Post Script
Why Marvel’s Avengers’ gear system is full of hot air
Perhaps the English language is trying to tell us something with the horrible industry initialism for games as a service, GAAS. Try busting that one out in polite conversation and see who smiles. But maybe there’s a bit of truth there, too. This style of videogame, designed to captivate a playerbase in the millions over multiple years, is one that many publishers and developers have invested heavily in yet somehow failed to grasp. Making a videogame is hard. Making one that people can play for years without getting bored? Few succeed.
Marvel’s Avengers is designed to be something with a long tail, something that morphs over the years, accumulates piles of content, and sustains a large and profitable playerbase. To this end there are many elements that will be familiar from other service games, not all of which feel well-integrated into the kind of game this is. The prime culprit is a loot system which – despite Marvel’s Avengers being based around rewarding players with loot – is so very dull. Each character has five gear slots, two minor artefact slots and a major artefact slot. You pick up things that go in these slots from defeated enemies and chests, then equip the one with the biggest number (or more rarely, a good buff). Rinse, repeat, and never get attached, because it’ll be gone in a few minutes.
Avengers also lifts some of the more obnoxious elements of service game loot systems, without ever thinking about why they were there in the first place. In Destiny, limited storage space means you have to occasionally enter your inventory and dismantle unwanted gear piece-by-piece. This was never especially engaging – but here loot drops are less regular, it’s easy to avoid picking up low-level gear, and there are long loading sequences in which to do the busywork. Avengers has the long loading screens, and the dismantling of the gear piece-by-piece, but so much more loot is thrown at the player, and none of it feels unique. This small process, a background exercise as conceived by the competition, becomes a drag in the imitator.
The question of why loot in some games feels meaningful comes down to how integrated that system is with the core activity. In other words, players value gear because of how they got it. Consider
Monster Hunter, where gaining an armour set means slaying a particular beast multiple times and spending enormous amounts of cash. That gear doesn’t pop out of chests, but is worked towards, earned, and then the player has the dual reward of the visual appearance and improved stats.
Avengers doesn’t have the world for such a neat thematic fit, but the aspect it really fails at is the upgrades’ lack of impact. The gear improves your stats, and after a certain point all of it comes with minor buffs and further unlockable benefits, but not one item will make your character feel different in the moment-to-moment combat. The player never gets the sense of a superhero using an awesome new chestplate or shield, so much as a pawnbroker going through costume jewellery.
Destiny’s finest weapons and armour are painstakingly assembled over many multiple-hour events that require enormous coordination and teamwork, and so are invested with that memory in some small sense. In both this and Monster Hunter’s case, all of that meaning is being ascribed by the player. We make this stuff meaningful for ourselves, and we do it because the core activity in both games is best-inclass and inseparable from the rewards we strive for. This may be the ultimate undoing of Avengers. As a combat game this works, and it looks a treat too, but it doesn’t hit that highest level of polish and refinement that makes you want to do it again and again.
The strangest aspect of this is that there are few licences out there that suit the idea of collectibles and loot and characters better than the Marvel Universe. This game includes comic books that grant minor buffs, which you can examine the covers of, but it never quite dives into that wider world in the way that, say, a Lego game does. Let’s not get too Comic Book Guy about it, but plenty of alternative loadouts and one-off pieces of gear have already been invented for these characters over the years. Almost any reference to such stuff comes on the cosmetic side of the game – basically, the many character costumes for sale – and Avengers is extremely stingy with its regular players in this regard, meaning those who’ve ‘only’ paid £60 for the base game have to really grind for an extra costume. That’s not to say “Microtransation bad, Hulk Smash!” But it is notable that Avengers fails to make its gear system distinctive and interesting, and that’s the part that ties into the action, while there’s so much character locked away in the shop. The balance is wrong.
Avengers may well recover from this shaky start, and build the community it wants. There’s nevertheless a shallowness to this game’s systems, whereby they’re layered atop one another rather than working together. That won’t bother those who just want the superhero brawler experience, but it precludes any longer-term investment. This might seem like placing too much emphasis on trinkets; perhaps it is. But when a player can sense that there’s no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, there’s little motivation to keep trying to get there.
It doesn’t hit that highest level of polish and refinement that makes you want to do it again and again