Hawkeye's back! After months of anticipation, the everyman archer of the Marvel Universe is finally making his way to Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics' Marvel's Avengers. Following up the events of the previous DLC, "Future Imperfect" pits Clint Barton against a rapidly approaching Kree invasion -- and a future evil rendition of a close ally.

Recently, CBR had the opportunity to sit down with Scott Walters, the Senior Designer on Marvel's Avengers and Nicole Martinez, the game's Narrative Director, to discuss the decision to include Clint as DLC, the game's unique spin on The Maestro and the changes coming to the game's challenging HARM Rooms.

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I want to start with just a real simple question: who is Hawkeye to you as a character?

Scott Walters, Senior Designer, Crystal Dynamics: You know, obviously, he's a fan favorite. I grew up reading Avengers comics and watching the cartoons, anything Marvel, pretty much. So being able to add him to the roster has been a real treat.

Nicole Martinez, Narrative Director, Crystal Dynamics: Hawkeye, to me, is one of the more grounded heroes. He's the most human and the most aware of his humanity. He knows that eventually, he's not going to be able to keep up and he's not going to be able to do this forever, and I think that's what makes him special. He's recognized that and brought in Kate Bishop as his protege. I definitely am aware of how much of a fan favorite he is; I have friends who constantly asked me about Hawkeye before we announced him. Even after we did, they can't wait for Hawkeye. But I think the most interesting thing to me about him is just him being so aware of his own mortality and struggling with fitting into a team. Even though the Avengers themselves see him as a great asset, he's struggling to see that in himself as well.

It's surprising that both Hawkeyes wound up being DLC even though Clint, in particular, was mentioned in story mode. What led to his inclusion in the story and the decision to bring him in as a DLC character rather than include him in the main roster?

NM: I joined Crystal Dynamics a little while in but by the time I was here, Clint and Kate were planned as that double feature for quite a while. If you check out the document sets that dropped with Kate and Clint and what they were up to during A-Day, a lot of their story focuses on them not being in San Francisco when everything happened and feeling a little bit estranged from the Avengers. Even though the Avengers do reassemble in the campaign, we definitely wanted to continue to grow that roster and continue to bring people back into the fold throughout the rest of the ongoing content as well.

SW: The Avengers have had a lot of members come and go in the comics and other media. For us, it was very much that we had a specific story we wanted to tell in the campaign, and we knew sort of who we wanted to bring on as we continue to tell that story. Like Nicole mentioned, pretty much right off the bat, we were planning on introducing Hawkeye and Kate together in this double feature narrative.

Kate Bishop is definitely a hit with the fans -- hell, I think she's my favorite character in the game so far. What is about Clint that will set him apart in terms of his story and his gameplay?

NM: I think his personal journey is very different from Kate's. He's struggling with feelings of self-worth and struggling to find his place in The Avengers. Even knowing that he's got Kate to fall back on as his protege, he's trying to figure out where he fits in everything. You see throughout Future Imperfect him realizing how much of a vital role he plays in The Avengers' future. I think, personality-wise, they're great compliments to each other. Having the two of them together is always fun, and seeing the different ways they interact with the rest of The Avengers is great, but I think Clint kind of rounds out the team in a different way than Kate does.

SW: Gameplay-wise, we definitely have some similarities. Obviously, they both have swords, they both have bows. We definitely designed some of those similarities to help tie that protege aspect to it and make it seem like she's trained with and learned some things from him. But we definitely push them apart as well, in terms of some of their movesets. If you've played Kate, you know, she can teleport with tech she's stolen from AIM, and a lot of her abilities use that feature. Clint is all about his arrows, so we included different arrows in place of what Kate would be using, as well as just including more of them. We definitely wanted more interplay with the arrows, whether he's doing melee combat or so that you have more options in range combat. We've also made his intrinsic abilities different. He's all about using his acrobatics and quick reflexes to dodge attacks. He can quickly riposte with arrows as opposed to a sword, right? So he's parrying with his arrow shots and firing additional trick arrows as follow-ups to that. His heroics also are completely different from Kate's and are all based around different types of arrows. We didn't want it to be too similar to Kate; she's definitely tech-focused, right? She deploys the decoys for support, but for Clint, he's firing an arrow that heals, not just dropping a healing pack.

