Yesterday’s big teaser for the upcoming Thor: Love and Thunder culminates in an appearance by Natalie Portman as Jane Foster as Thor, complete with what appears to be a rather shoddily reforged Mjolnir. But she—that is, Foster—isn’t just appearing in the next big Marvel flick: She’s also headed to Marvel’s Avengers.
The news is contained in the newest Marvel’s Avengers development update, which lays out Crystal Dynamics’ plan for update 2.4, currently slated for a May release, and beyond. The update will rework the previously-released Cosmic Threat, Tachyon Anomaly, and Corrupted Vibranium events to make them “more rewarding.” Changes will include a more diverse range of rewards across events, bringing Unit rewards to a wider variety of missions, making higher-power rewards more accessible “to create another path to gear-up beyond the soft-cap on drops for non-Raid/Omega-Level Threat content,” and by granting meta-objective rewards to entire rosters rather than a single hero, so players can equip their entire squad more quickly.
“Combined with the improved game loop introduced in 2.3, we think these new rewards will make a meaningful change of pace for veteran players, and a great way to gear up for newer players,” Crystal Dynamics said.
Jane Foster, aka The Mighty Thor, is a little further down the road. Foster, who first appeared in the Thor comics in the early ’60s and in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in the first Thor film, will join the game as a playable hero on all platforms in the 2.5 update. The timing of the announcement is almost certainly not coincidental, but Crystal Dynamics made no mention of the movie, and instead gently but unmistakably pointed out that it’s a game based on books.
“Our Hero designs are driven first and foremost by their core comic book identities, so, as a fellow wielder of Mjolnir, her suite of abilities will have a lot in common with the Odinson’s, however she will also have elements that are distinctly Jane,” the studio said. “More details on how Jane will come to life in our game will be coming in the future.”
Now that patch 2.3 is behind us, we’d like to update you on what’s coming up in the near future for the game. This includes some great improvements to the event system as well as our next playable hero Jane Foster: The Mighty Thor!🌩️ https://t.co/lp0kZiSYJt pic.twitter.com/ry8u6ZXN2AApril 19, 2022
Unfortunately for that future, Marvel’s Avengers has not been able to turn around its sagging player count. In September 2021, when we said that the game needs to be put out of its misery, its average concurrent player count was 862, catastrophically low for a big-budget licensed videogame; over the past 30 days, and despite now being on Game Pass, the concurrent player count has sunk to less than half that amount. At the time of writing, only 307 people are playing.
Here’s that Thor: Love and Thunder teaser, btw. It’s pretty good.