AVENGERS... ASSEMBLE!
Crystal Dynamics devs talk to Oscar TaylorKent about building Marvel’s Avengers’ heroic co-op multiplayer.
Inside the game that brings Iron Man back to life!
With the Avengers having been disbanded for five years following the A-Day disaster, it’s up to the newly superpowered Kamala Khan (AKA Ms. Marvel) to get them back together, uncovering the nefarious schemes of Advanced Idea Mechanics (AIM), which filled the vacuum of power with science.
Led by the villainous Modok, AIM’s plan to steal the Inhuman superpowers created on A-Day is hidden beneath a PR spiel that claims the organisation provides an alternate way to protect humanity. Marvel’s Avengers’ campaign promises a lengthy adventure where you get to play as Kamala, Thor, Hulk, Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Widow to bring AIM down. But it’s also just the start. As you customise your heroes with lootdropped gear you team up with your friends to tackle War Zone missions in co-op (or go solo with AI companions).
“Imagine the campaign as sort of the Kamala origin story, reassembling the Avengers, right? That’s the campaign. But that’s just the jumping-off point,” says creative director Shaun Escayg, (who was also creative director and writer on Uncharted: The Lost Legacy). “Once the campaign resolves […] it opens up [into] this sort of larger world and sort of AIM versus citizens, the superpowered, and the heroes themselves.” As any comic reader knows, a stomped threat rarely stays stomped for good, and the War Zone missions see you taking on AIM and other adversaries in an ongoing fight on behalf of factions from the Inhuman resistance to SHIELD agents Dum Dum Dugan, Maria Hill, and Nick Fury.
Waging war
You can jump into these missions from your ruined helicarrier base, which you restore and rebuild over the course of the game as you shelter the AIM resistance. In honour of Hank Pym, scientist assistant to the Avengers (and at some point, we presume, Ant-Man), it’s dubbed The Anthill. “So you’re
looking at the [war table] map, there’s different regions, and those regions have different activities on them,” says Phil Therien, the War Zone director. “It could be a mission that advances the story for a hero, it could be a faction mission that helps SHIELD rebuild, it could be because some AIM hotspot, some big threat, has been detected, and you have to go do that, and you’ve got a limited amount of time to do it.”
As well as developing the stories about the factions, the War Zone missions have narrative wrappers that add to the overall story of this new take on the Avengers. “Some of the War Zones will actually let you see a little bit more how the Avengers are dealing with everything that happened at A-Day,” says Therien. “So it gives you a sense of how did Hulk deal with being stuck as Hulk, right? […] So those are threads that are specifically for those heroes. There’s threads that also talk about the different factions that are basically dealing with rebuilding post A-Day as well. So you’ll see Maria Hill dealing with what’s happening with SHIELD, and that’s another line of missions.”
Avengers disassemble
While a lot of War Zone missions cover the aftermath of the campaign, you also get to see things that happened while the Avengers were disassembled, taking place alongside the campaign story. “There’s all this stuff that you don’t even get to see during the campaign, that you don’t get to experience until after the campaign. Now you’re like, ‘Oh, there’s some crazy event, and this is affecting Thor and his people in some crazy way,’” says Scot Amos, Crystal Dynamics’ head of studio. “So [you’re] going off and exploring that thread that then we get to add to post-campaign, but even post-launch, as we actually add more regions and more heroes beyond that.” And it’s worth remembering that we’re promised all updates, from regions to heroes to play, will be added for free, and we’ll only have to pay for premium skins. “That gets to be that ever-expanding world for us,” says Amos. “The campaign’s the beginning, then you have that War Zone state of the world of all these things to do, and then we just keep expanding from there.”
You unlock your first War Zone missions as you progress through the campaign, and it’s largely left to you to decide when you want to tackle them. “It’s not all sequential, you can do them in any order you want in many cases, but some of them also unlock because you’ve completed others,” says Therien, giving the example that a Black Widow fan may want to tackle her related War Zone missions alongside the campaign.
