“Spider-Man’s high-flying acrobatics bring an entirely new way to experience the game either solo or with friends, and his unique movement and combat abilities are sure to be a great addition to any Strike Team taking on missions in the Avengers Initiative,” a press release said. An entirely new way to experience the game on a PlayStation. A great addition to any Strike Team on a PlayStation. Spidey will hit PlayStations on November 30th. We on PC will still see an update then, with changes including a boost to the power cap and a new way to earn cosmetics, but no new wizards. See the announcement for more. System-exclusive content in a game feels so old. It’s not 2013 anymore. Exclusive skins would be one thing but one of the biggest Marvel superheroes? Sheesh. Square Enix have made some decisions with this game alright. In September it added paid XP boosters, which seemed a reversal of previous claims that they wouldn’t add “pay-to-win” microtransactions, then after backlash removed them earlier this week. The company have said before that the game didn’t meet sales expectations, and Squeenix president Yosuke Matsuda repeated that sentiment in their annual financial report this week. He said their venture into ‘games as a service’ (GaaS) was “ambitious” and overcame surprises including the pandemic, “but it has unfortunately not proven as successful as we would have liked.” He added that “the new challenge that we tackled with this title produced a disappointing outcome”. He went on to imply that maybe Crystal Dynamics weren’t the best pick to make this game. He said that “taking on the GaaS model highlighted issues that we are likely to face in future game development efforts such as the need to select game designs that mesh with the unique attributes and tastes of our studios and development teams.” It is wild that Squeenix landed one of the hottest licenses and the resulting game is, by most accounts, like, okay. Maybe a studio best known for singleplayer explore-o-shooters weren’t the ideal pick, because the jump from that to a live service action-RPG is huge one. But hell, making a good game is already hard, and the pressures and expectations of big-budget games and mega-huge licenses are hard, and doing live service is also hard. Most licensed superhero games are mediocre even without being live services. This was a huge task and I’m not surprised that the end result is simply, like, okay to many. Matsuda said the company do think GaaS “will grow in importance as gaming becomes more service oriented”. They need to think about it. “How we go about creating new experiences by incorporating this trend into our game design is a key question that we will need to answer going forward,” he said. I would suggest avoid unpleasant monetisation and exclusives.
