How do you squeeze the colossal Marvel Universe into the MMO space? Gazillion Entertainment and its Secret Identity Studios aren’t following convention. Instead of creating a game that resembles something like World of Warcraft, Secret Identity is drawing inspiration from another of Blizzard’s franchises: Diablo.

Loading

It’s an appropriate link when you consider the president of Gazillion Entertainment is David Brevik, who co-founded Blizzard North, the studio that created Diablo.“I don’t think of an MMO as an EverQuest, Dark Age [of Camelot], WoW clone. Everybody has gone down that route,” said Brevik. “We just didn’t want to do the same thing that everyone seems to be doing. MMOs are more than just that. It’s not four hours killing wolves. It’s very, very different from that. And to give it all away for free is very exciting.”As was previously announced, Marvel Heroes “You will be able to play the entire game, everything we have, without ever paying us a dime,” said Jeff Lind, studio director at Secret Identity.Built using Unreal Engine 3, Marvel Heroes boasts impressive effects and animations, and presents its characters and world with a stylized, comic book look. As an action-RPG, it also employs the genre’s classic overhead perspective, and includes fast gameplay, item collection and elements of randomization for loot drops and the layouts of dungeons and combat zones.Because it’s also an MMO, you’re not simply limited to solo and co-operative dungeon crawls. There will be public social hubs where you and others can gather, chat, interact with vendors and trade in places like Xavier’s sprawling wood-paneled mansion, where Professor X waits downstairs in Cerebro to hand out your main quests. Social interaction isn’t limited to the hubs, though. In public combat zones you’ll be able to smash apart enemies alongside others without even being in a group, and hop in on random events that pop up.Let’s say you’re running around nighttime streets beating up thugs in a public zone, for instance. Some carry guns, some lob Molotov cocktails, but none compare to the offensive power of a Sentinel that could drop down in the middle of the city and start causing chaos. By banding together with others running around the public zone, heroes like Deadpool and Wolverine could spontaneously decide to cooperate to slice apart the building-sized bipedal death machine, and everyone gets rewards based on their percentage of contribution to the mission. “I think our inspirations here are the Warhammer public mission and rifts that are in Rift,” said Lind, “rather than a GM thing that only happens once every few months.”If godly loot happens to spill out of the Sentinel’s body, you also don’t have to worry about someone swooping in and grabbing it, because all loot you see onscreen is yours alone. There’s no competition over last hits or kill stealing or anything like that – if you contribute, you’re rewarded. Like the instanced dungeon and questing space in Marvel Heroes, these public combat zones are randomized, so enemy spawns and layout will change every so often. Even if you and a few friends wiped the place clean of enemies, foes will respawn, and when you return the next day, you might find the territory has changed.In case you’d rather duck off somewhere private, there are many instanced dungeons throughout the world of Marvel Heroes, some of which contain random sub-bosses, and some of which are integrated into the overarching storyline. Act II of Marvel Heroes incorporates devoted mutant hater William Stryker and Purifier forces, who have taken over an abandoned army base in upstate New York to serve as their command center, and an emerging conflict with agents of A.I.M. Purifiers defend the camp with heavy weaponry, and mixed in with the standard grunts you’ll find stronger types called commanders with special attack patterns and higher health reserves, and of course it’s always worth taking out the more challenging enemies because, chances are, they’ll drop better stuff.While you fight, it doesn’t sound like Secret Identity is interested in stuffing in the standard types of MMO goals for you to chase after. “We want this game to be less about having a giant to-do list of missions and more about pursuing a heroic task and having smaller stuff that you discover along the way,” said Lind.“It’s very different from traditional MMOs where you have the Christmas tree effect,” said Brevik. “You go into a particular area, there’s eight quests that light up, they’re all pick six apples and skin four wolves, and we’re going to go in a different direction and tell a story along the way. It’s very much like Diablo II where you had a bunch of quests that led you along the path and told a story.”Story delivery won’t simply be through quest text boxes, but through full color comic-book style animated sequences with full voice acting to highlight major moments. Secret Identity has plenty of talent involved in the story and presentation department, including writer Brian Michael Bendis and a team of Marvel artists, to ensure the overall story and these special sequences have an authentic feel. As a nice touch, you’ll also find plenty of voiced lines of dialogue for every character, and they’ll change depending on the context. Deadpool might mention “you died of dysentery” if a party member gets wiped out, and if you’re playing as Cyclops and your party member is Wolverine, they’ll say X-Men specific lines.