We’ve known for some time that Uncharted creator Amy Hennig was working on a Marvel project at her recently-founded Skydance New Media studio, and in fact, she teased a World-War-II-set game featuring Captain American and Black Panther back in 2022. Well, today at Epic’s State of Unreal Engine 2024 GDC livestream, the curtain was fully pulled back the game, which is officially title Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra.
The debut trailer for the game features stunning French WWII backdrops and look at Captain America and Black Panther, who will be played by Drew Moerline and Khary Payton respectively, but it’s just a cinematic. Or is it? After the trailer aired, Amy Hennig took to the stage, and it was revealed the trailer consisted entirely of in-game realtime visuals running on the newest version of Unreal Engine 5. You can check out the trailer for yourself, below.
Here’s a how Amy Hennig describes 1943: Rise of Hydra…
“We’re creating a story-driven, World War II era, Marvel action-adventure game with an ensemble of playable heroes. But, here’s what’s important to note — people might not think this, but this isn’t some custom demo that we made just for this show. That’s our game. All the sequences you just saw in that trailer are all pulled right out of our game, running real time in Unreal Engine 5, no smoke and mirrors.”
To prove her point about the 1943: Rise of Hydra trailer being real gameplay, they then manipulated certain scenes from it in real time using their editor. 1943 is looking to leverage all the latest Unreal Engine 5.4 capabilities, including Nanite, Lumen, and Metahuman character creator, but also newer features like “Adaptive Tessellation” which can create incredibly detailed fine details and ground cover without consuming an excessive amount of processing power, and “Heterogenous Volumes,” which can produce incredibly realistic and dynamic smoke and clouds.
Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra is coming sometime in 2025. Platforms have not been announced, and I’m having a hard time imagining what hardware will even be able to run a game this good looking. I guess we’ll see!
