The Failure of Marvel's Avengers

This was originally going to be a video, but my rant ended up longer then intended and I don't wanna record that much footage to talk over at this point. Either way I just felt the need to do a rant on why this game failed.. As for my qualifications to discuss the topic I've got over 100 hours in the game... god why do I have that much time in the game, I've gotten several of the characters to max level and got them to the soft cap for gear, and most importantly of all, I've fantasized extensively about being stepped on by Kamala Khan.

A lot of bigger people on the internet have reviewed it and given their two cents. But a lot of them also cover new games constantly, hopping from game to game and might not have thought as deeply into this as someone who just really wanted a good Marvel game to sink a lot of time into. I also put all my time into this game last year, so it was after a considerable amount of updates so I experienced it at what was basically the peak of it's content.

The gameplay itself is actually pretty good but I feel that it was shown off in completey the wrong way when marketing the game. So much of the marketing focus was on the opening bridge battle which is a point in the game where you can't choose who you want to play as. You get tiny segments with it switching you from hero to hero without you really having any chance to think about how each of them actually plays.

And from my understanding that bridge section was the focus of the demos for the game. A completely terrible decision, because not only do you not get to spend much time with an individual character. But you also have next to none of their abilities unlocked. The more you level them up and gain access to their full kit, the more fun the characters are to play as. Which is both a mistake in showing them off at level 1 in the demo and also the actual pacing because someone might get bored before they unlock a lot of their combos and passives that make them truly stand out.

The other weird thing is their odd decision to have a single player campaign and have it be an online multiplayer focused game. The story in the campaign is good as long as you have any love for Ms. Marvel. Which I kind of do, she may not be my top Marvel waifu but out of the ones present in this game she is. Black Widow I've always found meh outside of when actually portrayed by Scarlet Johanson... more on that issue later.

But the thing is with a multiplayer focused game you should never have a story campaign that forces you to play as a specific character. Multiple other multiplayer Marvel games understood this by having a story objective for you works towards while also letting you use whoever you want out of the characters you currently have unlocked. For example, a series I'm gonna mention multiple times in this... Marvel Ultimate Alliance.

But now that we've covered gameplay and story which are the two things I feel the game did overall good. It's time to start turning our eyes to the things where the completely missed the mark. The first one being the obvious thing that everyone honed in on before release and that being the graphics.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 looked good, you could tell who the characters were, and it ran no risk of being compared to the movies.

The super realistic style they attempted for simply doesn't work out right for a super hero game. They did make some adjustments in response to the backlash before release, particularly to Thor and Black Widow. But this wasn't really mentioned much in many announcements about the game. They overall look fine, especially when you see them in motion instead of still screenshots. But it just feels off from what you expect out of a super hero game, it feels like the models were designed for a different genre.

Obviously the ones that weren't trying to be knock offs of MCU versions of the characters clearly faired better in this regard. Ms. Marvel's show wasn't out yet so she is designed better to just be the cute super hero fangirl that you'd expect out of non live action media. Iron Man and Hulk are fine for obvious reasons and the characters added later had the luxury of not trying to look like their MCU counterparts to help out.

But overall they should have went for a much more stylized look than what they went with. It may have been a top down diablo like game but Marvel Heroes even with minimalistic graphics felt like a better super hero design, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 is beautiful with it's colorful cartoony designs in spite of running on the Switch, and as much as people crap on Gotham Knights for not living up to the Arkham games even that managed a style where the outfits felt more super heroish. I won't get into the countless free to play mobile Marvel games that all rake in tons of money.

The other major issue I feel with this design choice, is I feel these realistic design choices may also give people bad memories of the dark ages of licensed games. When we got a games that were in fact far worse then this one but they were always movie tie ins.

This was one thing that just made me go "wait what?" with the Avengers cosmetics you could buy. It's a summer outfits bundle but everyone else is wearing like beachwear while Ms. Marvel is in a recolor of her handmade costume from early in the story. pic.twitter.com/t94KfKlYlM

— Ozzina Arcane (@OzzinaArcane) February 9, 2023

But the problem with the visuals not really conveying a super hero feel well also creates another issue for one of this games other major flaws. The monetization. If your main plan to monetize the game is cosmetic outfits and the graphics make things not feel very super... then people aren't going to be really inclined to spend money on the cosmetics.

Too many of the outfits are just recolors or just don't stand out that much. Even outfits that were supposed to be iconic outfits from the comics really just... don't have the right look in this game. Which means it's time to bring up Marvel Heroes again which is going to happen a lot, because it was a live service game and the costumes in that were drastically more interesting then any of the costumes available in this.

