Author: Trafficblast

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Marvel’s Avengers was officially unveiled at E3 2019, with a cinematic trailer depicting the fall of the Avengers after they fail to stop villains from attacking San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. The game features both solo and multiplayer missions, allowing you to choose from a roster of heroes and battle the forces of evil with friends online.

Avengers comes to PS4, Xbox One, PC, and Google Stadia on May 15, 2020, but we were able to get our hands on the game’s pre-alpha build at NYCC 2019. Our two-part demo consisted of the opening Golden Gate Bridge mission and a wave-based training session featuring Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel. We also learned that Kamala is actually the star of the game; she’s the one who gets the Avengers back on their feet after the Golden Gate incident.

Following our demo, we spoke with Scot Amos, studio head at developer Crystal Dynamics. Scot talked to us about how the game stacks up against the Marvel Cinematic Universe, post-launch content, microtransactions, and more.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and readability.

GameSpot: One thing that’s on my mind with this game is that you can’t get around the existence of the MCU.

Scott Amos: Never heard of it! [Laughs]

What is it like having to work around presuppositions people may have about Marvel now because of the MCU?

I think the best thing I can say is we’ve done this before at Crystal, right? Tomb Raider in 2013. Crystal has been around for 26, going on 27 years, and have been the caretakers of Tomb Raider, only to then rebuild it and reimagine it in 2013. We had this exact kind of storm then. People asked, “Where’s my Lara Croft? Where’s my ponytails, and my sunglasses, my dual pistols?” And there was some heat to take.

It’s just like, “No, no. Trust us. Come with us on this journey.” It’s the idea that we know what you love, we actually know why that works, we have a vision. That actually is what drew us together with Marvel, when we talked to them about how we do epic storytelling with the human spirit. It’s like, well, that’s what we do with Lara Croft. That’s what they want to do with their heroes.

So for us, it’s less about any one version of Marvel’s heroes via TV shows or magazines or comic books or movies. Instead, there’s a benefit to having access to 80 years of their history. Saying we can go and cherry-pick the cool moments, ideas, and elements of things that haven’t been done yet because we’re not going to be a one-and-done. We’re going to launch this game, and we’re going to have regions and new heroes showing up post-launch. That 80 years will become 81 years, and then 82 years, and so on. And so, we keep drawing all that stuff as it gets added to it. So we don’t see it as anything other than a boon for us because millions of people who didn’t know what a Hulk was 10 years ago are now wearing T-shirts that say Hulk on them.

For us, it’s become a lifestyle. So, in the sense of one version over the other, people will have their favorites. They always will. Our job is to interpret them in a way that it feels fresh but still familiar.

Are there plans to reflect happenings in the MCU in additional content down the road? We’ve got the Black Panther sequel, Dr. Strange, and Shang Chi coming up.

I will put it this way: Marvel’s great at thinking of all of their pieces of the world holistically, whether it’s other games, movies, TV shows, or comics. Bill Rosemann, who’s their VP of creative at Marvel Games, he’s a master editor. He’s been at Marvel for 25 or 26 years, so he knows everything that’s going on across the board for all the mediums. We don’t own that world, that’s their world, but we have Bill. He will help steer us in the right direction and say, “In view of the entire world, here’s what would make sense. Here’s what may or may not play well together.”

But it’s never ever a direct, “This has to tie into that.” That’s not ever the intention. MCU is an amazing thing, they have their world. You look at our game, and our world, and what our universe is, and our versions of the Avengers, and I think there’s room for both because we have different ways of accessing them. People are going to sit in a theater and watch something, that’s one thing. We’re going to watch at home on TV or streaming, that’s another thing. You going to read a comic, that’s another thing. Nobody’s sitting there saying, “That doesn’t look like Hulk in this comic.” That’s not the intent. It’s always, “Here’s the right shape and size for the medium that you’re consuming.”

There has been some backlash with Crystal’s character design. How do you respond to that?

Come with us on this journey. We’ll make you proud.

Do you have a timeline of when additional heroes will be added to the game?

We’re not discussing specifics on dates or cadence or anything like that yet. But we keep saying, “On an ongoing basis.” We don’t want people to ever get bored or to run out of stuff to do.

We’ve learned from a lot of very, very good products out there of what does or doesn’t work, and how quickly these amazing players who are particular fanatics can consume content. So how do we do this in a way that’s smart, and keeps them engaged, and rewards them for their time? That’s actually the biggest thing for us. If you want to play more, we want to give you more stuff to do.

