I’m saying goodbye to Marvel’s Avengers…

Launching a live-service game at the very height of a pandemic was certainly one of the biggest challenges any game developer can be tasked with. Even without that being a factor, Marvel’s Avengers already had a lot going against it. It didn’t appear to be what anyone wanted from a game starring Earth’s Mightiest Heroes with confusing monetization and characters that didn’t really manage to look like someone’s interpretation of famous comic book heroes that you could still easily identify, no these all looked directly like bad knockoffs of their MCU counterparts.

For the last two years, I stuck pretty solidly by Marvel’s Avengers as in fact, a good game. I think the 15–20 hours of actual story content (including the major expansions featuring Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, and Black Panther) make for a super compelling single-player campaign any Marvel fan would enjoy, and the endgame stuff is fun. The combat generally feels good with most of the characters, and therefore it’s fun to mindlessly wail on robots and AIM soldiers, get new gear and watch your stats go up. Maybe not many people wanted a superhero loot game, but I spent nearly 300 hours over two years having a blast for the most part.

But at least for me, there’s no such thing as a forever game, for sure not when said game is clearly just barely treading water, has been for a long time, and feels utterly directionless, and that’s kind of where Marvel’s Avengers feels at now. The last two characters, Jane Foster as Thor and Bucky aka The Winter Soldier, came with no story content to help flesh them out and really just seem like retreads of characters already available. There seems to be no indication of any big updates period. I’m sure more characters will be dropped, but if all Marvel’s Avengers has become is a game where they drop a new hero that doesn’t play much differently than the other heroes what is even the point? So I think after about 2 years, I’m done with this game.

This is actually not trying to dissuade you from trying Marvel’s Avengers. I didn’t spend two years and hundreds of hours in misery. I would’ve dropped it like a bad habit within the first few hours if that was the case. If anything, if you’ve never given the game a shot now might be the best time to come into it, it’s gotten a next-gen upgrade, it’s got a ton more characters than when it started and it’s been pretty streamlined in terms of how everything works. On top of that, it’s still on both Gamepass and at least some tier of PlayStation Plus, so many of you can try it basically for free.

However, for someone who got in in the ground floor and stuck with it for this long, it just seems like a good time to bow out. Maybe with the somewhat recent purchase of Crystals Dynamics by Embracer, it will get some new life breathed into it, but it seems more likely it’s just going to chug along til they arbitrarily decide to pull the plug (though again you’d still be left with a really solid campaign). I wouldn’t be opposed to coming back and seeing what the state of Marvel’s Avengers is in another year or two but I’m certainly hanging up my bow (Kate Bishop was my favorite to play) and I’m probably staying out in greener Marvel pastures…

That’s all for today, I will probably have two posts next week with new DLC for Marvel’s Midnight Suns hitting though don’t look for that til next weekend, I’ll have another entry before that. See ya real soon!