Sorry, Hawkeye. We’ll be playing as Hawkeye, please and thank you.
A few months ago, Square-Enix and Crystal Dynamics revealed that one of the many Marvel heroes coming to their incoming Avengers game after release was none other than Clint Barton, the A-Team’s resident Normie With Weapon alongside his best pal Natasha. Which was fine, because, yeah sure, he’s in the movies, he’s a longstanding member of the team, so on and so forth.
But, bless him, Clint’s very boring. All those movie appearances and he got like, maybe two cool archery shots and then became a weeb for a bit. It did not help that the design aesthetic the game went for with the lavender-clad archer was “what if every male first person shooter video game protagonist from 2005-2020 was mushed into one bland shell.”
So yeah. Fine. But whither Kate Bishop, the fun, cool protege of Clint who is excellent in the comics? She is also Hawkeye (and damn well earned that mantle) and, eventually, is going to get her own Disney+ series alongside Jeremy Renner’s Hawkguy.
Turns out, the answer is hither. In a live stream today celebrating the early release of the game (for people who preordered a fancy special edition of it, that is, everyone else has to wait till the end of the week), Crystal Dynamics revealed that the Hawkeye “Operation” coming to the game first is bringing not one, but two Hawkeyes to the game. In fact, Kate looks like the main one we’ll play as.
“Taking Aim”—followed shortly after by “Future Imperfect,” which will officially add Clint Barton—will see Kate recruit the aid of the Avengers and SHIELD to hunt down a missing Clint, who, exploring what happened to Nick Fury after the events of the game’s “A-Day” opening (where things go very wrong for the Avengers), apparently got himself wrapped up in a weird secret AIM project about tachyons, as one does. So, as per usual, it’s up to Kate to rescue his dumb ass from the mess he’s gotten into and, because of the aforementioned tachyons... she also has weird teleportation/portal powers too?
But hey: this is the best possible outcome we could’ve gotten because now Hawkeye is in the Avengers game! And so’s Clint Barton, I guess. Marvel’s Avengers is available on PC, Xbox One, and Playstation 4 on September 4. Kate and Clint will arrive in the coming months after launch.
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