Speaking of things that work and don’t work, what is Crystal Dynamics’ approach as far as microtransactions or season passes?

Simplest version is quite literally you have the core game. We’re going to keep adding heroes, new regions, and new stories at no additional costs on an ongoing basis. We have cosmetics. We’ve been very transparent about there being outfits you can only earn in-game and outfits you can only buy from the marketplace. That’s okay, if you want to invest into that particular lifestyle in a deep way. People buy Hulk T-shirts right now. You can buy outfits on our marketplace, but there’s tons of them you can earn simply by doing missions in the game. So that’s our path of looking at it, saying there’s no paywalls for gameplay. There’s never going to be an, “I can’t actually get this hero because I have to go do some other transactions.” We want the heroes to be like the Avengers. They keep growing and evolving.

Is there a costume that you’re particularly proud of?

I love Joe Fixit. It’s one of those things of reaching back into the archives and looking at it, then doing our version. We have Hulk in this beautiful, purple pinstriped suit with a fedora and the silk tie, it’s all unexpected. People who know, they’re like, “Oh my God, you have Joe Fixit. What?!”

That becomes something we get to take, and own, and do more. So people will start seeing that as, “Wow, I have so much agency over these characters. I can invest myself and make them mine, as opposed to some other version or vision that’s being directed towards me. This is mine to direct in the way I want to play it.” I think it will quickly change the story the more they get to see.

Is there a particular story arc, superhero, or villain you would really love to see brought into this game?

I think we’re doing it. That’s why we have A.I.M., a group who’s not a mustache-twirling villain. They’re sitting here saying, “No, science is the way. Logic is the way. Reason is the way.” Unchecked, uncontrolled powers are dangerous. We need to be able to think of this almost as an evolution of these kinds of companies right there. Look around at four or five tech companies you can think of today. “We’ll all be better if we’re connected, and all very similar, and all have our ways to talk to each other.” If you take that to maybe an illogical extreme, you get to see a sense that A.I.M.’s not vile.

They’re actually doing this because they think this is the better way for this planet to evolve. [Then you have] heroes who are saying, “No, the natural order of things is that people with the right power used in the right ways can actually benefit society.” So that immediately creates that kind of conflict for us. That’s a perfect story that we get to dive into that nobody else has in this way.

Any particular, maybe B-tier hero that you’re hoping to sneak in there?

Always. [Laughs]

I guess he’s not B-tier presently, but I have to ask because I’m very much a Star-Lord fan.

There are so many characters, I think Marvel has over 9,000 characters in their 80 years of history, which is insane, right? Because even when we first talked about this, it wasn’t, “You have to use this list.” It was, “What do you guys think? Do you want to make a new hero?”

And there’s so much to draw from. It’s very difficult to think we can be smarter than these guys. These guys have owned it and mastered it. So I think we have this incredible mantle of responsibility to both pay true loyalty to the fiction and the fan, but also add a little spice of something they haven’t seen yet. Something new that they get to play with.

I’m salivating about all the things that we can do and the amount of heroes that we want to add. I just hope when the players get their hands on it, they say, “Yes, we want more.” That’s the benefit of Crystal. We have a great community management team. We have a great world that we can reach into and listen to those folks and react.

There was a possibility early on of the game starring a custom character?

It is not off the table. I’ll put it that way.

Kamala Khan, aka Ms. Marvel, is your central figure. Why specifically choose her as the protagonist?

The best thing for her is that she’s fresh-faced, right? She’s new. She hasn’t been a part of other mediums. She’s been in comics, but [only since] 2013. It’s new enough that particularly the gaming fans will be like, “Who’s this character? Maybe I’ve seen her in other games or maybe comics or maybe an animated series.” It just gave us a new hook. This is kind of a cool character that has some great relatable problems that I can actually tap into, that’s on the cutting edge of becoming this major star that aligns well with anybody.

“Oh, you have power that you don’t know how to control yet. Oh, you are a fan of the Avengers, kind of like me.” So she actually has a very good viewpoint that very much synchronizes with the heroes and the players. Then you look around that, and you have the old guard, core heroes like [Tony] Stark and Thor. Now you have this point of view of, “I know these characters, and I love those characters just Kamala does.” I think it’s the magic mix that we’ve always wanted to do.

When Ms. Marvel first came onto the scene there was a lot of praise for the comic for featuring someone of a background you don’t often get to see in comics. Do you see this game as a chance to elevate more diverse characters like that?

