Anyone else tried this yet? It just came out yesterday, it's a free-to-play MMO/dungeon crawler with the Marvel license which is very similar to X-Men: Legends/Marvel: Ultimate alliance.
You start off with an initial selection of five characters (Hawkeye, Daredevil, Storm, Scarlet Witch and Thing) with more being either random drops (you get a new random character free after the prologue) or via micro-transactions. Full roster of characters so far is:
Black Panther Black Widow Cable Captain America Colossus Cyclops Daredevil Deadpool Emma Frost Hawkeye Hulk Human Torch Iron Man Jean Grey Luke Cage Ms. Marvel Nova Punisher Rocket Raccoon Scarlet Witch Spider-Man Squirrel Girl Storm Thing Thor Wolverine
Played a few hours tonight and really enjoying it so far, loved M:UA so this is right up my street. Definitely recommended if you are a Marvel fan, plenty of cameos and stuff and the story is written by Brian Michael Bendis (Ultimate Spider-Man, Uncanny X-Men, All-New X-Men).
I tried it, you actually start out picking only one of the five with another being given to you at the end of the tutorial. It feels like a beta of a game from several years back and the pay elements seem as major as you can get without being pay2win.
Really all it has going for it is the license, without that it wouldn't be worth touching
I chose Scarlet Witch, wasn't expecting much but she's pretty damn powerful as a ranged class so I'll be sticking with her. I bought Black Panther as he was really good as a melee class in the beta and it doesn't seem they've nerfed him since that. I got Storm as an unlock after the prologue but haven't used her yet.
Played a lot of this in closed beta and got a starter pack to get in on the early access so I'm slightly ahead of you guys but post your usernames so we can team up for some events.
My name is HunterUK.
Played most of the characters too. I recommend Scarlet Witch for magic lovers (she is op though) and Hawkeye for ranged characters. Thing is an ok melee character but there are much better paid brawlers.
I've been playing since the first beta chance. Love it The changes they made with each beta sessions was always noticble each time and the final product is a long way from how ropey it was.
I played a couple of hours of this last night, chose Hawkeye as my starting character.
It seems OK, plays pretty well as a standard Diablo clone- it does a slightly weird thing where everyone seems to be in the same instance (or at least a large number of people area) for the big open plan areas where mobs seem to respawn pretty much continuously, and then you can go into instanced areas yourself (or be put automatically into groups, which is a nice touch). There are Guild Wars 2 style random events, like Venom turning up in an area- again, it suffers from the same problem as GW2 though, by the time I got there, about 50 other players were there mullering him into oblivion. It works better when there are only a few of you around in one area, so you don't get 20 Hawkeyes, 10 Scarlet Witches and 10 The Things all clumped together. Also, noticed quite a few times that I'd be killing mobs, then they'd ragdoll around and hit the floor about a second after the game registered their death. Not sure if there's some sort of delay on their server side causing that.
The main problem is that I can see it getting repetitive very quickly, even considering the genre. There doesn't seem too much depth in characters- you can allocate skill points into one of three trees to purchase new skills or power them up, but certainly none of the Hawkeye ones seem that amazing/exciting. From what I can see, you get your 'stat' points allocated automatically, but there seem to be tier bonuses which you reach as you level up which unlock new passives- that seems to be all the character depth, which isn't that much. Also, because of the superhero costume/look nature, it misses a trick from other ARPGs in that most of your equipable items don't affect your appearance- you can get new 'looks' for your character based on different comic book styles, but that changes the whole body rather than just individual items. Crafting also looks to be a total grindfest, in that you need to collect 3 of one tier of drop to craft 1 of the next, which again you need 3 of before you can use it most of the proper recipes. You also need to 'donate' unwanted items to vendors in order to 'level' them up so they sell better items/offer better crafting recipes.
For free though, it's excellent. The only problem (and it's purely a person thing) I have with many of these slightly mediocre free to play games is that I've now reached a certain age where time for things like hobbies is at a premium, so I'm less worried about cost and more worried about getting the most fun out of every hour of video game time available. If I was a kid, and had hours to kill after school every day, I'd be on this type of game in a second. But now, I'd rather pay for a game that I can get more enjoyment out of and have a better overall experience with. I'm glad that this type of game exists though, but I think most of these F2P games aren't for me. I think after a few hours of this, the novelty wears off, and I'd much rather play something like Torchlight 2.