We’ve had an awful lot of Marvel-related online projects that never quite get over the finish line into an MMORPG. Sure, we have had a lot of Marvel MMOs serving as merely multiplayer online titles. There’s Marvel Heroes, which I didn’t like at all but everyone else seemed to love. There’s Marvel Rivals currently tearing up the optical space. I suppose you can make a case for Marvel Snap. Things definitely did not go all right for Marvel’s Avengers. You get the idea. And we’ve had MMORPG projects get started, but they keep getting canned, even if I’m not exactly sad about that.
But I also think we’re in a space where we’ve had exactly one really good superheroic MMORPG in City of Heroes and we have yet to have another competitor that’s very good. Making a superhero MMORPG is a tricky prospect at the best of times. So let’s take a step back and ask about how you could make this game in the first place. What would I want to see from a Marvel MMORPG in the first place? For that matter, how could you make it fun?
Well… I do have thoughts. But they’re weird and probably bad. So this column is on again!
Let me start by stating a fact that should be immediately obvious: Superhero comics are weird.
This is not a bad thing by my estimation because as you all know, I absolutely love them. But as much fun as people (me) make of superhero comics, they are kind of weird. The original Avengers lineup in the comics consisted of what amounted to Superman Robot, an ogre who could rip apart continents, a literal Norse deity, and… two people who could make themselves really small. Plus one dude who threw a shield really good.
The movies changed that lineup by removing the people who got small and replacing them with a dude who was pretty good with a weapon that’s been obsolete since the 18th century or so and a woman whose power is “owns some gadgets we change between movies and knows kung fu.” So that’s awesome.
What is easy to get lost over is that I personally think this is part of the fun of the entire genre. I do not consider it a flaw that you’ve got the World War II soldier fighting alongside the rage ogre or that technically two of the better-known characters in Marvel’s roster (Rocket Raccoon and the Winter Soldier) both have the exact same superpower, which is also known as “not a superpower at all” and “they just own some guns.” That’s cool.
So that’s where my thinking for the game starts. At character creation, you choose one of three types of character to make: Defender, Champion, or Avenger. But this isn’t a class or an archetype; this is a level of overall character power that ties into the sorts of threats that you are going to be dealing with on a regular basis.
Defender characters are heroes like Hawkeye, Daredevil, Luke Cage, and so forth. These characters are not necessarily human-level, but the problems and battles they deal with are mostly street-level conflicts. Champions deal with things on a bigger scale, ranging from SHIELD super-agents to city-threatening supervillains, and Avengers are up fighting world-ending catastrophes and dealing with appropriately high-level threats.
You’ll notice that I didn’t actually dictate limitations on powers, and that’s very intentional because it’s not really about what sort of powersets these characters have but how high and low the bounds on their powers on. In an abstract sense, Luke Cage and The Hulk have the same powers (they’re super-strong and super-durable). The difference is all in scale, which is why Luke Cage isn’t kicking Kang the Conqueror in his personal Baxter Building on the reg.
In other words, if your character is meant to be a SHIELD agent, it’s fine if she has power-nullifying bombs and adamantium body armor and vibranium katanas if you slot her at Avenger-level because that’s the stuff she’s dealing with. But if you slot her at Defender level, she’s taking a downgrade. Not necessarily in mechanics but in the sense of how her powers operate so you don’t have to ask why this week Daredevil can outrun an Asgardian and next week he nearly gets bodied by the Punisher.
In other words, this operates more like a faction choice. The factions aren’t in competition with one another, and all three power levels can team up for Crossovers (the equivalent of raids, broadly) because when those happen, you need everyone in the room. But for most of the game, you can choose between superhero street-level fighting, bigger-but-not-huge contests, and big full-fireworks shows where you pull out all the stops.
So what about the actual combat mechanics? Well, it’s here that I’m going to make a really weird argument and suggest… a class-based setup. No, wait, hear me out.
Champions Online has tried the whole freeform powers thing, and it didn’t really work. The CoH system works well, but you don’t want to copy that exactly. I think leaning a little bit more toward the class-based side of things is definitely an option. Instead of picking a Primary and Secondary set in a single archetype, you’d pick a starter class that conforms to a common Marvel archetype. Maybe start out with a dozen or so classes based around oddly recurring types.
From there, rather than picking broad sets of powers, you pick tags that can apply to your powers visually and your overall abilities. Some tags are purely visual – if your character is in the “force bubbles and control class,” for example, you could have the Magic or Weapons or Psionic tag as they all make sense. Others offer some custom free power selection, like Regenerating or Minions or Teleportation. The net result is that you get a fairly wide spread of visual customization for similar mechanical premises and what amount to a few different power pools in CoH terms to flesh out your mechanics.
Would all of this work? Well… yes and no. It would deliver a pretty good experience to my personal mind, but I also think it still butts up against a bunch of the same problems that superhero MMORPGs always do, and it also does run into the more subtle-ish issue of needing to design three factions’ worth of content from launch. That’s not impossible to do, but it is challenging, and it runs the very real risk of feeling like one is an afterthought.
Even more importantly, you still have the challenge of actually making fun combat that feels superheroic while making non-combat activities that feel rewarding in the mix. Combat cannot be the sole thing that carries the game, and that is tricky to do in a superhero game. I’m not claiming that this idea is the perfect silver bullet.
But it does feel like a fresh idea, and I’d want to play it if it happened. It certainly sounds more appealing to me than playing DC Universe Online, I’ll tell you that much for free.
Designing an MMO is hard. But writing about some top level ideas for designing one? That’s… also remarkably hard. But sometimes it’s fun to do just the same. Join Eliot Lefebvre in Design Mockumentas he brainstorms elevator pitches for MMO sequels, spinoffs, and the like for games that haven’t yet happened and most likely never will!