“These characters have relationships,” said Lind. “They have enemies and friends. We want to go as far as we can to honor that and express that. Obviously this is a video game first, and it needs to make sense. We can’t do all the things you can do in the movies and all the things you can do in the comics, but I think there’s some good opportunities to express who these character are.” Deadpool, by the way, is the only character who talks to himself.With access to all Marvel’s characters, it seems like there’ll be no shortage of heroes for you to choose, and thankfully you’re not forced to select only one hero. You won't be prevented from trying out Deadpool or Spider-Man if you pick Black Widow. Instead, you collect characters as you go (though it’s still unclear as to how), can eventually collect every character in the game, and switch between them at any time, even mid-fight, giving you access to a multitude of skill sets. You and a full group could attack Magneto with a well-rounded selection of heroes, some serving as tanks, others as long-range damage dealers, or everyone could pick Iron Man and blast unibeams until, ideally, everything dies. Switching heroes isn’t instantaneous, though, so if in the middle of a boss fight you realize the all Iron Man approach isn’t really cutting it and decide to bring in Emma Frost, you’ll need to wait for a long channeling time until she shows up.Gameplay, as is typical of the genre, is all about speed: fast skill use, an emphasis on movement around the battlefield, and battles against large numbers of enemies. For now, each hero is tied to one of three resource types. To power his special abilities, Thing uses Fury, which regenerates as he takes damage. In other words, Fury-type heroes are function best in the middle of a fight, and Thing has plenty of attacks to support this kind of play style. His default attack is a slow, heavy damage swing, and he can knockdown enemies with a charge, clap his hands for an area of effect slam or bash his head into an opponent. If you trigger his Clobberin’ Time power, he gains an attack speed and damage buff, and because Thing isn’t exactly weak, he can pick up cars and other pieces of the environment and fling them around to flatten the opposition.Black Widow is more of a martial arts character with the ability to pull off roundhouse kicks to damage multiple foes as well as string together bonuses between kills. By delivering a lethal strike with her Coup de Gras move, Black Widow gains a sizeable bonus to critical hit chance, letting her move swiftly from one target to the next and continue cutting down any that oppose her. If surrounded she’s able to attack multiple foes at once to draw aggro then duck away by triggering a stealth attack and sneaking to safety – or letting her teammates take over. She builds her resource to fuel powers by beating things up with her default attack, meaning she’s most effective when constantly attacking and cycling in her standard attack with more specialized powers.Iron Man, on the other hand, tends to attack from range with his repulsor cannon and fuels his abilities with a pool of a regenerating mana-like resource. With his death from above power he can fly up and stomp into crowds, can channel an energy beam and fire off homing missiles, tossing enemies backwards as the game’s physics take hold of their corpses. Depending on how you build out Iron Man’s skill bar, he could excel at area of effect attacks or focus on single-target nuking – Secret Identity is designing the game so every hero has multiple viable builds.Earning new powers is a little different in Marvel Heroes than you might be used to in other action-RPGs. Powers drop from enemies, and there are various ranks so you can find upgrades as you level. “The powers are really what defines these characters from a gameplay standpoint,” said Lind. “Finding powers should be a big deal, it should be very exciting.” While designing each hero’s power set, “so far we’ve not felt terribly constrained. There are so many things you can do with Iron Man, there are so many things you can do with Black Widow. The harder problem is picking. We want to build a lot of characters, so we can’t give Iron Man thirty-five powers. We need to make sure we work on everybody.”These can then be mixed into your active skill bar from your global power library at any time, and the number of slots on the bar is limited, so not everything