The story behind Marvel’s Avenger is, I imagine, not the one that those involved wanted to be told. The game launched and seemed to do well enough, but also underperformed to what was expected and has struggled to keep a consistent player base. It’s hard to see how well the game can do from here, but support is still planned. Operation Hawkeye and the next gen versions of the game are planned for later this month. But even along with that, comes more strange controversy. Now the developers are trying to explain things a bit.
In a bit of odd news, it was announced that along with the upcoming support, there was also going to be changes to the games XP and leveling system, effectively making leveling up characters slower. As you can imagine, it was not met with the greatest reception. Crystal Dynamics took to their account on the official Reddit to try and explain things about what they were doing. There’s a lot here, but the gist is that they said one of the things they came across was that players were getting levels and powers so fast, they didn’t get the chance to really feel them out.
“The problem we were seeing, and hearing, was that you would immediately get more skill points than you had time to review, apply, and get used to, before embarking on your next mission and gaining your next few levels. Hopefully, you can see the issue here.
“We want people to level up, in fact, we really want to see more people level up more Heroes, as playing the full Avenger roster should be the most fun thing you can do, but we don’t want the leveling up experience to be too overwhelming or diminish exploring each skill purchase.
“So we smoothed out the higher-level curves to make it so you were less likely to “ding” more than once or twice per mission at the higher end. There is so much variability in how quick you can gain XP (level types, mission selection, etc…), but the end result of our tuning was meant to add around 3-5 hours to reach the maximum level in total. This means leveling at a steadier place around every 2-4 missions at the upper end. We consider this a way to achieve clearer “ding” thresholds, and more time to engage with and enjoy each skill purchase. We also tuned the game to make early leveling slightly faster, giving players more advantage against enemies when first starting out and hopefully making them feel more like a Super Hero faster.”
Marvel’s Avengers is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, PC and Stadia. The PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions will launch March 18th and along those will come Operation Hawkeye and the changes to the XP system.
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