Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra or the vain race for realism – News

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At the question “is this realistic?“, the answer is obviously: no. Explanations: script-wise, Marvel 1943 places the public face to face with a uchrony (whether super heroic comics are uchronies by definition is another debate). In a Paris in the hands of Hydra, Captain America and Black Panther, first enemies then allies, must fight against Evil. From the first sequences, realism is abolished: you will not see swastikas of the Third Reich adorning the fronts of official buildings. All have been replaced with Hydra symbols. We can see a desire to shock the audience less, directives from Disney/Marvel in high places, or a lack of courage in the representation of a period of history. I lean towards the second option. But even this choice harms the credibility of the Canonical Myth of the Marvel Universe. Because before the rewrites of the 2010s (and more particularly the saga Secret Wars), Hydra was an offshoot of Nazism, a techno-mystical subsidiary representing the worst of Hitler's follies. Over the reboots from Marvel, Hydra has become an ancient organization, obsessed with the idea of ​​world domination, because they are very bad guysand that it takes at least that to make us forget the period of affiliation with the Third Reich.

Apart from these considerations of a nerd who reads too many comics for his own good, the problem that interests us relates to the very notion of realism. What is realism in video games? When the vast majority of the public screams about realism, they are talking about photorealism. Or the tendency to want to get as close as possible to physical reality and to restore it in the video game medium. A bias including Amy Hennig, director of Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydrahas always been partisan, her work on the franchise Uncharted is here to prove it. This realistic representation concerns above all the characters: the protagonists must have physical proportions acceptable and not deviate from what we define as the physical standards that make us human, “human”. We will then move away from any attempt at an approach based on cel shadingstylized SD-style characters (big eyes, round faces, small bodies, cuckoo Animal Crossing), but also exaggerated representation of bodies. Gears of War with its heroes with excessively hypertrophied muscles cannot be described as realistic.

It should be noted that photorealism concerns not only the characters, but also the representation of the world in which they evolve and the physical laws which govern them. We are talking about a graphic representation of the environment, as well as the sound environment. So, for the sake of realism, we will want credible trees, a very green lawn and a sun whose rays burn the retinas when we stare at it. And already, we see the limits of the approach emerging: in video games, the main parameters to qualify the cultural object as a video game are interactivity (no action possible on the game = no game) and the looking for fun. However, can we talk about fun in a game that would be 100% realistic? Would you agree to undergo a 24-hour day/night cycle in a Devil May Cry? That in your Farming Simulator you have to wait 3 months to go to harvest? That your Geralt of Rivia needs at least 7 hours of sleep to be playable? That you can't run more than 500 meters in The Last of Us without ending up out of breath and dragging like an old man? No music to accompany your wanderings in the wilderness of Red Dead Redemption? Worse still, would you be able to endure real cries of dying people in a Call of Duty ? Considerations that would also go with permadeath for all characters. Forget the last levels of Super Meat Boy, the real nightmare would be in a carbon copy of reality made into a video game. The harsh reality, the one we experience, is such a set of constraints that trying to copy it to the letter would be counterproductive and anti-fun. Forget the notion of ultra-realism in video games, it is an unattainable goal. Outside the field of sports play (collective, individual or mechanical) does it even have any meaning?

Dreams are my reality

So why this quest for realism at all costs? We could argue that the more realistic the world is, the more the incursion of fantastic elements into it denotes and allows us to highlight the extraordinary character of a situation. However, in doing so, once again, we move away from reality. The snake of reality would come to bite its own tail. The issue raised by the trailer for Marvel 1943 is ultimately: is the great quest for asymptotic progression towards realism an artistic approach or a desire to seduce a general public who are considered fond of this type of proposition? I see there, perhaps with a certain cynicism, the intellectual posture which supposes that the general public is not able to appreciate artistic directions which stray too far from the canons of cinema.

The quest for realism of certain JV companies, even more than the quest for reality, seems to be prisoner of cinematographic blinders. If a section of video games, and in particular superheroic video games, wants at all costs to move towards more and more realism, it is undoubtedly due to a lack of courage (or even ignorance?) in relation to the codes of its own media. Highlighting the actors in the casting of Marvel 1943 attests to this: the JV media must highlight connections with the 7th art to justify its own existence, to watch for the slightest justification of legitimacy. A disease that eats away at many AAAs. I think back to Elliot Page and Willem Dafoe in Beyond Two Souls and I can't help but see it as an unfortunate quest for recognition by the JV. I also remember a paper from The Guardian titled “Beyond Gaming“, symptomatic of the cinema industry's condescension towards video games. With the advent of tools such as motion capture, and even more so since the Ebola-style spread of Unreal Engine 5 in AAA productions, the quest for realism ultimately became the desire to be cinema instead of cinema. The desire to create a realistic game is a technological challenge, but I'm not sure it's an artistic approach.

Marvel 1943: Rise of Hydra prides itself on its photorealism, its casting “first class“(tells us official site, I would have been less enthusiastic) in a fantasy Paris, where from any roof you can see the Eiffel Tower. Let's call it the syndrome Emily in Paris. By puffing out his chest with his cinematic approach to the subject, he rushes straight into the pitfall of loss of identity, while flirting dangerously with a Uncanny Valley which is likely to provoke a few fits of laughter from yours truly (special mention to Captain America's overarticulation, who confuses shouting with expressing himself clearly). The “story trailer” released recently had no more character than yet another MCU film. Flat characters, empty stares and outdated staging, nothing that video games can convey is found in this trailer. The worst will remain this impression of déjà vu in which this video is bathed: the shot where Black Panther hits Cap's shield seems straight out of Civil War. And I won't talk about the promotional illustration with Cap and Black Panther looking into the distance, already seen and seen again.

The trailer for Amy Hennig's next title doesn't provide any thrills compared to the trailer forElden Ring of 2022, none of the audacity of the trailer for Breath of the Wild of 2017, or the carnivorous madness of the BA of Dead Island from 2011. Marvel 1943 only has the flavor of a derivative product, bringing together on the public stage characters out of breath, exhausted by media overexploitation, delivered in an AAA setting on steroid Unreal Engine 5. The AAA industry seems to consider that it This is what the public expects, and that the cinema-video game argument will be sufficiently convincing to sell, without the developers having to take the slightest risk. An approach which deprives the video game of meaning, and kills any connection between the Marvel game and the material from which it is inspired: the comic book, with its flashy colors, its onomatopoeias which tear up its panels, and its character designs often excessive. I dream of a Flash way The Pathlessof a metroidvania 2D Green Arrow as outrageous as possible, with Namor plagiarizing without remorse Breath of the Wild.

Marvel 1943 is expected in 2025. We will be careful not to pass any judgment on the finished product, despite a more than cautious first impression. We must hope that Amy Hennig will not have lost her claws (claws, Black Panther, humor) and that she will be able to bring her touch (paw, Black Panther… sorry) to an experience which, on paper -and at the moment T- is sorely lacking in flavor.