Absolutely. If you look at Tomb Raider and look at all the stuff we’ve done at Crystal’s history, we’re huge proponents of breaking new ground and putting people out there, new heroes and heroines that people haven’t really experienced. We’re so damn proud of our studio and how much we care about every one of these heroes that we’ve worked with, be it our own, Tomb Raider, and now our own Avengers. It’s a big deal for us that we want these characters not just be relatable, but people you want to hang out with. You start blurring that line really quickly.

And we have a great story from Tomb Raider 2013 where we actually had a fan who was literally at the end of her rope, kind of in a mental breakdown kind of state. But then she actually played our game, and it changed her life. It literally pulled her back from committing suicide to saying, “What would Lara do?” We wrote a character and a story that connected with her so much fictionally that it actually physically changed her life. So if we can save a life with a video game, that’s freakin’ worth it. The idea that we have that kind of impact just makes my heart flutter.

That is pretty incredible. Since you mentioned Tomb Raider, would you say any of the DNA from those games is translated into Avengers?

It is, for sure. We have folks like Noah Hughes, our studio creative director. He’s been at Crystal 26 out of 27 years. So he knows everything. Scott Crows is our tech director of 21 years. These guys helped us reshape how we build games, the way we build our technology, and the way we actually build the versions of our gameplay. [We have] new blood like Shauna Sky, who comes from the Naughty Dog, who’s a creative director for this project. You have this nice blend of people who’ve done things a certain way and have worked and lived through the tomb Raider series, and said, “No, this is how we should really do this story-telling moment.” And then we added other folks like Dave Fifield, who comes off of the Halo and Call Of Duty franchises, and we talked about co-op, and bigger worlds, and what it means to play together.

I think we have this huge laundry list of people at Crystal blended with a lot of new blood that we had to add, including our new studio in Bellevue and our partners working out of Eidos Montreal. Oh my God, they’re so good at what they do. Blending all these groups together has let us assemble these heroes in a way that we didn’t even know was possible when we started this project. But I think it has helped transform us into a better company because of stuff we can do with it now.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

GameSpot may get a commission from retail offers.

New York Comic Con 2019 is underway at the Javits Center this weekend, with the halls packed with cosplayers crammed within even denser crowds that make New York subway platforms feel spacious. We approached several awesome cosplayers and pulled them out of the crowd so you can see all the work they’ve put toward these great outfits.

Starting off, here are Nick and Wasabi of @wasabivision who are remixing the Italian plumbers into Samurai warriors.

Keep watching GameSpot for more on New York Comic Con, from the best exclusive Funko Pops to coverage of new movies like the Grudge reboot. And for more cosplay, check out the best cosplay from San Diego Comic-Con this year, and the best cosplay from last year’s NYCC.

Even before its release, the standalone Joker movie was a lightning rod for controversy. There were those who loved it and those who loathed it, whether any of them had seen the film or not. Now, after its first night of release, the controversy has already escalated. Thursday night, October 3, a movie theater in Huntington Beach, Ca. was forced to close after a threat was received that police deemed credible.

The news comes from the LA Times, which reported all screenings after 4:45 PM PT at the Century Huntington Beach and XD theater were called off. This was in response to a threat that was reported to law enforcement. Police have not disclosed where the threat came from or what the nature of it was.

As of Friday, the theater has reopened, though there is scheduled to be a law enforcement “presence” in the area, per the LA Times. “We took the threat seriously, and we’re investigating,” Officer Angela Bennett told the newspaper.

Since it first started being shown to critics, a debate has been ongoing about just how the kind of movie Joker is. GameSpot’s own Michael Rougeau and Meg Downey had a conversation about Joker and how “dangerous” it is, while Warner Bros. released a statement ahead of release to denounce gun violence, while standing by the film.

Joker is in theaters now.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Breakpoint has plenty of challenging enemies to fight, who each demand you to be at your tactical best. Compared to its predecessor, enemies are far more intelligent and organized. Aside from the special ops-trained Wolves unit, one of the most significant additions to the enemy roster are drones, and gosh, are they a handful.

If you play stealth, the best way to avoid these mechanical headaches is to cover yourself with Cloaking Spray, which can make you invisible to them for a limited time. However, if you didn’t choose the Panther class, then this repellant isn’t available until after you complete the side mission called “Cover Up”–which is given to you by Skell scientist Christina Cromwell.

