Summary
- After a year of struggling, Player First Games and Warner Bros. have decided to take MultiVersus out back with Season 5.
- Despite once being my Game of the Year, I wish I felt more about the death of my favourite live-service game.
- The writing was simply on the wall for too long for MultiVersus, and there was no chance of recovery. RIP, king.
Once upon a time (that far-off time being two years ago), I fell in love with a live-service game for the first time. That game was the ill-fated MultiVersus, and I was all aboard the hype train from the moment I saw Ultra Instinct Shaggy beating the life out of poor little Steven Universe.
That love blossomed as soon as I got my hands on MultiVersus for the first time and got hooked by its unique co-op twist on platform fighters and clear love for the source material it had smashed together with more care than you’d expect. During that first season, I put countless hours into mastering Bugs Bunny, loathing Iron Giant, and begging for Daffy Duck to eventually join the fight.
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Despite a record-breaking launch that saw it enjoying the spotlight throughout most of the summer, MultiVersus’ time in the sun was cut short when it was suddenly taken offline for a whole year so that Player First Games could create more content for a well that had somehow already dried up by Season 2.
MultiVersus Never Recovered From Its Vacation
multiversus paid skin controversy
It was a controversial and incredibly anti-consumer move considering how stuffed with microtransactions that “open beta” was (as well as featuring Founder’s Packs sold at $100) but, like fools in love are known to do, I defended it with blind optimism. The game, I believed, would truly be better when it returned and sat by the telephone waiting to be called back for a second date.
And wait I did, all the way until the MultiVersus Twitter account lit up like a dusty Bat Signal and announced the return of a hero – the lover metaphor, just like MultiVersus itself, gets a little tangled up in IP here. Maybe I’m Catwoman. I was one of those idiots who got excited about all the teasing, and I was certainly one of the idiots who jumped back in on day one as if MultiVersus hadn’t just popped to the shop for cigarettes for a whole year.
I was just happy to jump back into Batman’s boots and considered many of the relaunch’s changes, such as dash attacks and Rifts, to be big steps forward. However, that sentiment wasn’t shared by most players. Many considered MultiVersus to have returned in a much worse state, something that wasn’t helped by the new tidal wave of expensive cosmetics and an insulting amount of grinding unless you paid for each character, not to mention its missing modes and features.
Strange Character Choices And Bad Business Practises
Speaking of characters, MultiVersus shot itself in the foot from moment one with the strangest roster additions for a big comeback. Instead of starting strong with Daffy Duck, Ben 10, or even going weird with Walter White, we instead got predictable fighting game mainstay Joker, nobody’s favourite character from The Matrix Agent Smith, the classic but hardly current Jason Voorhees, and for some unknown reason, a meme character in the form of Banana Guard. Hardly the right start for a game that had disappeared off the face of the earth for a year all the while teasing big things to come.
Things didn’t get better for MultiVersus from there. While each season had at least one highly-requested character like Samurai Jack, The Powerpuff Girls, and Marceline, they were usually paired up with nobodies like Nubia or fighters that could have surely waited in line like Beetlejuice – except, like LeBron James before him, Beetlejuice was clearly part of a promo tie-in, making the game seem even more like a commercial first.
Bizarre character choices were one of the nails in MultiVersus’ coffin, but they were far from its biggest problem. All of the issues that MultiVersus started off with – a lack of decent modes, ridiculously expensive and sometimes limited cosmetics, and an air of anti-consumerism for anyone who doesn’t cough up the Gleamium – were even worse when the game came back, seemingly unaware of the point it had to prove.
Add to that Ranked mode being late, updates coming too far and few between, and the constantly clear lack of knowledge on how to run a live-service game, and MultiVersus had been dead at the scene long before Player First Games called time of death.
MultiVersus Is Gone, But All I Feel For Are The Devs
Which brings us to a few hours ago, when MultiVersus was officially confirmed to be ending with its fifth season, which will go out with a whimper by adding two characters already unpopular in the fanbase, Aquaman and Lola Bunny, as the game’s curtain-calling characters. What a way to go. Not with a loveable duck or a Cartoon Network icon, but with the joke of the Justice League.
MultiVersus once meant a great deal to me, perhaps more than any other live-service game. It has given me a lot of special memories, both when I’ve been feeling down and distracted myself by getting characters to max level, and when I’ve been jumping for joy when beating most of my friends online. Hell, it was even my Game of the Year in 2022 – that was how special it was to me at one point in time.
And yet, despite all of those memories, the death of MultiVersus hasn’t got me feeling much at all. A little bit of nostalgia for the all-too-short good times, maybe, but that’s about it. Not only have I literally been through this before when it shut down the first time, but the writing has been smeared in crushed banana paste on the wall ever since that year-long vacation.
Even if MultiVersus had come back stronger and with better characters, its consistently anti-consumer treatment of players who didn’t drop tons of cash and permanently tarnished reputation meant that its end was a sad inevitability.
The only thing I really feel for MultiVersus is pity for the next round of developers who are surely going to lose jobs after such a prolonged development for a game that Warner Bros. has even admitted was a disappointment. Making a live-service game in this generation is already like being thrown into the lion’s den, let alone one with so many problems, something Warner Bros. is an expert in after Suicide Squad.
For all of its notes that it cribbed from Smash, MultiVersus failed to copy the main thing – launching in a complete state with enough characters, modes, and content for years to come. I wish that had been the case and that I was sitting here talking about how great Daffy Duck’s moveset is, but that imaginary ship sadly sailed long ago. I’ll probably end up missing you when you go, MultiVersus, but for now all I feel is sorry for you.
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