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One of the first things that we noticed about Clint in that reveal trailer was he has his hearing aid, which has been an integral part of his character for decades and has come back into focus in the last few years in comics. Does his hearing disability factor into his gameplay? What steps did you take to make sure that was accurately reflected with the character?

SW: Gameplay-wise, like in terms of what happens on the sticks, it doesn't have a huge role. It's more of a narrative thing.

NM: We just really wanted to be true to Clint Barton as he is in the comics, so it was really important for us that he had those hearing aids. The story doesn't directly deal with his hearing loss. That's more something we want people to be able to go back to the comics and explore. To me, it's just such a part of who he is that we wanted to make sure it was included.

Outside of a few cameos and unlockable costumes, this will be the actual video game debut of The Maestro. How did you go about putting your own spin on such an iconic character from the comics?

NM: For Maestro, we took inspiration from comics, but the story that he's in is completely new. How he got to that point is different and has a lot to do with the Kree invasion and what's going on in our game universe. I feel like a lot of that is different while giving the nod to who he's been in the comics.

One of the major components of the Maestro story in the comics is that he's viewed through the filter of the modern-day Hulk. Is there going to be any kind of interaction between Bruce and Maestro? Are we going to see any fallout to Bruce learning what a potential future version of him could be?

NM: We don't see any direct interactions between the two of them, but I know the main writer on the "Future Imperfect" DLC, Keano Raubun, often describes Maestro as more of Bruce than the Hulk, even though he's in the Hulk form. It's telling us what became of Bruce as those two forms evolved.

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One of the biggest changes coming to the game is the ability to customize the HARM Rooms. Do you have any favorite HARM Room configurations or things you can do in them that are interesting?

SW: For the HARM Rooms, the customizable version we've got in this release is the ability to go in and queue up what type of enemies and how many you want to fight against. It's a good training ground if you just want to practice some of the skills that you've unlocked against certain enemies in a controlled environment or if you just want to smash robots and show that off to your friends. One of the things that I love doing, which I think players will get to start doing more with this, is to hop into our combat gym as I'm working on the heroes and just test out combos and see how I can get them to flow. I'm a big fan of training rooms and fighting games and action games with pretty in-depth melee systems. This is our first step at delivering something like that for players. I think it is a great entry point for us to expand on and add even more features for players to enjoy down the road.

NM: I think it's good target practice for the archers, as well, if you spawn one of the groups with a bunch of drones and you're able to test out all your skills against them. It's pretty satisfying.

Definitely! I was doing some of the Harm Rooms the other day trying to shake off the rust for Hawkeye, they're a lot harder than I remember them being.

NM: Was it one of the challenges?

I think it was the Tier Four challenge? But I hadn't played in like two months. So I'd forgotten how to do everything and I just got stomped all over the place. It was embarrassing.

SW: Yeah, the customizable ones are a little bit different. You don't have that pressure of having to complete ten waves. It's very much like 'I just want to fight these guys now.'

NM: And you can change the difficulty, how many enemies spawn, set it to whatever you want for that day. If you just want a quick warm-up and want to do something a little bit easier, you can definitely do that.

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So that sounds like an excellent way to get back into the game, like if you're just trying to reacquaint yourself to the controls. Are there any more changes to the HARM Room planned right now that you can talk about? Or is that something down the pipeline?

SW: We're always evaluating ways that we can add on to activities that we have. We don't really have anything to announce at this point.

Obviously, the game had kind of a rocky launch. We did notice that during the recent Twitch stream, some members of Crystal Dynamics were in the chat reassuring players that the team is committed to the game in the long term. That being said, gamers are jaded after titles with similarly rocky launches made similar promises and were still canceled shortly after that. What would you say to the gamers who are concerned about that long-term investment, both financially and emotionally, in the game?

SW: We're committed to Marvel's Avengers for years to come. We're big Marvel fans at Crystal, we love the story that we're telling and we can't wait to expand and add on to that. We're definitely listening to feedback and making sure we internalize and utilize that feedback to improve on the game as we go forward.

Developed by Crystal Dynamics and published by Square Enix, Marvel's Avengers is available now for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC. Hawkeye, the operation "Hawkeye: Future Imperfect" and the next-gen upgrades will be available as free downloads on March 18. 

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