can be active all at once. With this type of design, Secret Identity forces you to choose which build works best for a given situation, mixing in unique hero powers with powers available to multiple characters. For example, only Thing can use Clobberin’ Time, but multiple characters can take advantage of the Flash Grenade power, which creates an area of effect stun.Finding the right mix of skills that best complement each other is crucial, because the more effectively you kill, the more loot you’ll see tumble from enemy corpses, the better your chances of finding something really cool. Item names are color-coded by rarity, so you know if a purple item drops it’s going to be good, and all come with a variety of affixes, with percent chances to trigger special effects alongside direct statistical increases. But then there’s the tricky matter of how those items affect your appearance. In games like Diablo, if an item icon is a big, spiky helmet, then when equipped your character model puts on a big, spiky helmet. Captain America running around with a spiky helmet would border on comic book sacrilege, so Secret Identity is trying something else.Items do no directly modify your hero’s appearance, so no regardless of whether Black Widow is equipped with boring basic items or statistic-stuffed purples, her in-game costume modeled after the one in The Avengers movie will stay the same. In order to change a hero’s appearance, you need a new costume, and to acquire a new costume, you need to craft it, which is possible after discovering the appropriate recipe and gathering the proper components. For Iron Man, if you want to run around in his Silver Centurion armor, Stealth armor, or Extremis armor, you’ll need to find the right parts, called Elements. These Elements are tied to random statistical bonuses, and when you use one in costume crafting, the end product gains its bonuses. In this way, there are two avenues of character development through statistics. There’s the standard loot hunt for items that can be directly equipped on your character, and then the hunt for better Elements that can be fused into patterns to create more powerful costumes. It seems like a good solution to a tricky issue, as it provides more methods of customization without limiting costume selection or compromising the original costume designs of the heroes.“Previous games have used costumes as an incentive to play,” said Brevik, “and it’s always made me very sad my favorite costume is the one you get from level one to five. We’ve separated the look and stats to allow a lot of freedom, and allow you to express yourself with your favorite look.”Though it is being called an MMO, and playing with more people boosts the number of enemies, their hardiness and attack power, a majority of the content can be cleared solo. Secret Identity hinted at end game bosses that would require group encounters, but for now it doesn’t sound like that type of content will be the focus. Instead, it’s much more about clearing content over and over again looking for better, rarer loot, just in a more social setting.Some of the best loot comes from bosses, who attack in more sophisticated ways than standard or special enemy types. Toad and Blob attack simultaneously during the Stryker mission, and work together as Toad stuns you with tongue attacks and Blob follows with a directed shockwave burst. The mission’s real challenge is Magneto, though, who found Stryker before you. Professor X wants you to capture Stryker, but Magneto just wants to kill him, and as is often the case, this difference in intention means everyone tries to slaughter each other. Magneto sets down large bubbles of damaging energy, blasts out charged area of effect pulses and flies around in a debris field, requiring you to stay mobile, darting in between his attacks to deal damage.Beyond launch, there seems to be lots of room for Secret Identity and Gazillion to expand the game world with more of Marvel’s heroes, and possibly even incorporate Marvel’s cosmic elements. “We want to have the core game’s storyline take you on a tour of a number of famous Marvel villains and draw on well-known storylines from the past,” said Lind. “We have all kinds of things we can do in the future, everything’s open…one of the main vectors of expanding the game is to add new characters.”“The goal here is to bring AAA production values to a free-to-play title,” said Lind. “We felt very revolutionary two years ago when we decided to do that, now it feels like everybody’s doing that. It’s just a better business model. There are so many choices that people have out there right now, having to commit to sixty bucks is a good reason for people not to try things.”There’s no specific date yet for launch or beta testing, but it seems like Gazillion and Secret Identity are building something great, an online game that lets you get right to the action, and that actually lets you play as superstar heroes.