Marvel's Avengers - What Happened?

[Music] hey true believers before we start smashing and thrashing through the most expensive beat-em-up game of all time i wanted to give a quick psa about another title in the genre one that i personally worked on [Music] the takeover is an homage to the good old days of belt scrollers and while it's been out digitally for a while on steam switch and ps4 its fantastic physical edition courtesy of limited run is now available in both standard and collector's varieties if you have a lust for physical goods the pre-order window is closing at the end of the day tomorrow july 25th if you place an order by then you're guaranteed to have one kicking through your door later this year link in the description below thanks to everyone who supported this project so far as it's been a dream of mine to see something like this come to fruition and it finally has so without any further cheeky product placement let's charging star right into today's episode marvel's avengers featuring squeamix and crystal d has to be the financial flop of 2020 yes even worse than cyberpunk as to why well there's a multitude hell a multiverse amount of reasons for this which in a very rare case is not due to the regular lineup of villainous villains we encounter here at what happened no disastrous engine switches developer closures or rogue variants mucking up the sacred timeline not one thing doom this brawler slash rpg slash live service single player adventure but rather everything did so grab your shield your tattered purple pants and your bow and arrow i guess cause it's time to find out what happened with marvel's avengers the avengers as a refresher the avengers are not new to the realm of video gaming there's of course the cap cap-centric 90s arcade game that terrible ubisoft fighter literally no one remembers and a canceled thq first person shooter but most famously of all there's galactic storm but ever since the mcu became the dominant force in the landscape of cinematique there hadn't been a big ambitious game to take advantage of the team's mega star status thus in 2017 square enix of all publishers announced a collaboration with marvel to produce several games based on its franchises with avengers obviously being the marquee one first dubbed the avengers project this announcement was met with um not much as it was essentially just a logo and a temp name and wasn't actually revealed in any concrete form for another two years before that though what square did want fans to know was that the game would be primarily developed by crystal dynamics best known for their blockbuster smash hits gexx and nikuji the heartless it's tale time ever wonder why shadow of the tomb raider was handled by idos montreal and not the company that started the rebooted trilogy well this is why crystal dynamics would need all hands on deck because avengers was going to be a massive undertaking that would require not only their sizable staff but the staff from several other smaller studios this off the bat was always going to lead to problems as coordinating several companies across different time zones and language barriers is not something you just suddenly start doing and expect to excel at and while crystal dynamics had collaborated before with other partners on multiplayer modes and additional maps for prior tomb raiders something of this scale was a first for the team this was acknowledged very early on by studio head scott amos from our side it's the biggest thing we've ever done we now have five studios working together to pull this off crystal dynamics at redwood shores we opened a new studio in bellevue called crystal northwest we have our partners in the netherlands nyx's idos montreal and even square enix japan has folks from the tech group working with us we've had to change how we work how we are organized as a team the number of people we need to do this the number of external partners we've had to go hire experts like sean eskeigh who is our creative director he told stories for uncharted and the last of us we needed him to help tell this story dave 5 field was a game director who worked on halo and call of duty we needed him to help us with multiplayer we go around and look at what we need who are the experts we cherry picked the best of the best and said let's put this together in a new way for something bigger than we've ever done if that doesn't sound like a recipe to appear on the very show you're watching right now i don't know what does if you're working on your own ip that a singular studio or publisher owns that certainly helps facilitate a smooth development cycle in terms of design and approval which of course doesn't apply here you're making a new game with some of the most well-loved comic book heroes of all time and you got square crystal dynamics marvel and all those other studios trying to hone in on what that game should be so with that amount of cooks in the kitchen it was always going to get a bit messy the main development period lasted without any party giving anything away and when it was finally shown in may of 2019 in its own midi event that close to the chess mentality continued despite the game getting this its own mini e3 many basic key details were not shown at least not publicly released footage consisted solely of cinematics occasionally peppered with a snippet a whisper of actual gameplay but behind closed doors it was a different story press were shown not not allowed to play but shown the full opening level that showed off several avengers for whatever reason square or marvel didn't want this footage going out to the public and instead focused on the game's story tone and introducing the characters and their new looks these new looks as many of you know induced the earliest but certainly not the last of many fan grumblings while sony and insomniac spider-man had made a conscious effort to distinguish itself from what was happening on cinema screens avengers was clearly embracing the mcu as the core story was eerily similar to infinity war end game there is an opening crisis that the avengers fail to stop followed by a five-year gap followed by the team having to regroup and pull together to stop a bigger threat etc etc however it still stopped short of committing to that continuity and aesthetic i.e they didn't want to pay any of the mcu actors for their likenesses or voices which i can't really blame them for when the mcu started that was affordable but in 2020 it would have caused the game's already massive budget to balloon to something that would have made even tony stark blush alright so these character designs no need to beat a dead beta ray bill here but many complain that these designs simply look like bottom shelf facsimiles of said actors and actresses everyone here is depicted as legally distinct the best type of distinct to their real life counterparts that's not to disparage the incredible