Next week marks the release of War for Wakanda, the largest content drop Marvel's Avengers has received since it launched in 2020. Ever since it was announced in Crystal Dynamics' 2021 roadmap for the game, it has been the entry many players have circled on the calendar as the primary destination. We haven't had a chance to go hands-on with the new expansion quite yet, but we did get to see it in action and speak with the team to learn more about Black Panther's introduction to the game.
Wandering in Wakanda
In addition to adding new story campaign missions in the new Wakanda biome, players can also look forward to exploring the area to find iconic Wakandan locations like Shuri's Laboratory and the Wakandan War Room in the Royal Palace outpost. New enemy types, two named villains, drop zones, and villain sectors round out the expansion to give players more content than any previous addition to Marvel's Avengers.
My video tour of War for Wakanda showcases the first two missions of the single-player story campaign, as well as the Birnin Zana outpost. After a brief cutscene giving the backstory of Wakanda and its source of Vibranium, we hear Zawavari plead with T'Challa to reopen the borders so he can help in the ongoing fight against AIM. However, it might not be necessary for Black Panther to re-enter the world to take part in the fight, as Ulysses Klaue has brought the fight to Wakanda.
Klaue enters Wakanda in search of Vibranium, and it's up to the Black Panther to disrupt his plans to bleed the isolated nation of its most precious resource. The jungles of Wakanda are lush and beautiful, but Klaue's forces aren't exactly respectful to the natural splendor. Their first appearance features them setting charges to explode. Thankfully, Black Panther arrives just in time and prevents the explosives from detonating.
After a confrontation with the mercs, the player takes control of T'Challa as he roams through the jungles. Black Panther is nimble, with ample jumping and wall-running capabilities. T'Challa may not be as talkative as his quip-ready counterparts like Tony Stark, but Christopher Judge (best known as the current voice of Kratos in God of War) delivers the Black Panther's lines with conviction.
"We were thinking of who our T'Challa was: We knew we wanted him to be older, a more experienced king, a more experienced Black Panther, and we had this wishlist of actors who we thought, 'We want that caliber. These people won't say yes, but that's what we're going for,'" writer Hannah MacLeod says. "And Chris Judge was number one. We were like, 'There's no way he's going to do it,' but that's what we were looking for. But we were like, 'Maybe we'll ask. I mean, you never know! The worst he can say is no,' and then he said yes! And I lost my damn mind."
As T'Challa arrives on the scene, we get our first glimpses of him in action. It turns out Black Panther is just as quick in combat as he is in transit. By pouncing and parrying, Black Panther shows he is more than capable in battle and looks to be a ton of fun in fights. Combining ranged and melee attacks, Black Panther eliminates a group of enemies with the agility of the big cat from which he takes his name.
Throughout Wakanda, corrupted Vibranium clusters pop up, a result of Klaue's mining of the resource. While Black Panther doesn't know exactly what the cause is right off the bat, he knows one thing: the corrupted spires must be destroyed to prevent them from spreading. The next sequence has him taking on several enemies while trying to destroy three of these clusters. After completing this combat sequence, T'Challa activates a shortcut to the heart of the city, where he hopes to meet up with Okoye and Shuri. Along the way, he encounters loot chests, secret tunnels, and a ton of scenic vistas. Unfortunately, he returns to a city under attack and doesn't exactly receive the welcoming party he was hoping for.
Without going into too much detail beyond this point, T'Challa continues working with his fellow Wakandans to uncover the mystery of exactly what Klaue is up to. As you play through, you not only get a ton of banter between the characters but also lots of backstory about the nation. I left my video demo excited to see where the story goes from here. It also quickly becomes apparent that while Black Panther is certainly the star of this expansion, this is still a game about the Avengers.
"It's sort of, what are the themes of Wakanda that we wanted to explore, and then how does T'Challa fit in with the rest of the Avengers?" MacLeod says. "Whenever we're adding new characters, our discussion always is, 'What were they doing before A-Day? Where were they on A-Day? And then what was their reaction to it?'"
Prior to the events of Marvel's Avengers' main story, T'Challa was in talks with Captain America about potentially forming an alliance with the Avengers, but after A-Day, where Captain America was thought to have been killed, the King of Wakanda severed talks and closed the borders. "The one person that he trusted – the designated adult in the group – was gone, and so they thought they were better off protecting themselves and closing Wakanda's borders," MacLeod says.