The War for Wakanda expansion was not what Marvel’s Avengers needed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great chunk of content and I had a blast playing it. But once I finished the new campaign and found myself right back in the unrewarding grind that has plagued Avengers from day one, I was no longer motivated to keep playing. You can’t be a live service game without a good incentive to keep people engaged, and so far, War for Wakanda hasn’t done that. It’s built like an expansion for a single-player game, and I expect that’s exactly how most people will play it.
Earlier this month I wrote about what a great time it is to come back and play Marvel’s Avengers, and I still make that recommendation. If you finished the story in the base game and put it down last year, there are three fantastic campaigns and three new characters for you to play, entirely for free. If you haven’t played through Kate Bishop, Hawkeye, and Black Panther’s campaigns, then you’ve got a good 10-12 hours of content to check out. If you enjoyed the story stuff in Marvel’s Avengers but weren’t so into the live service stuff, you’d have a pretty fun time just playing through these campaigns for a weekend before putting it down again.
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But that’s not what Marvel’s Avengers is supposed to be. Checking in once a year to play a bunch of free content is pretty much the worst thing you can do to a live service game besides not playing it at all. For Avengers to thrive, it needs a consistent healthy base of players logging in regularly (and spending money on microtransactions). There’s no subscription and all of the expansions are free. The only way a player can support the ongoing development of the game is through XP boosters and cosmetics, but if they’re only logging in to play for a few hours when a new expansion comes out, then they’re likely not going to buy boosters.
It’s an inherent problem with the content release structure of the game, and it isn’t going to get fixed simply by releasing more characters. Avengers’ expansions only serve to extend the length of the campaign, but so far, haven’t done much to build out the end game, which is the core experience of any live service game. It doesn’t matter how good War for Wakanda is (and it’s quite good), as soon as that content runs out, the game is over. Crystal Dynamics can’t produce new content at anywhere near the rate that an average player can consume it, so it needs to focus on making fun and rewarding replayable content, but it just isn’t there.
Things have improved somewhat over the last year. OLTs and Mega Hives add some end game challenges and the opportunity to farm activity-exclusive gear sets. There are more mission types coming eventually that will presumably have different rewards, like the long-promised Raid-like AIM Secret Labs. I think this is the right direction for Avengers, but we’re just so far away from anything that even vaguely resembles a meaningful end game. Right now, you could easily max-level and max-gear a character in two days if you know how to make the most from Vendors and farm the right activities. After that, all you have left to do is hit those OLTs and Mega Hives one time on three days throughout the week, and you’re done. It barely feels worth logging on to do that.
Marvel’s Avengers needs a wider variety of activities that give players meaningful rewards to pursue. It needs an overhaul to the gear system so that loot feels valuable and players feel like they can form their playstyle around gear traits. If it’s going to have a No Man’s Sky-level renaissance-level renaissance, Avengers needs holistic content updates to build the game out from the center rather than tack onto the end. I know overhauling the end game is a herculean task, but I would have much preferred a rewarding end game experience to the five hours I spent with the War for Wakanda expansion, even though I enjoyed that quite a bit. Spider-Man isn’t going to bring a sustainable audience to Avengers unless there’s still something more for them to do a week after he’s released.
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