Crosscountry heroics
“One of the big things was we wanted to make sure that rather than having just one big open space that’s always the same, we wanted to have many different regions. So, a War Zone is effectively a subset of one of those regions,” says Therien. We’ve glimpsed three regions so far: the Eastern Seaboard, which is a large AIM-controlled city; the Utah Badlands, full of dry, craggy rocks and boulders ( The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction fans rejoice); and the more forested, rural Pacific Northwest. More have been teased worldwide, especially as the game receives fresh content post-launch.
However, these are far from static
spaces, and different missions within them will utilise different chunks of the space – a mix of open areas and interiors like underground bases. “Those regions can change. They can have different times of day, different weather, they can have different activities. So when you consider that ongoing conflict against AIM, you imagine that AIM might come back to places they’ve been before, but it’s not always going to be under the same conditions, right?” says Therien. “As you get stronger in multiplayer, you’ll see that AIM starts to throw bigger things at you, so the game wants to be interesting in that respect, and not all content is available all the time. We have things that rotate in and out […] Between the things that you can unlock by playing sequentially and the things that rotate in and out it’s sort of like a living organism on the war table.”
Within these War Zone missions there will also be difficulty options (Brutal’s the hardest) and modifiers like enemies having cryo-based attacks – and these will give greater rewards, such as rarer gear.
Multiple choice
Whether you want to hop into a quick session with your friends or get together for longer, the goal is to offer something for everyone. “We have a mechanic in the game called tactical awareness: press up on your D-pad, it’ll show you question marks,” says Therien. These are side-objectives beyond the main one you’re tackling. “The objectives are linear because there’s a story when you’re playing through the level, but what you choose to do before you get to the objectives is up to you.”
Therien gives us an example: “If we were landing down in a really urban environment, well we might see 200 metres to our left, there might be a question mark, we go check that out, there’s a SHIELD agent that needs to be rescued; several hundred metres ahead of us, there might be a bounty special enemy that spawned there, we go defeat that guy to get some special gear; then over to our right, another several hundred metres away, which is probably two or three city blocks away, you might find some AIM resources that you need to upgrade the gear you just got from defeating a bounty. And that’s still not dealing with your main objective which is a few hundred metres ahead of you.”
Each War Zone will be dense with things to do. “Imagine a city block, or several city blocks rather, is a region for that War Zone. And another mission in that same region might be using different city blocks. So, it’s a fairly open space that gives you a lot of freedom,” says Therien.
Gearing up
Each hero has powers and abilities in keeping with their established character, but even so you can use them in ways that make them very much your own – even when you’re operating in these larger spaces. “It’s all about giving the player agency, right? Because when Vince [Napoli] talks about combat, you see all these options. This is fun if you have an environment that fits having so many choices for the heroes,” says Therien. “Imagine that you have an open objective in the War Zone, it’s an AIM outpost – well, does Iron Man fly overhead and provide air support? Does Hulk go right in and fight? Or actually, no, Vince likes to play with lasers, he’s gonna go melee with Iron Man, I’m going to use my Hulk on a cliff and I’m going to use gamma-infused boulders to rain down hell on the fight, right? And that’s awesome. Like those choices are there.”
The rare gear you find is designed to help you stack more powers on top of the heroes’ individual superpowers to tailor them. So, Iron Man’s laser and other gear can be infused with Pym particles that shrink enemies and make them weaker and easier for teammates to mop up. “We also have gamma radiation, [and] cosmic is one of our
“WE WANT TO TAKE A VERY MARVEL CUSTOM APPROACH.”
status effects. So we want to take a very Marvel custom approach that you cannot find in any other game,” explains Vince Napoli, the lead combat designer (who also worked on 2018’s God Of War). “We wanted to ensure that as you were specialising the characters, when you leaned into a playstyle that the gear encouraged or reinforced that playstyle.”
Even as one story draws to a close, with comics there are always more adventures on the horizon. This could shape up to be the Destiny 2 solution for superhero fans and those who just love smashing enemies up with incredibly satisfying combos – all wrapped up in a constantly evolving comic-book story. We can’t wait to begin flipping through the pages with you at our side.