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X-Men: Destiny Writer Mike Carey Talks Storyline

Activision’s announcement for X-Men: Destiny last week had many fans excited, though details were sparse at best.

Outside of a vague teaser trailer (below) that teased us with phrases like "The struggle that is to come will define us all" and "Not every mutant has the freedom to choose his path," as well as the reveal that Too Human developer Silicon Knights was behind the project, very little was said about the game.

At a Marvel videogames panel at New York Comic-Con last week, Marvel’s T.Q. Jefferson asked the game’s writer, comic author Mike Carey, a bit about the game. While Carey wouldn’t disclose any story specifics, the brief interview did provide some new details, like the fact that the game appears to be from the perspective of a young mutant discovering that he or she has powers, which Carey describes as "the starting point for something like a nightmare."

Carey also spoke about players meeting well-known X-Men characters in the game, adding fuel to the rumor fire that players will take the roles of either new or player-generated mutants, rather than the franchise’s stars.

We took the liberty of transcribing the entire interview portion of the panel for you guys to dissect, so let us know in the comments if this answers any of your questions!

T.Q. Jefferson: For those people who are not in the know, Mike, tell us about your history with the X-Men franchise and the books and this game.

Mike Carey: Sure. I’ve been writing X-Men: Legacy for...I guess about five years now? Four and a half, going on five years. It was a team book the first year, and then it became a solo book. And at first I felt a little sad to lose the team, but I realized the formula we had put together allowed us to steal everybody else’s mutants and put them together in interesting and unusual combinations, which I’ve been doing for the past four years and I’ve been having a blast doing it.

So I’ve written almost every mutant character under the sun, because with X-Men, with the X-Men universe, you have literally thousands of them. One of the goals of this game is to bring as many of those characters onto the stage as we could.

TJ: Was it difficult? What were the challenges in keeping the videogame true to the X-Men universe?

MK: I guess there are two answers to that. One of the pleasures of playing a franchise game is when you meet characters you know from the book and the encounters feel authentic, you feel like, this is really Cyclops, this is really Wolverine or whoever, and so that was one of our goals in putting this game together, is trying to make it feel like you really are in the X-Men universe, you really are meeting the characters that you know and love.

I think also thematically this is very much an X-Men game. It deals with the core themes of X-Men continuity, with the fact that finding out that you have powers is not a dream come true, it’s actually the starting point for something like a nightmare. You’re persecuted, you’re marginalized, there are people who will hate you, there are people who will fear you, and it’s about the process of finding a community or a family, someplace where you do belong, and making the decisions that will ultimately take you towards that group and make you a member of that group.

TJ: Can you tell us any tidbits about the storyline of the game?

Um, no. You probably noticed [in the teaser trailer] San Francisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge, so there are ways that it plays off the existing status quo of the X-Men universe.

But X-Men has a long and honorable tradition of bringing in characters from other timelines, other dimensions. There is this idea that the world these characters live in is only one of many possible worlds, and there are other ways that the story could have gone. So there are things that you will recognize, and there will be some surprises as well.