amount of voice and motion captured talent that was brought in which was a veritable who's who of the va industry while there's some great performances in the game it was very clear that square wanted their mcu cake and to be able to eat it too so this event which showed very little gameplay leading to many being confused about what the genre was even aiming for was coupled with designs and story that felt like regurgitated cinematic concepts made for a first impression that left many underwhelmed at worst and just whelmed at best a game where we as players can experience in both single player and co-op what it's like to be earth's mightiest heroes do i have any true believers in the house yes you get one shot at making a big splash and square and marvel fumbled this showing right out of the gate a fumbling that might have done even more long-term damage since they're being so hush-hush and were trying to control all imagery and media coming out of this debut it wound up having the opposite effect one individual at the show with a press pass wanted to [ __ ] around and find out so they shot a shaky cell phone video of gameplay which of course does a disservice to most high fidelity titles said footage was of course then leaked onto the internet and the damage i hinted at earlier indeed was done the power level of this villainous cell phone was off the charts if square and marvel hadn't been so clandestine with this reveal allowed direct capture or showed off uncut gameplay this is something that could have been avoided things didn't improve over the coming months as the powers that be slowly drip-fed new details and imagery with conflicting messages that came from both the press and square themselves it started to circulate that the game had elements or or maybe actually was the dreaded live service model that was already wearing out its welcome and was getting increasingly difficult to get a foothold in you can have like two or three big games that serve that need your sieges your dead by daylights your leagues but there's just as many failures your fallout 76s your anthems and your all these others to put such a monumental amount of money manpower and money and and money into a live service model is always risky especially when crystal dynamics had never done something like this before but it's weird because unlike those aforementioned titles avengers wasn't a 100 dedicated live service title at all but an awkward combination of a traditional single player action game and an online co-op brawler with daily events rewards missions in loot but you'll be forgiven if at some point you never realize that because it was a murky message that everyone involved failed to explain adequately when you start avengers campaign you'll find several hours of what you'd expect an uncharted like action movie filled with impressive set pieces before midway through your adventure the game awkwardly shifts to a mission-based co-op suite that's only there to lube you up for all the live service fun it wants to give you now since avengers is a game very much still being made and employing hundreds of people t has yet to be spilled about the inner workings of its development but given how the multiplayer's clumsily bolted halfway through the story campaign means it was at least something that was implemented after the fact since scott amos admitted they needed to staff up with multiplayer experts it's very possible that a simple single player action adventure was initially designed but then square or marvel or both wanted one more back of the box feature but it's that back of the box feature that was the cause of so many headaches for earth's mightiest heroes for a game of this scale with open explorable levels explosive set pieces several complex characters a single player story a full online multiplayer suite and extensive dlc plans meant there were a lot of working parts working parts that would be very prone to not working when the public beta was released in august of 2020 people were understandably worried as as beta went so poorly even bethesda were embarrassed for them ah bethesda gotcha again any number of functionality bugs would occur at any given time the game would randomly crash just not connect players it was cataclysmic in how poorly it went although still not as bad as heroes reborn in the weeks leading to this beta major publications like gamespot and others were finally able to speak freely about what avengers actually was a game with two halves there's a story mode and a multiplayer mode think about that it took a year and a half for square and marvel to finally confirm what the game was and how it worked oh right august was an important slash disastrous month for the game for another reason and that was the announcement that marvel's most popular hero adam x the extreme spider-man was going to be a playstation exclusive character now matt you scream that's because sony has the exclusive rights to spider-man video games that makes sense no they don't own those rights they always need to be worked out with marvel on a game by game basis so it's pretty clear sony stepped in wanted more people to play the game on playstation systems and thus brokered a deal with the involved parties when you have a multi-platform game you're always gonna piss off more people than you're gonna please with a move like this many fans bemoan this anti-consumer practice being denied a fan favorite character just because sony wanted to sell a few extra consoles that was never gonna fly or swing or web swing and all the online petitions or angry tweets in the world was never going to erase the ink on those contracts so this is yet another decision that while on paper seemed like a big money move it just wound up being nothing but a tone-deaf misfire that only hurt the game from a pr perspective and by this point avengers already had its fair share of black eyes and battle damage also for those out there still keeping score it's been almost a full year since spidey's announcement and there's been not a shred of the old web head while we don't have the full reasons for this part of the delay could most likely be attributed to [Music] the many bugs and issues found during the beta were indicative of a larger problem because when kovit impacted the entire world avengers was being worked on by five different studios in four different countries and at a critical phase of development the majority of bug squashing obviously takes place in the last few months leading to release and while games like this usually do suffer from rough launches a global pandemic causing millions of businesses to rethink their work strategies and logistics obviously was a factor here but even before that became an issue please refer back to january of 2020 where square announced avengers was seeing a 5 month delay from may to september and a delay like that means the game was already rife