New Content Galore in Gazillion's Marvel Heroes!

David Brevik and his crack team of Super Hero game designers have been hard at work on their Free-to-Play ARPG, Marvel Heroes.  It feels like just yesterday that Gazillion Entertainment released their Diablo-esque, Hack and Slash Superfest, and the people behind the game have been hard at work on their game ever since.  The game’s most recent patch, Patch 1.11, contains some serious upgrades, changes and additions to the game and the company has a lot of awesome stuff in the pipeline too.

I was given the chance to sit down with David Brevik and Jeff Donay, and discuss the many new assets for the game.  What a returning player will find in the current patch includes some of the biggest changes to the game to date.  For starters, the Human Torch is the latest addition to the group of playable heroes.  Including some of the biggest graphical enhancements of any of the Heroes to date, the Human Torch is a gorgeous cacophony of particle effects and fire spells.  The Human Torch also flies 100% of the time, which is something not seen much, if ever before, in an ARPG.  The team plans to make sure that any future Heroes that should be flying, will be, and they also have potential plans to go back and make the change for such Heroes as Iron Man and Storm.  If you would like a chance to get your hands on the newest Hero, leave a comment down below for a chance to win an unlock code for the Human Torch, and his Costume Bundle!

In addition to the new Hero, players will also find the newest game mode, called Midtown Patrol.  This game type is available through Avenger’s Tower and gives players a chance to fight endless waves of mobs for great loot and tons of experience.  Through clearing the waves of mobs, players will find themselves challenged to fight a gang of Super villains every few minutes, for even greater rewards.  As the system stands, the Super villain encounters are lacking in experience rewards, but the team assured me that in a future patch they will bump those bonuses by 600% to increase the allure of fighting the “bosses” in Midtown. 

Perhaps the biggest change of all to the game, is Eternity Splinters.  Designed to replace Hero Tokens, Eternity Splinters are the new freely-earnable currency with which players can unlock new Heroes, upgrade their Ultimate Abilities and purchase some unique Items.  Eternity Splinters have varying drop rates, depending on difficulty, and can be spent at a vendor for said rewards.  Currently, new Heroes will cost 200/400/600 Eternity Splinters, depending on which one the player is interested in.  This allows for more player choice behind unlocking new Heroes and abilities, rather than having to hope for that perfect drop. 

The team has also noted from player feedback that some Heroes have few options in build order.  This is one of their biggest focuses going forward, and in the near future, they wish for each Hero to have about 4-6 different possible effective build orders.  They want Person-A’s Thor to play differently than Player-B’s Thor, and Player-C’s Thor differently than either of the first two, and so on.  They also touched on the fact that they very much dislike it when game designers take too long to respond to community feedback, and that they are planning on having weekly patches and updates to coincide with the current community climate. 

For the next major content patch, Gazillion has a lot in the pipeline.  Xavier’s Mansion will be the next major PvE Game Type, and will scale with level as many of the current types do.  They will also be introducing a 5v5 Competitive PvP Game Mode, with leaderboards.  Emma Frost is the next Hero in the works, and will come complete with Mind Control!  The team is hard at work on a new First-Hour of the game as well.  They promise that it will allow new players to get into the action within just minutes of booting the game.  There are also some amazing new item types coming soon, including Relics, Superteam Items, and Uniques.  Forgive the awful pun, but Uniques are unique in a very cool way.  Brevik explained that Unique items will not be referenced by the game designers in any way.  They won’t show up on Patch Notes, they won’t be referenced in the game, and they will simply have to be found in the open world by the players.  While Jeff went on to spoil a handful of these items, I’ll go easy on his PR team and give you only one example, but it’s an awesome one.  Wolverin’s Bone Claws will be making an appearance, so strap on your explorer cap and get to item hunting. 

The team also released a new downloader to streamline updates, patches, and make the initial game download a lot quicker.  Gazillion has done an amazing job of giving us very little reason to not play their game, so what are you waiting for, let’s go fight some crime in a Super way.

-Tyler "TovarishGaming" Solley