These days, Crystal Dynamics is a very busy developer, juggling three separate projects that we are aware of. However, given recent developments, it’s difficult to see how their most recent release, the live service Marvel’s Avengers game, will remain a focus.
Crystal Dynamics is a big company, yet it’s not that big. According to estimates, they have roughly 350 staff, give or take, and this is what they’re working on as of yesterday:
Their first goal is a recently announced AAA Tomb Raider game built in Unreal Engine 5, which is a break from their previous engine.
They’ve been enlisted by Microsoft to assist The Initiative, led by their old employer, in developing the new Perfect Dark game for Xbox, and all indications are that they’re handling a sizable portion of the work at this time, given The Initiative’s struggles to retain its personnel.
Finally, Crystal Dynamics is expected to continue providing live content for Marvel’s Avengers, which is currently in its second year.
It’s simple to see which of these feels like the odd project out at the moment, and I’m having a problem believing that Avengers will receive much meaningful funding in 2022, and at this rate, it may be canceled entirely in 2023.
Crystal Dynamics would have a 2022 content roadmap for Avengers before the end of the year, I was told back in late 2021. That did not happen, and it still hasn’t happened four months later, indicating that plans may have evolved.
Crystal Dynamics has detailed ongoing projects, including a revamp of some gear and the battle table itself, which is mostly focused on new player onboarding. They’ve also been plagued by even more serious flaws, such as a PS5 crash that became a meme after Crystal Dynamics proposed that gamers fix the problem by deleting their campaign progress. Sigh.
In terms of real new content, we are four months into 2022 and it appears that we will see less overall content than we did in 2021.
According to the most recent internal rumors, the next hero will be Jane Foster Thor, a gender-flipped mirror figure, and the first “new” character would be She-Hulk, who looks to have been postponed to better align with the launch of the She-Hulk MCU show.
Avengers has primarily released content in the form of a never-ending stream of MCU-inspired skins, and we’re running out of those as well (I just saw a Thor: The Dark World one the other day).
This is not meant to be a criticism of Crystal Dynamics. At this point, I believe it would be a better use of their time for them to focus their efforts on the Perfect Dark project and the upcoming Tomb Raider game.
Sure, finish what’s in the works with Avengers, but given the condition of the game, I don’t believe it’s reasonable to expect a big portion of CD to continue generating massive content drops for Avengers indefinitely. I expect a few more releases this year, followed by a slowdown in 2023. But, as time passes, we’ll see if that’s their intention.
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