Marvel’s Avengers studio head issues statement on game’s future
If you’ve already starting to feel like you’ve burned through all the worthwhile content in Marvel’s Avengers, you’re not alone. The studio behind the game, however, wants you to know that it’s working to fix that..
As we noted in our review, Avengers as it existed at launch was lacking in content worth replaying over and over. While there have been a few updates to the game, they’ve almost exclusively been bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements. We haven’t gotten any of the new content—like raids, story missions, or heroes—that Square Enix had previously announced.
Though it’s always difficult to track how many people are playing a game across all platforms, as a rough proxy, Steam Charts lists the 24-hour peak at under 2,000 concurrent players. (To put that in context with random examples, the much older Monster Hunter: World peaked at more than 60 times that, and even 2012’s Borderlands 2 managed double.) The front page of the game’s official Reddit community features several posts complaining about both the state of the game and the lack of communication from the development team.
In an attempt to reassure fans, Scott Amos, the studio head of Avengers lead developer Crystal Dynamics, issued a lengthy statement to Kotaku about how he envisions the state of the game and its future.
Here’s Amos’s statement in full:
To our players: every day we fight to make the best game possible for our community. We have a great community management team at Crystal Dynamics and Square Enix who funnel all of your concerns, suggestions, and feedback to the development team daily. We are listening. We are making fixes, improvements, and additions as fast as we safely can to make Marvel’s Avengers the game we all aspire it to be.
As such, we have a number of new content pieces coming in the weeks ahead including: a totally new War Zone mission type called Tachyon Rifts, a new Outpost that’s a jumping off point for new story missions in the future, and AIM’s Cloning Lab, which requires a coordinated high-level group of four players to beat with new top-end loot rewards for finishing it. And in each of these updates we do tuning and bug fixing to enhance the overall experience.
In addition, we’ve announced two new Heroes coming in the near future: Kate Bishop in Operation: Taking AIM, and after that the double-feature Operation starring Clint Barton… this is the “two Hawkeyes” we mentioned in the last War Table. These new Operations pick up right from where the main Reassemble campaign ended in the core game and will propel the overall world story forward with new mysteries and villains, as well as new multi-player content.
Lastly, we will continue to add new content to the game in the coming months as we address issues and overall game balance, including loot distribution and quality of life features everyone is clamoring for to improve our day-to-day experience from accessibility to co-op communication tools to balancing the economy!
We are confident that we’ll see PC players (as well as those on Xbox One and PlayStation 4) return to the game as we add exciting new late-game content and demonstrate that we continue to be focused on improving the game.
We’ll have more information and details about the very near content drops in a blog scheduled for next week and we have new community communication initiatives coming soon to even more directly share fun and useful information with you.
Thank you for coming with us on this journey to truly realize the best of what Marvel’s Avengers can become.
The gist, basically, is to be patient. Amos believes that upcoming patches will improve the game to such an extent that players looking to play on a daily basis will eventually come back.
We’ve seen plenty of live-service games change for the better over time and win back fans, but it’s hardly a guarantee. Sea of Thieves, for instance, certainly overcame lackluster launch reception with its subsequent updates. As a counterexample, though, nearly two years after middling reviews BioWare has been unable to turn Anthem around—though the studio is definitely still trying.
Marvel’s Avengers is available now on PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC. Next-gen versions will launch alongside the Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 on November 10th and 12th, respectively.
