Marvel’s Avengers developer Crystal Dynamics announced Kate Bishop’s December debut in a new video on Thursday. But the studio also teased some exciting items for the future.
At the end of the Kate Bishop deep dive, we got a preview of Hawkeye’s Operation coming next year: Future Imperfect. We see a Hawkeye (with long hair!) walking through a desolate future. It’s filled with flipped-over cars, rust, and all sorts of brown — basically what you’d expect post-nuclear fallout.
But things get interesting when Hulk enters the picture. In this wasteland, Hawkeye approaches Hulk — in his Maestro form — sitting on a throne, surrounded by Avengers relics, under a frozen Sentinel. In the comics, this older, wasteland Hulk is actually Maestro, and he’s a supervillain with the intellect of Bruce Banner. He also has a beard and a pretty prominent bald spot.
Maestro speaks to Hawkeye and tells him, “Welcome to the end of the world.”
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The tease of Maestro and future-Hawkeye is interesting enough. But there’s also a tease for a future hero if you look closely among Maestro’s collection. By his feet rests the helmet of Black Panther.
This isn’t the first time Marvel’s Avengers and Black Panther have been mentioned in the same sentence. There was a leak suggesting Black Panther would be one of the first post-launch heroes, alongside Wakanda as a new area. Crystal Dynamics also officially showed its in-game Black Panther logo during the game’s launch-day War Table stream, seemingly delaying the character’s announcement out of respect for the death of Chadwick Boseman, who portrayed the hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
With this tease, it seems the rumors are true, and Black Panther could be making his way to Marvel’s Avengers sometime next year.
Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix will launch Hawkeye’s Future Imperfect Operation early next year. The studio will also release the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions of Marvel’s Avengers in early 2021.
