Avengers open beta out on PS4

Playing it is kind of surreal because you have to confront that it actually exists.

21 Likes

Wow that was dire

3 Likes

i think they might be onto something with this superhero thing. seems timely and marketable, excited to see where they take it

7 Likes

wow that 1-liner at the end was so epic! did they get jos weedon to write this?

this game looks so bland, if you removed the marvel guys this could be pretty much any modern realistic third / first person shooter. i am curious if there’s any sorts of environments that even remotely live up to the creative potential of the medium

1 Like

yawn o RAMA!

3 Likes

This kinda makes me want a Black Widow game. But the Marvel fatigue is also ridiculous.

I was interested when it was “Marvel Ultimate Alliance crossed with Destiny plus an emphasis on melee” but the execution looks so bad. Do any western studios do melee well?

Mournhern or whatever that is called.

Does anyone else find it a bizarre casting choice to have Nolan North as Iron Man? His quips sound almost exactly like his Deadpool (same tone of voice). On the Venn diagram of people who know both it’s probably a miniscule overlap.

The bit in the first clip where you’re helping police officers beat up evil black suited bad guys also feels like…kind of a bad choice in the present political climate.

4 Likes

On further reflection : it would be a bad choice any time but right now it seems like an especially brazen thing to ignore what I’m getting at.

They’re the avengers, can’t they just punch purple monsters coming out of a blue Portal or a mad scientist and his robot legion or something? You don’t need cops in this at all.

2 Likes

Maybe after you play though the bland 60 hour story, you can unlock an option to make it colorful or something.

There are some kinda neat looking combo videos going around for this game, which like, almost, almost got me interested in it.

Then I watched some streams and it was a lot of Iron Man getting knocked on his ass by tiny robots, or frozen by ice beams from larger robots, which then proceeded to knock him on his ass.

That, plus the whole, uh, “your character never visibly changes, but this loot you get makes the numbers go up!!” is, hmm! Well! Good luck, Crystal Dynamics!

New Gex when, CD? The people demand it.

gex is back and he’s horny as hell

3 Likes

That big green guy? That’s Gex.

If there’s not a Gex DLC skin for Hulk then what’s the point.

3 Likes

Actively rejecting bad ideas from omnipresent media is never…a bad idea.

4 Likes
3 Likes

Will try to post thoughts later. To stop this from solely being a hate session I do think there’s the potential for a solid enough game in here somewhere, hidden under all the performance issues, motion blur, overdone special effects, screenshake, and GAAS game design. If The Last or Us 2 was the game of the generation on the cinematic end of the industry, this could be the game of the generation on the GAAS end of the industry.

Bonus video:

2 Likes

I was not able to really sit down and focus on this game since I was visiting some family while playing it, but having thought about it some more I think the best way to fulfill this potential is to finish developing the combat system and then put it in a completely different game that isn’t trying to be Destiny, so the combat system isn’t muddled into a goop for trying to wedge itself between “character action game” (is this what people are calling action games with any combat system that isn’t batman style?) and AAA mass market GAAS loot grind.

The combat is a step up from most AAA games just by the fact it doesn’t feel like a Batman style rhythm brawler. Technically speaking, every hit in a combo has its own properties rather than just being part of a chain of attack animations that all. And these moves do have lots of properties.

The system allows for changing between light and strong attacks while keeping a “string” going, kind of like a combo offset system where you can do the first hits of a light chain and then end with the last hits of your heavy chain. You can take into account which moves cause stun and which ones launch, you jump cancel and do (endless) air combos. Everyone has some variant of a special resource meter, or a super mode, and unique effects on parries, and unique “mechanics” like Black Widow’s zipline or Iron Man’s flight. You can technically do stuff but…

It usually doesn’t feel good. The pacing of the combat has so many impediments to its gamefeel that are clearly there for balancing it with the overall game design as a modern multiplayer stat based loot game. Many attacks have slow start-up animations that feel incongruent with their effectiveness and slow down the rhythm of a combo, I guess to encourage your teammates to be wailing on the same enemy. You have to do a charged heavy attack to break shields on shielded enemies but that charge animation is like 1.5-2 seconds. Sometimes the particular attributes of an attack won’t work, such as causing stagger or launching, for some reason the game never tells you but I can only assume is because it doesn’t consider my equipment strong enough.

The enemies don’t have any interesting behavior to play around so it can be effective to just mash attack buttons until your target, which is not getting any hitstun, attacks you or you get an indicator (sometimes) that someone is going to shoot a projectile at you from off-screen and you need to press the dodge button, which just makes you duck in place. Individually enemies are not hard so it tries to pressure you with larger crowds. But your crowd control is somewhat limited do to the long start-up time and recover time of large range moves, I guess to make you have to rely on your team mates. But this puts you into this weird middle space where neither the 1v1 and crowd control aspects feel super fun.

The encounter designs revolve around killing X waves of enemies, playing king of the hill, playing 3-points point control, and destroying three marked cabinets objects in a room that have oddly high health and keep re-spawning enemies at health bar milestones. Very Avengers like. It has a mix of levels that run you through generic futuristic research lab corridors or Open Level environments with optional king of hill sub-missions off to the side before you reach an elevator that takes you to a generic futuristic research lab. I think the Story Mode missions can have some more unique, linear level design but it was all very straightforward.

You have three special abilities that someone decided should be called Heroics (what an unsatisfying and vague term) but they all take too long to recharge instead of them being cool super hero powers you can do often. Thanks, Destiny, for poisoning the well on this.

And visually it’s just a chaotic mess. It’s so heavy on special effects (see the video I posted a couple of posts above) and the FOV is so close that you can’t really keep a solid situational awareness. But don’t worry, you can use detective vision Tactical Vision to highlight allies, enemies, and interactables.

The game has lots of stats and numbers, but since the combat is so mushy that I can’t tell how much they are really making a difference. And I’m sure that’s partly by design because lots of people who this game needs to sell to probably don’t want to deal with anything but the main Attack and Defense numbers. With all of the attack properties and stat systems in the game maybe Crystal Dynamics could have made something really interesting if it was designed around real loot min-maxing like Path of Exile and Warframe.

5 Likes