Avengers: Endgame?
Well here we are, just over two months after the release of Square Enix’s Marvel’s Avengers and things are honestly looking kinda grim. Though it’s hard to get any official real estimates, there’s evidence that the online community just isn’t there, promised DLC to keep players interested such as Kate Bishop and Hawkeye have been delayed with no real indication of when those are actually coming (which may also have further pushed back future characters and content) and on top of that Square Enix just posted recent financials and while Avengers was the top-selling game of September, it fell well below targets.
To be clear, I am still playing and enjoying Avengers. I just recently got Kamala Kahn to max level, currently working on Thor, and certainly plan to max out the rest of the main cast. I’m still getting a lot of enjoyment out of Avengers myself, but I can see the cracks. Content is light, enemies are the same damn AIM flunkies and robots, for some reason, there are just two Marvel villains to fight and it’s the same ones you fought in the campaign over and over again. Some of it is definitely just unfortunate timing and not the fault of the dev team at all in the year of a pandemic but one has to wonder if the game would’ve performed much better just pushed back to 2021, possibly as a next-gen exclusive.
So is this really it for what should have been one of the biggest games for the next few years? It’s just going to limp along until Square Enix unceremoniously kills it in say 6 months or possibly less and Marvel fans are still left with very little in terms of video games to play as their favorite superheroes?
While things are most definitely in a bad spot no question, this isn’t like the last two Avengers movies where there’s only one very slim way out in millions of scenarios.
Firstly, especially in the last two generations (yup PS4 and Xbox One are last-gen now guys, we have new consoles in less than a week), we’ve literally seen several stories of games that launched extremely poorly that took the time to really turn things around and get great and now have a dedicated fanbase that really enjoys them. The amount of money Square Enix has sunk into making Avengers actually drastically improves the odds of this happening if it's even necessary.
And Avengers may not even need something that drastic. If they can manage to get the fresh content rolling on a regular basis, that may be honestly all they need. I think Avengers is a super fun game to play, players just need more to do.
It’s also completely possible that the game finds new life on the new consoles especially with a new version optimized for the next generation where the game looks and runs way better and will have whatever content has launched by that time included.
I’ll still continue to play Avengers for the immediate future and hope that Square Enix hasn’t given up on it just yet. If it has, I feel I have personally gotten my money’s worth out of it, but it was a game that was supposed to go for years, not months. Maybe that’s the problem, but it’s also a disappointment if it can’t be the game it was striving for. That’s all for now, but after my month and a half hiatus, I plan to be back to regular writing, maybe even with an additional piece this weekend (regular features such as Main Street Mobile Arcade, Disney Infinity Chronicles and Into the Vault will also be returning, I just have to get back into a regular groove and then will add them back in), so see ya real soon!
