Marvel Heroes is due for a massive overhaul, one Gazillion is calling “the biggest systems update in the history of” the game.
Lead Systems Designer TheArtofRawr says the team is planning a series of updates to hero powers, items, the Omega system, and the personal difficulty slider. Of note, every single hero — that’s 59 of them — is being updated all at the same time, with an eye toward simplifying and streamlining character development into “meaningful choices.”
“We want to enable you to more quickly dive into playing your Heroes the way you want to play them, without spending a lot of time ‘balancing your Power Point checkbook,'” explains TheArtofRawr. Talents will replace specializations, power point bonuses will be removed from items, trait passives will be merged, and you’re not going to have five million buttons to make your character go ’round, so extra action bars are gone too.
“To put it simply, we do not feel that needing to press more than 8 active buttons in a rotation is enjoyable for the vast majority of players, and it needlessly adds complexity without adding any real depth. […] The solution was clear, and has been clear for some time, but it could only be paired with a very large-scale Hero design change such as these Hero Talent Updates. The restrictions we had been trying to install on a per-Hero basis needed to be a clear part of the game’s mechanics, so we can freely design Heroes without trying to solve core game issues in the Powers system. […] The intended play dynamic from the Hero Talent Updates is to choose and slot eight Powers that you enjoy and want to use, and five Talents that will support those decisions. This will get you to the meat of the game much faster than tediously assigning Power points and scrolling through multiple action bars during combat.”
The timeline isn’t set in stone just yet, but players should expect at least some of the overhauled heroes on the test server in October.