You can only meet Cromwell after you rescue Jace Skell and take him back to Erewhon. That said, the version of the Cloaking Spray you’re given lasts 30 seconds instead of a full-minute and offers +10% Drone Evasion instead of +100%. We highly recommend unlocking the Panther class if you’re ever considering tackling a mission stealthily.

Your only other option for taking out Drones “quietly” is waiting for it to get to a side of the map that isn’t populated by guards. A well-placed shot from a powerful sniper rifle should suffice, but still, cross your fingers that the resulting explosion doesn’t alert the opposition. It’s not the best, but there are simply no guaranteed options to incapacitating them silently.

If you don’t mind fighting drones directly and alerting everyone around you, then stock up on EMP grenades and rockets. Ground drones can’t access elevated positions, so it’s best to attack from there to inhibit their capabilities. For the more powerful drones, it’s best to cheese it and use an attack helicopter with rockets to destroy them, especially if you’re under-leveled.

In Breakpoint, drones are a constant headache no matter the approach you choose to take, but it’s best to be prepared. If you find any other useful tactics, let us know in the comments below. Otherwise, we’ll be updating this guide with more findings in the coming days.

For more about Ghost Recon: Breakpoint, check out our spoiler-free beginner’s guide and our guide about how blueprints work. For everything else Breakpoint-related, read our feature rounding up everything you need to know.

Ghost Recon: Breakpoint is out now for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. You can read our most significant thoughts about the full game so far in our early review impressions. You can also check out what other outlets think of the game in our review roundup.

It’s hard to overstate how much better Destiny 2 has become in the last year. The Forsaken expansion and the smaller updates that followed added variety in activities that meant you could earn rewards while playing your favorite content, as well as a huge amount of new, weird lore to sift through and fun secrets to uncover. It’s not a stretch to say Destiny as a franchise was the best it’s ever been in the second year of Destiny 2.

The new Shadowkeep expansion builds on those foundations in just about every way. While returning to the moon is a pretty good time in and of itself–the expansion leans hard on the spooky locale, which was part of Destiny 1 but refreshed and enlarged for Destiny 2–it’s the smaller improvements to the way the game works that are really the standout. Destiny 2 is a stronger experience in Shadowkeep because Bungie has found ways to make it even more fun to play.

Forsaken made some effort to establish Destiny 2 as a game that’s constantly evolving. Instead of dropping a series of big content updates with little happening between them, Destiny 2’s second year became a drip-feed of new stuff that helped keep the game compelling, for the most part, month after month.

Bungie has said this approach is how it wants to handle the game going forward, and Shadowkeep represents a big step in that direction. That means at least across the first few days, the expansion feels a bit truncated; there’s a lot more Bungie has detailed that’s just not in the game yet. Destiny 2 story campaigns have always been a touch lackluster–they usually pack cool individual missions, but they almost always end quickly and rarely amount to more than chasing down some big enemy and putting them in the ground. Shadowkeep’s main story is also on the short side, wrapping up in a four or five dedicated hours (and less once you start leveling alternate characters who benefit from the high-level gear you’ve already procured). It’s also clearly the first part of a much larger tale, one that Bungie says will play out over the entire year. As such, it presents something of an unsatisfying journey; it’s the first few steps, rather than a complete arc, and you might be a bit surprised when it’s suddenly over.

Shadowkeep sees the return of a Destiny 1 character, Eris Morn, who was central to two previous expansions: The Dark Below and The Taken King. Here, Eris has learned that the death-worshipping enemy alien race, the Hive, has discovered something on the moon that’s conjuring up phantoms of past foes and allies, returning deadly facsimiles of them to life. In a way, it’s a big reunion tour of old Destiny content. Eris is back, you return to the D1 location of the moon, which we haven’t seen in two years, and you fight slightly watered-down versions of big bad guys you’ve previously defeated, such as Dark Below raid boss Crota and Destiny 2 vanilla boss Ghaul. Since we haven’t been back to the moon for two whole years, it’s something of an amped-up nostalgia trip. But we’re still waiting to reach the long-term endgame content that will wrap up some of these story threads.

It is cool, however, to hang out on the moon, especially because its spooky factor has gone up. Lunar tunnels are filled with frightening screams of hidden terrors, there are plenty of tough enemies to dispatch, and the whole place carries an air of haunted mystery. It seems we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s hidden on the moon so far. Destiny is at its best when it’s full of secrets for the community to band together to discover, and it appears there will be lots to find on the moon during Season of the Undying, the first season of Year Three.

