I am TheArtofRawr, Lead Systems Designer for Marvel Heroes 2016. As you may know, the design team has been posting a series of design blogs about many upcoming systems updates, including Hero Powers, Items, and the exciting new end-game progression system called the Infinity System. Before finishing the series with a blog announcing the new difficulty slider, we need to discuss another major change that is running tandem to the suite of system changes: Character Mobility.
Since the inception of the game, mobility has maintained a binary state. If your Hero is moving at all, you are dashing. Stop and dash–that’s it. This lack of variability has crippled our ability to improve the game in some very meaningful ways. Level, enemy, and boss design hasn’t gone very far since we launched, because we gave all heroes an infinitely powerful tool to avoid anything dangerous or risky. The good news is that we’re going to do what’s right to increase the long-term fun of Marvel Heroes.
In order to move forward and generate fresh, exciting game content, we must give Heroes the opportunity to stop and enjoy that content for just a moment. The changes we are presenting here may seem contentious to some, but we do ask for constructive feedback as we get closer to testing. Keep in mind that in the long run, we know that these changes will open the way to better gameplay and more fun.
Here is an outline of the upcoming changes to mobility:
- All Dash Powers now have a fixed distance and travel speed, uniform across all heroes.
- “Dash” Powers (such as Combat Rolls, Lunges, Teleports, and Charges) have 3 charges and generate a charge every 4 seconds.
- Teleports still begin their travel instantly, but move across the world at the same rate of Dashes rather than disappearing from one location and instantly reappearing at the next. They are comparable in distance per second to any other Dash Power.
- Dash Powers now cleanse crowd control effects, and make the user completely invulnerable while travelling.
- Travel Powers have a 1-second channel time before they start.
- Travel Powers reduced in speed from 1000 to 700.
- Ziggurat of Kargul will have a new ability replace its active power.
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More Challenge, Decisions that Matter, and Better Gameplay
When Heroes boundlessly dash or teleport around the battlefield, limited only by their Spirit pools (and often not even by that, especially with endgame gear), there’s really no game situation that can provide a challenge. The only real threat to a player is an attack that is so damaging that it takes the Hero from 100% hp straight to zero. While one-shot attacks may have their place in extremely difficult content (as long as they are clearly telegraphed to the player and possible to dodge), as a rule, they become altogether boring and unfun unless they are implemented extremely rarely.
A far better gameplay pattern is for hits of various magnitudes to come at the player in a varying rhythm. Heroes don’t need to dodge every projectile from a Hydra mob because such minor attacks are relatively little threat unless present in overwhelming numbers. More threatening attacks such as the power brawler’s ground slam, however, should inflict noticeable damage but not instant defeat. These mobility changes will enable the player to face frequent and interesting decisions about what to dodge and when. And just as importantly, in the very rare cases when you’ve used that last charge on your dash power, it’s fitting (and fun) to feel a sense of risk as you move through the battlefield.
One important counterpoint that comes up frequently when we talk about making Marvel Heroes more challenging is how important it is for the heroes to feel true to their comic origins. This position is reflected in statements like, “a single Hydra soldier shouldn’t be a threat to The Hulk.” It’s important to understand that no one is talking about a single Hydra mob of any sort defeating a Hero. Heroes will still smash their way through hordes of enemies with little trouble. Only very large numbers of normal mobs in very difficult game modes will pose a serious threat to a Hero who is actively attacking and moving.
The tuning of endgame has become more and more of a challenge, and mobility is the primary reason for that. Those who have played the Cosmic Trial know that, for the most part, the only way to beat it is by being extremely mobile, dashing or teleporting constantly. That’s not how we want the endgame of Marvel Heroes to play out–there should be more to the game than just damage! Providing you with opportunities to make meaningful decisions and react to the challenge presented to you: that’s how we can continue to produce a variety of interesting content! To do that, we have to dial back on the speed just a bit so that we can trade it for strategy, decision-making, and better gameplay.
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Let Nightcrawler be Nightcrawler
The Marvel Universe has a rich array of characters with different abilities and unique stories. One of the worst parts of limitless mobility for every Hero is that the truly mercurial Heroes such as Nightcrawler cannot stand out from the others. With these relatively minor limitations to mobility on all heroes, we now have the ability to let Nightcrawler and other very agile heroes stand out from the crowd. For instance, Nightcrawler’s Bamf power has more charges and a faster cooldown than the standard applied to most heroes.
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Waffles Taste Good
Yes, Travel Powers were capped to 700 for a few weeks back in August, and we buffed the speed to 1000. That change was meant to be a correction for the fact that travel powers benefited from speed increases in prior patches. Now, we’re switching back to 700 and sticking to it. At speeds above 700, the controls became unresponsive on many Travel powers, such as vehicles with turn speed (Motorcycles), since they were never meant to be that fast. Increasing the turn speed would make them functional, but also reduce the visual quality and the feel of the powers. Many Sprint animations look wildly inaccurate running at lightning speed. These animations were authored at specific speeds, roughly twice the normal run speed. There’s no version of a Sprint animation that looks thematically correct when the user suddenly takes off a 3-4x times their former top speed. In addition, incredibly high movement speeds do not perform evenly on high- and low-end machines. One of our goals is to be accessible to as many gamers as possible, and this kind of speed provides a very uneven experience.
Honestly, we immediately regretted the change to 1000 and should not have waffled. We know that 700 is the correct speed for several reasons, and we’re owning up to the fact that we waffled and doing the right thing by switching back to the correct value.
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Travel Between Combats; Dash in Combat
One last note about the one-second startup time that we’re adding to Travel powers. With the limits on dashes, being able to flick the Travel power on and off instantly is simply too powerful in combat, which is part of the reason why Travel Powers will have a 1-second channel time before they start. Ultimately, the path to good gameplay is to make it optimal for the player to use Travel powers between combats and Dash or Teleport powers in combat. This change is the least invasive way to achieve this goal.
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The Road Forward
We’ve mentioned some of the gameplay improvements that these mobility changes open up, including more variance and opportunity for strategy. At a later date, the improvements that we’ve mentioned will get more detailed treatments in blogs of their own. Soon we’ll feature blogs on the improvements to enemies. In the meantime, our next blog post will continue with the series describing the biggest systems update in the history of the game! In it, we will share details about adding a personal difficulty slider that allows players to adjust the difficulty of the game. Until then, we will see you in the forums!
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