In Marvel Heroes you could get such a wide variety of costumes for characters, covering multiple different time periods across the character's existence. For instance with Captain Marvel, you could use multiple different outfits from her previous time as Ms. Marvel. And they weren't just the same character model wearing a different outfit, their entire appearance reflected the costume you were using. This was further exemplified with some of the more premium cosutmes where it actually turned them into either a different character who spent time in that hero role or just a different character with similar powers.

What do I mean? Captain Marvel had a skin that let you play as the previous Captain Marvel who was a guy. Spider-Man had skins to let you play as Miles Morales and Spider-Gwen, years before Into the Spiderverse would ever be seen. Loki, who yes was playable in that, had a Lady Loki skin based on the short time when he was using Sif's body as a skinsuit.

Meanwhile not only do this game not have very interesting outfits, it sometimes even fights against itself. Let's look at Ms. Marvel for instance, her coolest looking outfit is the Starktech outfit that you get for free for getting far enough in the story campaign. Everything else she has is recolors of an outfit that looks like it was homemade or recolors of her street clothes which I guess you might wanna use if you have a thing for bare ankles or something. I don't know, it would be one thing to give a character a street clothes outfit but to expect people to pay or grind to get recolors of it? Not exactly an engaging progress reward.

Another thing they tried to monetize is emotes, which might have been a brilliant idea if... you could equip more then one of them at a time. But only being able to equip one at once, what reason would you have to bother getting multiple of them unlocked instead of just picking a single one you like?

Last there are the faceplates which display with your level information in the pre-match lobby which are almost all beautiful artwork from the comics that really just reminds you what a terrible mistake the art direction choice in this game was.

This promotional image doesn't even show all the launch characters and this F2P game had Avengers beat on number of characters.

Monetization out of the way, let's talk a biggy. You can not in the year of our previous lord 2020, release a multiplayer focused Marvel game that only has 6 characters. We eventually got up to 11 with post game updates, 12 if you count the Playstation exclusive spider-man. However every single Marvel Ultimate Alliance game had more then 20 characters to choose from. Even the X-Men Legends games which were precursors to Ultimate Alliance which were simply X-Men games had 15 playable heroes and that was a new game series being made by a cheapskate company like Activision. Marvel Heroes which was a free to play game launched with 21. Even the recently release Midnight Suns game which is very story focused released with 12.

The small roster in turn made a very big problem at launch. You had 6 heroes to form a 4 player team with and you could not have doubles. If you weren't coordinating with friends to play you couldn't make sure you guys weren't doubling up, if everyone playing was queued as The Hulk you couldn't get into a lobby and it didn't tell you why. It didn't tell you "Hey there are too many Hulk players, choose someone else". They resolved this later by making multiple of the same character allowed and even made up a story reason about mutliverse anomolies to explain it, but with a game like this it's hard to recover after a launch flop.

And as someone who played the game long after launch and didn't experience those issues it's time to talk about something I did experience. That wasn't directly a design choice and was baffling to see was still such a huge issue 2 years after launch. The bugs.

Now I didn't really experience any bugs while playing the single player campaign but the minute I stepped into the main gameplay focus beyond the story it was a non stop battle. Constant issues playing with my friend where the game would desync and either kick one of us out of the game or just straight up crash the game. One time had the loading screen elevator activate for me but just left my friend standing on the first floor which cause a bug where the elevator would just never reach it's destination. We'd finish a mission and after it says "Mission Completed" on the screen it would just never transition to the results screen.

There were times where objectives would not update just making it impossible to progress in the mission unless we reload a checkpoint or worse were forced to just restart the mission from scratch. We saw instances of a questline where we had to complete a certain number of a certain type of mission not count towards the goal when we completed one of them.

Last we come to the worst kind of bug for a completionist like me. There are some pretty grindy achievements in this game. Some of which just involve getting to a certain level or equipment rating. But there are a bunch that are complete X number of certain task. And I didn't realize these were prone to having your progress on them reset. There are these missions called HIves that are like 5 of the smaller drop zone missions linked together and on average if you're doing well take about 20 minutes to complete one. There is an achievement for completing 50 and my progress reset when I was over half way on it.

This was the point where all motivation I had to play the game just completely died. It's the only achievement I'm missing but it's also an achievement people with thousands of hours in the game are also missing. Since the end game has changed since the game originally came out there is not really any reason to do that many hives unless you're trying to get the achievement and even I wanted to try for it, there is no guarantee it wouldn't reset again. I stopped playing relatively soon after this happened.

So there, that is my laundry list of reasons why the game failed and considering how many stupid decisions they've made over the last couple of years, I feel I only have one last thing to say... Fuck you Square Enix.