Marvels Avengers Shutdown!

Gaming news stories that stand out in people's memories often involve major successes or massive failures. Crystal Dynamics' licensed live-service title Marvel's Avengers is a recent case of the latter, sparking concern before its release and coming out in September 2020 to heavy criticism. The game felt like a shell of what it should have been, and its technical instability drove lots of players off while the developers tried to fix things. Sadly, the public now knows that these efforts were too little, too late, as Marvel's Avengers is formally ending its digital shelf life on September 30, 2023, a little over three years after its launch.

This news came out on January 20, and it was accompanied by a large FAQ detailing when the final update would be, how development would go until Marvel's Avengers is delisted, and what players will keep at the end of it. The last patch is coming out on March 31, making many cosmetics free and performing one final round of balance changes and bug fixes. Curious onlookers now have ample time to get it on sale and experience the game's final form before it's pulled from digital storefronts. After such a disastrous launch, this isn't surprising, but it's still a shame to see Marvel's Avengers fail to live up to its potential.

Signs pointing to Marvel's Avengers' doom were present from the beginning. By the time the title was announced at E3 2019, gamers had started to become wary of live-service game launches. Any AAA title intended to be updated over the course of years seemed to have a good chance of crashing and burning at launch, and first impressions of Marvel's Avengers weren't helping. The game tried to model its cast after the MCU Avengers, but they looked slightly off without their actors' true likenesses. It also took a while for clarification to come out regarding how Marvel's Avengers' gameplay worked, and because Square Enix Europe was publishing it, the game had to compete with the then-upcoming Final Fantasy 7 Remake during its marketing.

Starting August 7, about a month before Marvel's Avengers came out, it launched a series of betas on various platforms. This is when it became apparent that the game was in trouble. Even though its release date had been pushed from May to September for polish, Marvel's Avengers' betas and final release were technical disasters and light on content to boot. Just about every aspect suffered somehow, whether it was general stability, the length of the campaign, how much repeatable content was available in the postgame, an uninspired loot system, or plenty of online issues. Even the story, praised as it was, spoiled its ending thanks to the supposedly dead Captain America clearly being a fleshed out playable character within the larger live-service elements.

Je merkt dat de spellen vaak worstelen tussen hun klassieke oorsprong en andere, modernere Pokémon-games. Dat valt bijvoorbeeld op tijdens gevechten, waarbij de gekke speelgoedpersonages ineens worden omgeruild voor de langere, realistischere helden die we van recente games kennen. De makers durven niet te kiezen tussen twee stijlen, waardoor het geheel nooit echt samenkomt.

It's quite unfortunate that Marvel's Avengers flopped as hard as it did, as the game showed a lot of real promise. Many reported that the campaign's story was charming, and focusing on Kamala Khan's debut as Ms. Marvel was a great direction to take. The story also gave the spotlight to a number of characters from the wider Marvel universe that hadn't debuted in the MCU yet, such as M.O.D.O.K. and the Maestro Hulk from the second expansion. Combat was also widely praised, with every character playing differently and offering lots of ways to string together combos.

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Marvel's Avengers is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. Bron