MARVEL’S AVENGERS
OSCAR TAYLOR-KENT TALK WITH CRYSTAL DYNAMICS ABOUT MARVEL'S AVENGERS TO DISCOVER HOW IT'S BUILDING AN ONGOING PLATFORM FOR SUPERHEROICS, STARTING WITH MS. MARVEL
Crystal Dynamics reveals how it’s making a game as super as the heroes at its heart.
“SHE ISN’T THERE TO PAD OUT THE NUMBERS, SHE’S THE GLUE HOLDING THE TEAM TOGETHER.”
We might not possess Ms. Marvel’s polymorphic superpowers, but you’d be forgiven for not realising that, given how closely our hands are wrapped around the DualShock in our behindclosed-doors time with the sixth hero in Crystal Dynamics’ Avengers roster.
The most recently announced on Marvel’s Avengers’ roster of heroes, she’ll be fighting alongside some other titanic heroes who everyone who’s been within Hulk’s throwing distance of a cinema will be familiar with: Iron Man, Black Widow, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America (who ‘dies’ within the tutorial mission). But make no mistake, Ms. Marvel (or Kamala Khan, out of her super-suit) isn’t there to pad out the numbers. She’s the glue holding everything together – or, at least, the glue that must eventually restick together the fractured superhero team, as she helps them come together after they’re held responsible for San Francisco’s destruction, and superheroes are outlawed as a result.
“So Kamala, in our game, she’s the sixth playable character, but she is the protagonist of our campaign,” explains Scot Amos, Crystal Dynamics’ head of studio. From the very first teaser trailer, Amos says, she’s been teased – it was Ms. Marvel who narrated that initial reveal.
“From the beginning of making this game she’s been that core,” says Amos. “I think there’s an amazing synchronicity between the player’s perspective and Kamala’s perspective that will help really pull them all together.”
Having won a fan fiction contest to attend the ill-fated A-Day celebrations that doom the Avengers, Kamala is an accidental hero in the making. Acquiring her Inhuman powers from the Terrigen Mist unleashed during the attack, she picks up the torch five years later to reassemble the Avengers team. Kamala is an outsider thrust into the superhero game. She’s our way into this world of green Hulks and world-ending threats.
MARVELLOUS MIGHT
So what’s special about her? “She can bend and stretch her body into all kinds of crazy shapes and sizes, which gives her an amazing new, very fluid combat,” says Amos. “[We had to ask] ‘How does she stretch? How does she punch? How does she grow? How does she shrink?’ And for us, it’s this amazing power that has really changed our combat system.”
Broadly the answer to all these questions is: very well. We’ve had time to play around with all of the heroes, but Ms. Marvel the most extensively, and she is terrific fun to play as. She’s melee-focussed and has the combos to match as we whale on AIM soldiers – hitting r for light attacks and then wrapping things up with w for heavy attacks to end with different finishers, some more suited to dishing out direct damage or hitting a wider spread of enemies. Reduce an enemy’s health enough and a combination of w and e will perform a scripted finishing move.
So far, so superhero brawler. But it’s incredibly slick, polished, and responsive, with Ms. Marvel able to dish out smackdowns at speed. Simply double-tap q and she’s able to stretch out her arms to grapple to far-off ledges mid-jump, while dodging using e not only stops enemy hits from landing but allows her to follow up with unique attacks, such as an air-launching sweeping kick by pressing r.
SHE KHAN DO IT!
Even with a large number of powerful enemies coming at us we’re able to control the crowd, zipping between enemies who will pick us off with long-ranged guns if we leave them unchecked. By holding p we’re able to aim her long-distance elastic punches, and her assault heroic on u unleashes a massive fist with some range too. All heroic skills are on their
“[MS. MARVEL’S] AMAZING POWER HAS REALLY CHANGED OUR COMBAT SYSTEM.”
own separate cooldowns, but they recharge quickly enough for you to be able to pepper plenty of them into a good scrap.
Our favourite technique makes good use of her powers to ‘embiggen’ – by holding i she grows a bit taller, modifying the moves she can use and the strength of her attacks. This type of skill is known as an ‘Intrinsic’, taking up energy to use. What’s great is how easily you can use it. It simply toggles as and when you have i held down, so you can use it for just a few seconds at a time to give your finishing moves a little extra burst of power.
Of course, for her ultimate heroic move Ms. Marvel can become even larger still, growing to absolutely giant size when you push both o and u. This embiggens her to her massive form for quite a while, during which time we’re able to take to task even the big AIM tank we end up tangling with. We still take a fair amount of damage towards the end of our encounter, however, so her support heroic on o helps us out, healing her wounds.
WAR MACHINE
Our time cracking skulls as
Ms. Marvel is super, but what’s perhaps most important is that it feels very Ms. Marvel. That’s in part thanks to the great working relationship the team has directly with Marvel itself.
