Does Avengers have a future?

Step up, Crystal Dynamics.

Woah, wait a second. There was a Square Enix event the other day? What- but I wasn't even prepared. This is all too sudden, how do I behave myself? I've waited so long for the day when Deus Ex came back to us and now, five years after the last entry, three after we were promised the series would return, we're finally going to get a- they didn't say a thing. Not a damn word. Once again Deus Ex gets discarded for favour of half-hearted brand starters and DLC. (You called an event to talk about DLC? Shame on you.) Square can't even talk about the Final Fantasy series in their own events because they've practically sold her out wholesale to Playstation. (At this point I'm genuinely starting to believe we're not going to see a PC port of FF7R.) God what a terrible time to be a Square fan... at least we have, what else did they talk about... Marvel's Avengers? Oh god, why is fate so cruel? You know what- Fine. If Avengers is the game we have to live with now that Deus Ex is retired, or petrified, or cryogenically frozen, then that's what I'm going to talk about. I'm going to talk about the future of Avengers and the ways in which this team are determined not to throw in the towel despite everything.

So... I guess that means I have to be positive? >Sigh<. (Be strong for Jensen. It's what Adam would want.) I guess Avengers is a game that's not utterly terrible. Those with the spare time and wherewithal to dedicate to it's elongated levelling grind have insisted that it's a half decent romp at the end of the road. For my part, I'll say that I did have a glimmer of excitement during one of the bigger battles when every Avenger was doing their part and our eyes locked with that indomitable glimmer of a group untie- and then the game crashed. (I kid you not, that's a true story.) But months of delays, an unfriendly opening 20 hours of grind, a lackluster story, plain bad character writing, uninspired enemy types, lazy monetisation strategies, separate levelling trees for each character, anaemic multiplayer lobby pools- (actually, I'm going to cut myself off) after everything; a lot of people have already given up on the game. Coffins are being picked out, tailors are crafting the funeral suits and everyone is ready to plot this game's spot in the cemetery right between Anthem and- Artifact. (I literally had to look up that game's name because it was so forgettable and it only died this month) It would even fit the pattern, all games that start with the letter 'A'. (Guess superstitious developers out there know what to avoid in the future.) But Crystal Dynamics, bless their Deus Ex smothering hearts, want everyone to know that's exactly what's not going to happen to them.

"We are committed to the future... for years to come" No, that's not the exact statement which Bioware made in regards to Anthem less than a year before they stopped supporting it, nor is it the words which I can only assume Valve appropriated in regards to Artifact. It's the 100% original promise made by the Avengers team to let everyone know that 'we mean business and this is a game that's going to be here for the long haul so please buy it we need the validation for our investors.' And, in the manner of all these live service disasters, the team want us to know they have a map to fix this game's longevity, showing us the road that development is poised to travel. A 'Roadmap', if you will. If this is starting to sound eerily like the death cries you've heard from so many other games so many times, well done, you have a rational mind in your noggin, but then no one ever accused Marvel's superheroes of acting too rationally before, now have they? 

No, Marvel Heroes are know for defying the odds, reality, even death at times, so why can't Crystal Dynamics do their same in the fight to save their game? It starts with a grand renewal, a gift granted to this game through merit of good timing; a fresh re-release on the new consoles. How novel. Were it only that we all got granted the opportunity of a second chance in a new skin, free of the warts of the old world, with decent frame rates and less critical crashes. Yes, it seems Avengers will be available to a brand new crowd of- except there's the fact that the new consoles are still prohibitive to the wider community... hmm, that's a problem Square can do literally nothing about... But perhaps it won't matter. Those who do get to have a console will surely be enough for decent player figures. But then there's also the bad press around certain decisions that are being implemented, specifically the XP reworking which sort of reveals how out-of-touch the development team is from the community. But if we erase the mountains in their way, then Avengers might, perhaps, conceivably, possibly, knock-on-wood, perchance, maybe, conditionally have a future.

And that would be a future written in new content, because that's what they'll need to weather this storm. The two Hawkeyes event took it's sweet time, but now that it's out we can finally begin looking forward to brand new horiz- oh wait, there's still the other pre-launch promises that the team promised. Yeah, they have yet to deliver on the promised Spiderman DLC that Square sold to Sony, so that's in the works. Then there's the Antman DLC which- huh? Wait, sorry my bad there is no Antman DLC, just supremely confusing marketing. So it's just Spiderman then. And when he finally makes it we can all breath a sigh of relief and start looking towards the future of for what Crystal has in store, and in fact they've already deigned to tease us during this event. See- they're not all talk, there's a tiny bit of bite too.

In a move that seems either honorary or ill-timed, Avengers is going to spend their next DLC slot in Wakanda reintroducing us all to Black Panther, making for a lot of emotions that I wasn't expecting to feel. On one hand I always liked Black Panther and find the idea of playing him pretty cool, (He was a favourite back in Marvel Ultimate Alliance) I even like his ingame outfit a lot, and on the other hand it kind of feels like stepping on the shoes of Chadwick Boseman. Now, I recognise that's an entirely personal gripe that you, ideally, do not share. Heck, I even feel weird about them going and making a Black Panther 2 movie, so obviously the video game version was going to rub me strangely. I shouldn't be affronted, Square's Avengers is hardly related to the MCU anyway. Besides, Wakanda certainly will make for a welcome and familiar visual to offset the tired skyline of 'nowhere' from the base game. (Between this DLC and the Hawkeye's 'Fallen Earth' environments, this game's almost in danger of looking varied!)

But that's just a stepping stone, a means to an end, because no amount of small time character piece is going to win fans over, make them sure that there's a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. You need something for them to hold onto, something they can share rumours and theories about, something that can whip their expectations up all into a frenzy so that ultimately you can disappoint them, but by then they'll be invested in your game and you can take that money to the bank. What you need, is an Endgame. (See what I did there?) And, would you believe it, but Square's Avengers actually has that. I mean, it's nothing as grand and secretive, and desperation has decreed that the team already shared it with us in hopes of sparking the imagination, but it's a plan nonetheless. It's the Kree invasion, and you know what? That's not too bad of a plan. It's a ballsy promise that is almost certainly going to crash and burn- but what if it doesn't? (And that is where the addiction lies.)

When this started I remember noting about how amazing it was for Square to squander the Marvel licence, and whilst that holds true, some part of me can't help but wonder if the Marvel name alone is powerful enough to sustain itself. Because to be honest, no one really saw a future in Anthem, Artifact died the day it was announced and booed off the stage, (that's still the most wild announcement I've ever seen) but Avengers has that name, and with that there's promise. I won't lie and tell you that Avengers is definitely going to blow up and become the game that shakes the world, but I can genuinely see a reality where it reaches a point of sustainability, albeit with a lot of changes from where it's at today. It all really just depends on how much lifeforce they want to suck out of the Deus Ex fanbase in order to support it, and seeing as how they just put my favourite Cyberpunk series on ice to sit out another year, I guess that gives at least another year of appropriated lifeforce. Who knows, if everything goes to plan they might not even need to go F2P. (Though I suspect that's a foregone conclusion at this point.) So does Avengers have a future? For Deus Ex's sake, it better.