’s success. Their recent forays haven’t all been successes; Marvel’s Avengers was an embarrassing failure, and Guardians of the Galaxy suffered for it as well, despite being a much better game by most accounts. But Spider-Man and now Spider-Man 2 seem to have pushed them to branch out, with Wolverine on the way from Insomniac, and now Blade getting announced. There isn’t much to glean about Blade yet; the trailer is just a cinematic that tells us Blade exists and sometimes gets his hair cut. But if they put the same thought into this (and Wolverine) that they did into Spider-Man, especially insofar as getting the character’s powers, movements, and combat style down, these could be a lot of fun. They could be very different from each other as well, like Marvel’s Spider-Man is different from the Arkham games while clearly being inspired by them. Setting it in Paris is a neat idea; it could work as an unofficial sequel to Blade the movie, sort of a Blade 1.5. I hope this turns out well.