“They’re full-fledged collaborators. There’s no other way to put it,” says Amos. “These guys are at our studio every week. Like you know, Eric Monacelli, their director of production, and Bill [Rosemann] who’s their VP of Creative, these are the folks that we ring up and we’re like, ‘You know, we’re not sure about Kamala – if she would say this or that?’” From there Crystal Dynamics has a direct hotline to the likes of
Ms. Marvel creator Sana Amanat or one of her writers, G Willow Wilson, to get their direct input.
Beyond dialogue, the creators can even get in front of the game to give feedback on how she moves. “That kind of direct access to these creators has been… we’re almost starstruck in some ways! [laughs] You’re talking to these people who have made these characters from scratch,” says Amos. “For us, it’s a pure and simple collaboration.”
It’s not just that the team want their Marvel heroes to feel distinct from their movie counterparts, but also from each other. They’ve
“FOR HER ULTIMATE HEROIC MOVE MS. MARVEL CAN BECOME EVEN LARGER, GROWING TO ABSOLUTELY GIANT SIZE.”
managed to do that, keeping the characters’ controls similar enough that you can hop between them without feeling lost, but giving each one their own specialisations so they fundamentally feel different to play.
CROSSOVER EVENT
“Vince [Napoli, lead combat designer] has a nice solid philosophy of just getting people the basics. We want people to be able to pick up and play this. Anybody can come in and play this,” says Amos. Light attacks and heavy attacks, for instance, are always on the same buttons, but the combos can be different. You hold p to aim a ranged attack,
for example, but there’s a big difference in the result depending on whether you’re chucking Thor’s hammer or unleashing Ms. Marvel mid-range fist.
Amos continues: “Then you have to get into ‘How do my Intrinsics work with those moves? How do I use these moves in certain ways to do the most efficient kills or blocks or whatever that might be?’ [When you play as Ms. Marvel] it’s an amazing experience where you go ‘Oh, if I hold the i button there’s an Intrinsic, and then if I use the light and heavy attacks differently, if I hold them versus tap them versus combo them – you start to see the different ways for her to fight different enemies.”
This mix of ease of play and deeper tactical combo strings is common to all the different heroes. “The more you invest time in them, the more you can start mastering these combos and these skills,” says Amos. “And then you start adding, on top of that, the skill trees and the perks and the weapons and the attributes and it’s like ‘Oh my God, there’s so much here I can min/max my characters out of’. So I think there’s a ton of depth for people who want to go after it.”
POWER COSMIC
Beyond the characters simply feeling different from one another, you can get into their setups and make them work for you. Adding moves to a character’s repertoire will unlock more options, and you’ll learn how to pull off more devastating combos with those advanced movesets.
“As you invest skill points into his repulsor tree, you’re going to be able to change and upgrade even how his repulsors behave,” says Amos as he takes us through Iron Man’s robust gear and skill menus from the game’s alpha build. The menus tease plenty of intriguing customisation options. Amos explains, “You’ll also be able to unlock new trees and new attacks like lasers and rockets.
[See the screen on the right.] You can also switch between these sets of attacks on the fly using your D-pad right in a combo. So if you start with a repulsor attack, you can swap to laser when you hit the ground and pull off a big melee attack and then switch to your rockets with an auto-lock and
take out two more enemies that are at range.”
In practice, moves like this hit the gaming sweet spot: they don’t feel too complicated to pull off, but do make you feel inventive for performing them. Combat is robust, full of options, and incredibly satisfying. This is thanks in large part to the diversity of playstyles and individual skills, the latter ensuring it feels unique too. Amos isn’t afraid to admit the team has learned from other games in the genres they’re gunning for – think God Of War meets Marvel’s Spider-Man – but by mixing it with their own talents as a studio filled with accomplished team members, it feels very much like their own.
But while the combat feels like Crystal’s own, the different heroes can feel completely yours once you’ve got your hands on them. “Thor is a God, so Thor should fly, so being able to fly I get to control the battlefield. So I put all my skill points into recharging my heroics, having more lightning strikes,
“THE DIFFERENT HEROES CAN BE CUSTOMISED TO FEEL COMPLETELY YOURS.”
having faster speeds to do those attacks,” says Amos. “But Mark back there likes melee attacks, so Mark put all his skill points into making Thor’s melee moves stronger and faster and stunning enemies, being able to do more types of finishing attacks and making more health by tanking up his Thor. They’re both Thor, they both feel and play like Thor – mine’s better – but they both play like Thor. And you can choose how you want to do that with your character for the fine-tuning.”
Depending on the skill points you assign or the gear you equip, you can give your character different bonuses. Better gear will give you more buffs, and is earned through completing harder missions (outfits, unlike gear, are purely cosmetic), giving you plenty of reasons to return to missions with co-op friends. Just as the comics keep coming every month, we see no reason why we won’t want to play as heroes just as frequently come 15 May 2020, when the game assembles on PS4, with an exclusive beta period for PS4 players before that.