It’s impossible not to immediately think of Marvel’s Avengers when Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy being brought up, and one can’t help but wonder whether the latter Marvel game by Square Enix is going to struggle the way the former has. But honestly, in everything that Eidos Montreal have shared about Guardians so far, it’s been abundantly clear that it’s offering quite a different experience- from being a purely single player game to putting all of its emphasis on storytelling, and more.
Of course, another way it’s doing so is by eschewing DLC and microtransactions altogether, which, of course, is something Marvel’s Avengers – as a live service online-drive game – definitely does not do. So is that because of the negative reception that Avengers has had to endure since its launch last year.
According to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy senior creative director Jean-François Dugas, that is not the case. When asked the question in a recent interview with VGC, Dugas said that Guardians was already deep in development by the time Avengers came out, and as such, any and all decisions about whether the game would have post-launch DLC had been made long ago, and weren’t influenced by anything that was going on with Avengers.
“When Marvel’s Avengers was released, we were already deep in production,” Dugas said. “Those aren’t calls that you can make at the last minute. It is something that is part of the vision or isn’t. In our case, we made that decision during the early stages of the project.”
Considering the fact that Guardians is barely a few months away from launch, it goes without saying that if Eidos Montreal and Square Enix did indeed have plans for post-launch DLC, development on that would have been at least in its early stages when Avengers came out last year, and if that had been the case, they probably wouldn’t have cancelled that just because of that game’s poor reception.
Either way, it’s rare to see a game offering a full-fledged experience right at launch these days, and we’re glad that Eidos Montreal has taken that approach with its upcoming action-adventure title.
Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy launches on October 26 for PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, Xbox One, and PC, as well as for Nintendo Switch as a cloud-exclusive release.