A New Marvel Project Could One-Up the Competition And Keep an Old Promise

Posted by By our-little-miss-is-home February 7, 2025 4 Views 6 Min Read
A New Marvel Project Could One-Up the Competition And Keep an Old Promise
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Marvel‘s latest forays into the world of free-to-play games have been fairly strong. Marvel Snap was far from the first Marvel mobile game, but it was likely the company’s most immediately successful, with it amassing over 12 million downloads within its first month of release back in late 2022. Though it’s likely lost a good portion of that initial player-base, Marvel Snap still seems to be doing well enough to release content at a consistent rate.

The recently released Marvel Rivals has also taken the world by storm. Since its release last December, Marvel Rivals has garnered over 20 million players, and given its ambitious post-launch roadmap, it seems likely to keep a good percentage of that initial player-base for a while longer. Given Marvel Snap and Marvel Rivals‘ continued success, it would be no surprise if Marvel was looking to explore other types of free-to-play projects, and there’s a genre Marvel needs to give one more shot.

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It’s Time for a New Marvel MMO

DC Universe Online Is Still Going, But It’s Showing Its Age

Originally released for the PS3 and PC all the way back in January 2011, DC Universe Online has been around for over 14 years now. It’s incredibly rare for a free-to-play game to last as long as DC Universe Online has, and its longevity is a testament to the dedicated team that’s continued to produce quality content consistently for the MMO for over a decade.

DC Universe Online is now on its 48th episode, “Harley Quinn vs Apokolips,” and while the game still has a loyal fan-base, it’s starting to show its age in a few glaring places. As should be expected of a 14-year-old game, DC Universe Online features some dated visuals and animations, and its gameplay can be rather clunky, falling into the same trap of older generation MMOs. Its combat often sees players spam the same attacks repeatedly until the enemy’s health bar reaches zero, with very little feedback from the enemy character model.

Though DC Universe Online should still have a place in the gaming world, it would be easy for a shiny new competitor to come along and take the lion’s share. Marvel could be that competitor, but it wouldn’t be able to get by on half-measures. A new Marvel MMO would need to take a page out of Marvel Rivals‘ playbook and go all-in, delivering a unique art style, fluid animations, modern MMO combat systems, and a ton of content off the bat with more to follow very soon after launch.

DC Universe Online‘s Daybreak Games was working on a Marvel MMO that was canceled in May 2022.

Marvel Still Needs to Fill The Void Left By Marvel Heroes

But this wouldn’t be the first time Marvel has experimented with a big-budget MMO. Back in 2013, Marvel Heroes released into early access. An action-RPG MMO, Marvel Heroes launched with a respectable 21 playable characters at launch, all of whom had three unique skill trees to work through. Marvel Heroes also featured a story written by Brian Michael Bendis, a renowned comic writer and artist who helped to create characters like Miles Morales, Jessica Jones, and Ironheart.

While Marvel Heroes wasn’t met with great reviews during its early access period, it gained a much better reception with the release of its 2015 iteration. That reception only continued to grow more positive as time went on, and more content was added, and more systems were refined. But it all ended on an abrupt and sour note.

In 2016, CEO of Marvel Heroes‘ developer Gazillion Entertainment, David Brevik, left the studio. Dave Dohrmann took over as CEO and within a year fans noticed that updates weren’t arriving on time. Behind the scenes, Dohrmann was facing allegations of workplace sexual misconduct and harassment.

In November 2017, Disney announced it was ending its partnership with Gazillion, and within just a few days the entire studio was suddenly shut down, and all employees were abruptly let go.

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