Yesterday after making my blog post there was an extended back and forth that took place on twitter between me and my friend Pete. When I wrote the post yesterday, I largely considered it to be a positive review of Avengers. However Pete latched onto the fact that I said from the start that this was not a “must buy” game. I feel like I need to delve into that statement a bit further, because one of the things that you have to take into account is that I poke my head into a lot of new games. On a pretty regular basis I will have friends ask me, if this is “the one” aka the game that is going to unite the tribes for an extended period of time.
I have disposable income that I can use to purchase games without really impacting my quality of life. That is not the case for a lot of my friends and there are many folks who can’t afford to pick up a game on the day it is released, or in this case the day that the pre-release happened. It may be two or three pay periods before there is enough free cash to be able to purchase a game. So often when that mythical date finally comes around that someone can buy their way into an experience… that the zeitgeist has already moved on past it. So in the case of Avengers, I do not think this game is going to be something that gains permanent traction, at least not without a good deal of content being released.
I have no clue what the case is on consoles, but at least right at this moment it does not have great traction on Steam. The all time peak was 4 days ago when the game had just over 31k active users. The 24 hour peak was 19,602 so a fall off in concurrency of 37% since launch and the game is effectively nine days old. I’ve not played multiplayer, as I am largely focused on the core single player gameplay loop with bots, but based on the experiences of friends it seems that maybe everyone is doing this thing? The queue times are rough, so unless you are bringing your own team with you, fast groups are not a thing that is going to happen.
All of these things are why I am saying that if you are looking for the next big MMO, then this probably isn’t going to be it. That does not discount the fact that I think the main story is extremely good and that I am still enjoying myself. Honestly based on the conversation with Pete it comes down to a difference in perspectives. I tend to latch super hard onto a single game and play the shit out of it until I reach a point where I disengage because I ran out of content. I’ve already begun to encounter the frayed edges of that now, because as of last night I have collected what is effectively an end game set of gear. I will likely jump around to some other characters in the coming days, but I am not sure how much alting I am going to be down for given that I have clear favorites and then heroes that I cannot stand playing as like Iron Man.
As I talked about yesterday, the highest gear that drops is 130 power level. After that you can raise that gear 10 points if it is epic or legendary, and the Major artifact will add another base 10 points to your power rating. So if I pour a copious amount of materials into the full legendary armor set and then my two minor artifacts and grind out the rest of my Major artifact I will be at 150 the gear cap. This will of course take a really long time, and will be nowhere as enjoyable as actually getting things to drop. However I have effectively reached a point where Captain America is “done for now”, allowing me to shift over to other characters and try bringing them up to level 50.
I thought I would share my farming run with you, because I am absolutely abusing the system in how to get drops. There is a mission called Stark Realities that has a few side objectives that are actually more valuable than completing the mission itself. Avengers uses a check point system, and unless you have completed any objectives you can exit out of the mission and start it again to keep farming the side objectives over and over. Sure this is degenerate gameplay, but it also was a fast way for me to raise my gear level. Lets just say that I did this for science, and for the ability to write about it.
There are three areas on the map that have things that you might be interested in, but after having run this several times I feel that it is best to focus on two specific side objectives for the maximum amount of benefit. The first is the hidden shield vault, and when you drop into the mission you are going to turn left and follow the zone wall around until a tracker appears under the objective on the left hand side of the screen. You could of course play hotter or colder until you find the switch on your own, but it will always be located in the same place so run towards that single solitary tree in near the center of this clearing.
Once you hit the switch the shield bunker will open and inside are two chests, one of which will contain a guaranteed piece of gear and a guaranteed minor artifact. I’ve never seen a legendary minor artifact, so it seems like the best possible thing you can get here is an epic which I have. After this you are going to follow the icon to the mission objective. This route is going to take you in from the side and will end up causing you to miss a bunch of packs, which in this case is a good thing given that you can effectively run all the way to the shield bunker without killing anything.
When you get to the objective a pack of 5 elites are going to spawn in around a bunker. You are going to completely ignore this pack and try and avoid them while going through the bunker gate and then hanging a hard left to go down the path shown in the above image. This will eventually dead end into an area with two side objectives. The first is going to be a single elite that has a guaranteed item drop, and the second is a chest that appears behind one of those destructible walls. Since I have been playing Cap, and there is seemingly no way to break down those walls I have just been farming the mob that has a guaranteed drop.
Once you take out that Elite, it will drop something and will be either a blue, purple or yellow. Once you wrap the pack up you can hit escape and choose the “Return to Quinjet” option allowing you to reset the mission and start it up again. When I was at my peak efficiency, this run was maybe taking two minutes to complete, and technically you can bail as soon as the elite drops. I however preferred mopping up the pack that spawns in with it because I have actually seen a significant number of bonus drops that way. Sure it is repetitive, but it is the sort of activity that is perfect to do while watching something on Netflix because it requires very little focus.
As for leveling other characters… sadly the most efficient way of doing so seems to be repeating the Harm missions over and over. Everything in the game gives you experience, even these tutorial missions. It seems like experience gain is not impacted at all by the difficulty that you are attempting, so that means your best bet is to queue up for anything with a large volume of mob encounters on the lowest possible difficult. You won’t get any gear drops in the Harm challenges, but you will get one to two levels per round until you get fairly high in level. At this point you can bump things up to Harm IV or Harm V which reward more experience, not because of the difficulty but because they spawn in a lot of mini boss type encounters.
I attempted to do some of this on Thor yesterday, and while I was perfectly fine grinding for loot… grinding for experience bored the shit out of me. So I figure I will probably go back to running missions because at least in that way I am getting some gear drops as I continue the leveling process and have a chance of maybe getting wardrobe unlocks through the rare and epic pattern drops. I’ve never seen a legendary pattern drop, but for all I know that might be a thing that exists in super rarity out in the wild. Grinding the levels also gives me a more reliable source of item materials which then can be converted into power level on Cap. For me at least that seems to be the best option, but for sheer speed… those Harm missions cannot be beat.
I am one of those players who rarely, if ever, buys a game when it comes out. I wait sometimes upwards of 3 years to play a game so I get it cheaper and can spend my money on other hobbies. The only time I buy a game at launch is if enough people that I trust say “this is a game you can’t miss” and that game involves any kind of social act at all. I’m not a social gamer but if someone says this is an amazing game, try it… I might make that my one at launch purchase that year. So I see the benefit of having someone tell me whether this is going to be a game people play for a year and still go strong with because then I might be able to justify the expense to enjoy that “period of popularity”. If it’s not that big of a deal, or if the game is mostly soloable…. I’ll just wait. It’ll still be there and I can try it when it hits the 50% off mark (or, more likely… buy it at that point but not play it for another couple years ::looks at steam and epic backlogs::).
We have talked about this before (on Twitter) but another big difference between you and me is that you approach games as something to be completed as efficiently as possible, where I play games for kind of the “internal role play” of getting away from the real world for a bit. That could factor into our discussion too. I’m approaching Avengers in an almost diametrically opposed way. I’m leveling all the characters at once, and I make a point NOT to do the same kinds of missions over and over again. Instead I kind of jump around; in fact I get a little annoyed when I get a Challenge Card that says “Do 2 Drop Zone missions in a specific area” because it means I’m going to repeat the same map twice.
I love the leveling process in games and when I hit cap I generally walk away, so I’m in no hurry to get there. I also almost never do multiplayer so I’m not concerned about matchmaking issues (though I feel for those who DO want to play with others and are having issues.)
Even with all that said, I suppose I wouldn’t call it a “must buy” but after a week of playing nothing else I’m still really looking forward to getting off work tonight and logging back in.