The new content is all generally pretty fun, though it does feel a bit thin, at least in the early going and especially compared to the big, layered content offering that was Forsaken. Part of the issue is that the new seasonal approach means we’re still waiting on additional activities, like the Vex Offensive, which starts in the days to come and is effectively a part of Shadowkeep that’s not yet available. The story campaign has some exciting moments as Guardians band together to attack and infiltrate the new Scarlet Keep location and discover what the Hive is up to. Nightmare Hunts, the new high-level gear-grind activity on the moon, are pretty much mini-Strikes, making them quick, palatable boss fights that help you grab new gear. Exploring the moon has a lot to offer as well–though a lot of the location is made up of old areas, they’re deep and maze-like, and every trip into their depths feels deliciously dangerous.

Where Shadowkeep really excels, however, is less in the content to work through and more in the myriad smaller changes Bungie has made to totally revamp Destiny 2. The biggest changes focus on making character builds a bigger part of the experience, giving you a chance to experiment with weapons and armor not just to make your character more powerful in general, but more powerful in ways that specifically meet your particular play style and needs.

Driving that focus is the new approach to weapon and armor mods, which allows you to mix and match elements that were previously unmovable perks on particular pieces of gear. In the past, you had to spend so much time switching gear in order to make your overall stats go up that more nuanced numbers, like how fast your grenades recharged or how quickly you moved, could generally be ignored. Making sure you had the best rolls on particular gear only really mattered in the game’s toughest activities and to the most hardcore of players.

With Armor 2.0 and the new weapon mod system, you can move those perks (now as individual mods) between armor sets to build a few pieces of gear with exactly the capabilities you want. You’re also no longer penalized for experimenting since mods aren’t consumed on use. It means that once you start to get some pieces of armor and weapons that work really well for you, it’s possible to continually tweak them to fit how you want to play the game and your particular role on a team.

I’m still early on in the process of seeing just how useful the system is–moving mods around is great, but how much freedom you actually get and whether you really need to care about them will become more apparent after spending more time in the endgame and upcoming seasonal content. But even early on, the system is providing more opportunities to think and develop character builds than I’ve been doing through most of the five years I’ve played Destiny. On paper, this is an improvement Destiny desperately needed.

The early leveling system has been improved significantly as well, making the climb to the endgame a lot more reasonable. Leveling up your character is (mostly) gone in favor of constantly chasing gear with better Power numbers. Up to the soft Power level cap, every drop is a useful one–giving you a chance to try out a host of different weapons and armor in various circumstances before you get to Shadowkeep’s toughest content. Shadowkeep’s change to move experience points from a needless character-leveling system to a battle pass also helps a major ongoing Destiny problem of running out of things to do as you approach maximum level. Everything earns you experience to advance your battle pass, so there’s a lot less wasted time chasing useless rewards.

Evaluating a game like Destiny 2 is always tough, especially now that Bungie’s putting more of its chips on long-term, evolving content. There’s still a lot that won’t be clear until I’ve been able to spend more time with the game. My initial experience with the post-soft cap endgame climb is that it is, in fact, pretty grind-heavy. After only a couple of days, however, it’s tough to really get a sense of how satisfying or frustrating the path to reach Shadowkeep’s pinnacle activities will be.

I’m also still waiting for new activities that will launch in the days to come and change from there. No review of a Destiny expansion would be complete without addressing its raid–Bungie’s raids are consistently the most inventive, clever, and difficult experiences in Destiny, but we won’t see the raid until it launches on October 5. A new seasonal activity also drops with the first completion of the raid, and seems likely to advance the story and help with providing higher-level players with more to do.

What’s clear from just the first few days of Shadowkeep is that it represents a shift in the fundamentals of Destiny 2, and that has only improved the game. Returning to the moon is full of spooky fun, and while Shadowkeep might not be as huge as Forsaken, it still provides some impressive additions to the world that will take time to fully explore. More meaningful choices in Shadowkeep, even in the early hours, are pushing me to think beyond just packing my most powerful guns and shooting everything in my path. It remains to be seen just how much new choice and nuance these improvements will provide at the highest levels of play, but they absolutely represent a giant leap forward for Destiny 2.

Editor’s note: We will be playing more Shadowkeep, including the Garden of Salvation Raid, before finalizing this review and the score. Stay tuned for the final review in the coming days.

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