Gamer Blog Log: Marvel Heroes, Forge, Date January 16th, 2013
- Jan 16th. 2013
- By Agilen
Hello website, been awhile.
The reason for my sudden absence despite having set out to start updating on this website again was a severe case of depression which pretty much crippled me from doing anything productive. I could barely keep up on top of work much less anything else. I’ve started taking some happy pills and I’m feeling pretty good and without endless mood swings. Now that I’ve summed up the last few month I’m going to go back to what this site primarily is about.
A few days ago a friend of mine made a private stream for Marvel Heroes an upcoming F2P mmo . Since this isn’t strictly allowed since it is from the closed beta that is under NDA I am not going to say who it was.
The game is an action rpg in similar vein to Diablo. Which isn’t surprising considering at least one of the people influential in the creation of Diablo is lead designer for Marvel Heroes. They have a pretty large roster of heroes for starters. There are many of the obvious like Hulk, Wolverine, Iron Man, Thor and Spider-Man but there are also lesser known ones like Squirrel girl and Rocket Raccoon.
The game will be completely “F2P” according to this recent interview with David Brevik. I’m assuming this means you can unlock everything just by playing the game aside from maybe some optional skins.
At the start you can only pick from a limited number of heroes but you can unlock more by clearing some missions or as a drop. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of unlocking everything through hours of just playing the game you can buy starter packs where you get a roster of heroes, xp bonuses etc. There is even one that costs $199 where you unlock all the heroes. I don’t see why anyone would want to buy that, I mean what’s the point of playing the game if you have already unlocked everything. You’d be denying yourself a lot of the game experience. Guess this all depends on how regularly they will be releasing new content to the game to keep people interested and playing.
Now on to what I saw from the game.
I only watched a little bit of the game in action and I liked what I saw. From what I could gather split into a shared area and then instanced areas for missions and “dungeon” crawling.
The shared area is weird because people start out with such a limited number of heroes to pick from you end up seeing a huge number of heroes running around that look exactly alike. This is fine for your general mmo because you are just another Dwarf or Elf or whatever. You aren’t a distinct hero or personality like in this game where everyone picks from a limited roster of heroes so story wise this makes no sense. I’m guessing this area will be devoid of actual story missions and will mostly be for socializing and keeping the huge amount of muggers and ninja that keep appearing out of nowhere at bay. Was rather hilarious watching the shear amount of muggers that kept spawning and attacking my friend. He had like 10 following him for awhile, It was absurd. I am not sure if there is any kind of “dungeon finder” system in the game in the beta but I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s a feature they would implement at some point.
As for the instance missions or “dungeons” You find entrances for those scattered around the shared area. Inside you have to fight your way through a horde of enemies and fight a boss at the end either solo or with a group. The villains I’ve seen in the game so far are Doctor Octopus and the Shocker. I also saw Venom in non player area in one of the dungeons and the Rhino in cut scenes.
The game seems largely loot driven and has three skill trees to invest the points you get when you level up into as expected. At the present there aren’t a lot of skills to put points into in the skill trees but I’m sure this will improve as the game gets closer to launch.
It seems in any respect like a game I could invest a lot of my time into especially if dedicated group of my friends start playing as well.
The game doesn’t have an exact release date. I know they are aiming for a spring release date this year so there shouldn’t be a long wait for the game to come out.
In other news, during the Steam sale I picked up a game called Forge and I’d like to write a few words about it.
The short version: It’s a dull, unfinished ugly mess of a game and I recommend you stay away from it.
The long version: The short version pretty much sums it up but let me elaborate nonetheless.
There are a number of problems with the game that need to be addressed before it actually becomes playable.
Issue number 1 would be the very very steep learning curve. The tutorial doesn’t help at all. The main problem is that the game plays kinda like you are playing pvp in a mmo game like World of Warcraft however unlike those kinds of game you aren’t gradually introduced to your available abilities. Playing this game is kinda like if I asked a friend of mine who had never played WoW to take over raid healing for me while I had to be afk he would have no idea what he was doing since there are so many abilities that I’ve setup and set to certain hotkeys which only I really know. My first match playing I ran around with like 8 different abilities to choose from and I had barely any idea what any of them did and it’s hard to learn and memorize when you are being attacked.
It also has a number of important features that haven’t been implanted yet like group matchmaking, friend lists. The game has interesting game mechanics like you being able to wall jump to get around the map. This is cool in theory but no one actually uses this feature because it serves no point or no real advantage that I could see plus it being hard to do.
The other big issues is that all your abilities and movement abilities use the same resource bar. So basically you are either forced to run away from a fight or stay and fight you can’t do both. Even jumping drains it away, and this from a pool of only a 100 and each jump costs you like 15.
Aside from that the game doesn’t look so good, graphics and characters are dull and ugly to look at.There is a lot of grey in the color scheme and the maps are very dark and they run rather sluggish on my laptop(which runs Farcry 3 decently with near max graphics)
It might be that some like this game, but they have to be very hardcore about it and have been playing it since it was an alpha. For someone who is just starting out this is a completely unforgiving experience, even more so then any MOBA game I’ve ever played like League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth.
Now that I’m feeling a little more productive I’ve also started streaming again. Last night I went through and finished Mega Man 1 for the first time to my recollection. I never owned it as a kid and I only played it over a friends place so I didn’t just breeze through it like I would some other Mega Man games that I’ve played to death (Mega man 3 in particular) so it wasn’t exactly record breaking run through the game. It took me about 2 and a half hours which is just shy of the fastest 12 minute speedrun right? 
I’m hoping that this time I will stick to the site because I really do enjoy writing about games, they are what I am most passionate about .
Until next time!
- Agilen
