Square Enix, Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, Crystal Northwest, and Nixxes have all been collaborating together with Marvel on the upcoming Marvel’s Avengers for home consoles and PC. During Square’s E3 presentation the company revealed that the four-player cooperative game will launch next year in May, 2020 for PS4, Xbox One, PC and for Google’s Stadia.
The game was originally teased back in 2018 but we knew nothing about it and had no information about what kind of game it was. This year Square and Marvel rolled out some cinematic footage of the game, and it looks like it might be a more cinematic version of Activision and Vicarious Visions’ Marvel Ultimate Alliance.
We know that there is a four-player cooperative mode included in the game where you can team up with three other players online, but we didn’t get to see it in action. You can, however, see the E3 trailer below to get an idea of what that smorgasbord of developers mentioned above are working on.
The story is about some mysterious group using Stark’s technology against him (as usual). Captain America apparently dies when a S.H.I.E.L.D., craft is attacked while the other Avengers are dealing with some disturbance on the Golden Gate Bridge.
The rest of the trailer is about the remaining members of the Avengers feeling bad about letting down the Captain.
We don’t get to see who the actual villains are and we also have no idea what the story is about. Also, all of the Avengers look really uncanny.
We’re at a point where a lot of numbskull Western developers decide to use laserscanned photogrammetry for character designs, but instead of just scanning in the actors 1:1 and leaving them alone, they like to tweak, modify and otherwise butcher the way the actors look so that they no longer resemble their real life counterparts. In turn they come out looking strange, with mutant-tier jawlines and strange faces with oddly proportioned hairlines.
Overall they just look disgusting instead of realistic or cool. It’s the polar opposite of when you see the same technique applied to games like Yakuza, Judgment or City Shrouded In Shadow, where the characters look like normal human beings. Then again Japanese artists aren’t ideologically driven to purposefully make everyone look like freaks to appease a phantom audience that the west coast Silicon Valley types have an obsession with.
Anyway, Marvel’s Avengers is due out next year. It will feature all of the basic Avengers featured in the trailer above even though they say that Captain America dies (although it’s likely he gets captured by the mysterious villains). Hank Pym is also in the game, but he looks like a soy-guzzling man-nerd, which is disgusting.
So far no one who values their credibility as a gamer should be excited about this until they see some true gameplay footage and only if the actual gameplay is mind-blowing, but I doubt that will happen given the pedigree of the groups involved, who have spent the last half decade working on stuff like the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. I may be wrong, but you might want to prepare to be disappointed.