with instability and bug so if you combine that with a pandemic you wind up with a patch that addresses over 1 000 bugs once the game was released in early september the first major patch rolled out on the 19th and scrolling down this list of fixes is is just exhausting it's like reading the spider clone saga omnibus i look at this list and i just grip my heart as it's currently trying to escape and go out to all the qa testers and programmers that have to work their asses off to fix all these issues cause i'm aware of how many sleepless nights they would have had to endure really could have been avoided if square and marvel had just decided to push the game back by like another three months maybe to january of 2021 would have done a lot in the long run but because the game had already been delayed five months i guess it was never an option yeah no and unfortunately when someone that's on the fence about buying a game here is that its first patch fixes a thousand issues that's not a great look what's a worse look though was the game's critical reception which could charitably be described as lukewarm while the game certainly had its positives with an entertaining if predictable single player campaign graphics and overall production it's bugs glacial grind to unlock moves cosmetics and gear and its repetitive and lackluster end game were huge knocks against it obviously square and crystal dynamics had a lot of work ahead of them which threw their entire dlc road map out the proverbial window before launch they had promised one character a month which was something that just wasn't tenable as they were currently embroiled in stomping out thousands of broodlings so all these factors would then result in a games player base obviously you know being unhappy but of course a publisher doesn't really account for this so when the dlc rollout did start it wasn't exactly tailored to quell the tumult of disappointed fans kate bishop arrived almost three months later in december and while i had nothing against kate and many people don't she wasn't exactly going to be putting butts in the seats this was not made any better by another three month delay which resulted in hawkeye yeah again while this isn't exactly their fault it does come off as tone death ah there's that term again but fortunately after hawkeye there was oh nothing that that's it as of the time of this writing there's only been two completely original heroes added to this game yes black panther is coming in the wakanda expansion but that's still three characters in one year this was all exacerbated due to covet delays which led to more bugs which led to pushing back the next gen versions this just impacted everything obviously as time went on bugs were fixed the next gen versions alleviated a lot of technical issues but for every positive step forward square and crystal dynamics would cause it to take a step back in march of this year they announced that they would be increasing the grind to unlock moves and gear they felt that due to bugs and design oversights players were unlocking too much too fast and that was ruining the pace of the game's economy they actually said in in a public article that if players wanted to unlock stuff they should now do so immediately before the changes were implemented literally everyone in the world disliked this while they tried their best to reiterate and clarify with follow-up articles it was too late the mainstream player simply saw we're making it even grindier and there's no way to parse positive info from that finally in the back of the parade of bad moves and misfires sean eskeigh the creative director of avengers that had been put on a pedestal in early interviews in shellings suddenly quit crystal dynamics to go back to naughty dog the company he left to join crystal dynamics for weirdly there wasn't any communication or details from square over this huge loss of staff no farewell no so long good luck so that's it after 20 years so long good luck i don't recall saying good luck also it should be noted while everyone praises this guy's work on the the last of us or uncharted his real claim to fame is the co-director of it's pretty evident with all this information that this [ __ ] isn't getting realm reborn anytime soon if at all in fact they're doubling down on what they do have there's just too many companies and interests involved with this universe and unlike square who has complete control over final fantasy shutting it all down going dark and rebooting months or even years later is simply not viable they're gonna continue pushing forward and to be fair the wakanda expansion is the biggest one yet clocking in with eight hours of story content with square and marvel hoping that this will inch that needle over to the line of profitability oh yes if i didn't mention that as of the time of this video profitability is something that avengers still have not achieved despite selling over 3 million copies worldwide across all versions the hd console game division of square lost 68 million dollars in the latter half of 2020 because of the game's performance or lack thereof and remember square has to spend more money on all these expansions and characters as they're made but the game simply isn't performing well enough to support these efforts financially so it's kind of a vicious circle where the game just never stops bleeding money this is one of those projects that while on the outset seemed like a slam dunk a lot of decisions both from marketing and creative plus pure old bad luck resulted in something that really didn't live up to many people's expectations disappointing it makes sense to have a catch-all live service game that lets you live out your superhero fantasies please add she-hulk along with an almost limitless roster of characters locations and enemies but we've seen that even the biggest franchises can fail to catch on whether it's an mmo or live service thing and while 3 million copies is nothing to scoff at the game needs millions of active players on all the time buying dlc and cosmetics every month which is a good reason why this model doesn't always work you know i made it for all the right reasons while it's still a bit early to claim that the game is dead or has zero future it certainly is one example of the avengers failing to assemble nuff said if you know of any other video games or movies cosmic street level or otherwise let me know in the comments below over on my twitter or enter the flaphouse vip tower and become a big boss and nominate what you'd like to see next excelsior true believers and thanks for watching [Music] a world

Channel: Matt McMuscles

Views: 884,027

Keywords: Marvel's Avengers, Avengers Video Game, Matt McMuscles, What Happened?, Wha Happun, Video Game Documentaries, Video Game Bomb, Square Enix Marvel

Id: -1OT5z609Ko

Length: 24min 5sec (1445 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021