For our "Things you would change with..." article we take a look at Marvel Heroes 2015 from Gazillion Entertainment, the fast-paced action RPG where we get to play as over 40 different Marvel heroes from the universe with such famous faces as Wolverine, Captain America, Black Widow, Hulk and many more. We've loved watching the game develop over the past few years, getting our hands first on a pre-release press exclusive at GamesCom back in August 2012, it's come on leaps and bounds and continues to head in a direction we like; but there's been one or two troubling issues along the way:
STASH/Inventory Space
Too much stuff; nowhere to store it. When starting out in the game players get access to a single STASH, their communal account bank boxes that can be accessed between characters, pretty useful and a great idea and we wish more MMO's would implement. The problem we have, along with many members of the community, is that as the game is so item focused and players need to collect a wide variety of things from boosts, med packs, crafting gear, artifacts, costumes, weapons and a whole lot more this limited space actually doesn't go all that far. Some items are trash and can be thrown, or the items you need such as the SHIELD Medkit, even though they have a cool down timer and cost next to nothing to purchase/craft and so are low impact on the games economy, but as players need them they take up vital space (just put them as a skill cooldown already). Other items such as Artifacts players try to collect for different situations and to help level up different characters, crafting items comes in a variety of components that players must combine (ranging from eight different tiers of element for example, from Simple to Pure), add to that players can have multiple costumes for their characters. The longer you play the game the more space you use up, combined with the fact that players have multiple characters and so all of this starts to add up and pretty soon you get trapped in the endless inventory management simulator meta game, which can take a long time, time you're not playing. The main issue is that extra STASH costs real cash to get access to, the developers have made an item dependent game and put the means of managing these items behind a pay wall; bad form. Either take up some of the recommendations we've made or make STASH purchasable using one of the many hard to acquire in game currencies.
Event Rewards
Artifacts and Legendary items in the Event Cycles. We love events, we love rewards for events, we accept that unique rewards for events are great even if they are only one-offs that come around once a year. What we don't like is using the Rotation Events, i.e. the same events that are repeated each month where players must heavily participate in these events to be in with a chance of acquiring some of the better loot in the game and, if they miss out, they have to wait around for another month before they get another chance. Now I could be a player that spends a lot of money in the Cash Shop, has played since release, is an active gamer, but if I don't prioritise and play the game like it's my job then getting access to some of these rewards can be extremely difficult. Putting Legendary items as rewards for a rotating event just seems like a way to bribe players into sticking with the game for another month to see if they get it next time, it’s pointless because the game is already pretty good and doesn’t need such an annoying system that can only be utilised by hard-core players. The system isn't good enough to keep players so only results in p*****g off the players that are sticking around regardless. Keep events, keep unique rewards, but don’t simply have constant events for the purpose of trying to keep players playing and definitely don’t put the best loot in that system.
PVP (Yes the game has PvP)
Show the PVP some love already. Players wanted PVP for quite a while, even though the main core of the game focuses on team based Co-op PVE, the problem is we don't think many players necessarily knew what format they wanted their PVP, whether just a simple beat-em-up, objective based PVP (WoW Alterac Valley style battlegrounds) or a more MOBA focused type metagame (similar to Infinite Crisis that uses DC Characters). What was delivered definitely wasn't what anybody wanted and subsequently PVP is pretty much non-existent in the game, you're "lucky" to get a handful of games in a week of queueing. Balancing is obviously a big issue between hero characters, their builds are primarily made to fill the niche so that that complements other characters in PVE as a cooperative team based game, so as solo characters some are going to be so underpowered and others completely OP that essentially the developers would have to rebuild; it isn't an easy system to balance when they are built for PVE. So why not focus on that? Personally we say focus on PVE focused content with objective-based missions where players compete against each other on the same map to complete missions first that can hinder the other team, unleash extra mobs and bosses on the other team and PVP that way instead of having direct player combat.
Purchasing Heroes
Characters that you already have being sold in Hero Packs. It's such a common issue that we’re surprised nothing has been done about it sooner given that it directly stops players spending real money on the game, which you presume is what Gazillion are after. We've all seen it, there is a seasonal event or promotion where a new Hero Pack is released in the store, you go and check it out only to see that of the three heroes being sold at you already have one of them and so purchasing it is pretty much a waste of your money. It'd be great to see some alternatives with the packs such as a choice of five different heroes and you can pick your favourite three, or even sticking with the planned three but having a single alternate hero for each of the initial three that players can switch in and out, alternatively why not let players get rid of the hero they already have an exchange it for some costumes for their two new characters?
More Villains
We want to play as the bad guys. Whilst there's a few villains that have already been placed into the game (Juggernaut, Magneto, Loki, etc.) there's still a ton more that with love to see over some of the Heroes that have been introduced. It seems that because the game is Marvel Heroes they avoided picking some of the cooler characters from the universe and instead picked actual Hero good guys. Screw that, use some dues ex machine to shoehorn some of the amazing bad guys into the game like Apocalypse, Carnage and Red Skull! And whilst we can't ever imagine they'll ever have the time or resources, seeing some bad guy quests and gameplay available instead of always being the good guys would be pretty amazing.
Hero Homes
A place to store our trophies and accomplishments. Though it has taken over a year to finally implement the Achievements system, instead of just seeing them on our profile page it'd be great to be able to see these as a more physical representation within the game in our own player housing, a place where we can head to at the end of the day, sort out our inventory (dealing with our STASH issues) and looking over our accomplishments with a variety of trophies, and newspaper clippings, keys to the cities and everything else any hero could gather. As a final thought it would be pretty awesome to even share your hideout with all the other hero characters that you have collected as they move around the base of operations interacting with each other dressed in whichever costume you have purchased for them!
So that's what we'd change with Marvel Heroes 2015, but more importantly what do you believe should be changed? What do you think could/should be added to improve the game? What would you add to your own personal wish list? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Deja tu comentario
You must be logged in to post a comment.