Beaten By A Grue: A Designer Looks At Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects

[Full Disclosure: I am a game designer for Electronic Arts, which co-developed and published Marvel Nemesis. However, I do not work at the same studio, or even in the same country as anyone on the development team. I do not know anyone who worked on the development team. I have no special insider knowledge of any of the designers' intentions. These are all my personal reactions to purchasing and playing the game at home, and the opinions are no-one's but mine.]

What happens when a developer known for its action RPGs teams up with a developer known for its sports titles to produce their first fighting game? The answer would seem to be, "not much."

Nihilistic, who brought us Vampire: the Masquerade: Redemption*, joined forces with Electronic Arts (specifically EA Canada, in Vancouver) and a Marvel character license to create an excruciatingly underwhelming fighting game. Now, I loves me some fighting games, and I loves me some superheroes, so I really, really wanted to love Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects, but sometimes you just have to face up to the fact that the game just doesn't give a good sense of being a superhero, or of being a fighter. I played through all of Story Mode, and a couple of versus battles, just to make sure. Marvel Nemesis is not without a few cool ideas, including one I'd never seen in a fighting game before which I will now demand future fighting games either include or have a good reason why not.

When you make games for a living, sometimes you play games for fun, and sometimes you play games for research. If you're not playing Marvel Nemesis for research, there really isn't much point to it, I'm afraid. This game shows a lot of signs of being forced out the door before it was ready, which is a fairly common trait of the first game in a new genre for a developer. I'm going to step through my impressions of the game: what didn't work, what did work, and what I'd like to see expanded upon and improved if EA or Nihilistic ever tries to do another fighter in a similar mold (which I wouldn't be opposed to, honestly).

The Characters

Fighting games are extremely character-centric. Ever since Capcom released Street Fighter II's motley crew of international warriors on an unsuspecting world, every fighting game worth its silicon has struggled to present a cast of characters that will appeal to a wide audience. In this case, most of the work has been done already, because we're dealing with a suite of Marvel's finest: Wolverine, Spider-Man, Venom, Magneto, Storm, and a handful of other popular characters. Additionally we have a roster of characters created by Marvel just for the game, the Imperfects: Johnny Ohm, Fault Zone, Hazmat, and some others, for a grand total of 18 playable characters.

It's easy to be disappointed by the Imperfects. They come across as two-dimensional characters with backgrounds that seem completely arbitrary (Fault Zone was a ballerina who got in an accident and lost her ability to dance, until the scientist Van Roekel gave her cybernetic augmentation that restored her limbs and, um, gave her the ability to cause earthquakes). The Marvel characters here have literally decades of character development behind them. It would be impossible to include new characters that could honestly match up to that kind of depth. I mean, Spider-Man has been the subject of college essays. I'm willing to cut the Imperfects a little slack here.

My real problem with the characters in the game is that there really aren't as many as there seem to be. Several characters in the game are effectively copies of each other. The most obvious example is Human Torch and the Imperfect, Solara (a flying, flame-covered female), but these characters are also effectively the same as Iron Man and Storm, who also fly, and have powerful ranged attacks and weak melee attacks. Ryu and Ken this isn't. Marvel Nemesis uses so many duplicate characters, it just comes off feeling cheap.

Lastly, I really don't understand where the art direction was going on this game. The color palate is low-contrast, and the character lighting looks really, really wrong. It doesn't look like a comic book, it doesn't look like a movie, it doesn't even look like a videogame. I tried looking into some of the Marvel-affiliated artists who were named as working on the game, but I couldn't find anything they'd done that would have suggested the visual style in this game. Honestly, I was expecting cel-shaded, or at least the bright jewel colors of the Ultimate series Marvel's been working lately.

Controls & Mechanics

Oh God, something just didn't work here. Fighting games live and die on their control set, and in Marvel Nemesis, it's just way too easy to miss when you're aiming at something, get stuck in a combo that forces you to go swinging into an explosive barrel. The end result is I just don't feel much like a superhero.

The basic idea of the controls is kind of interesting though. I wouldn't mind seeing this iterated on in the future. Each face button on the controller does a different kind of action: Attack, Block, Jump, and Grab/Throw. The shoulder buttons act like shift keys. Left trigger makes for quicker moves, Right trigger makes for stronger moves. Using either trigger takes some amount of your "Super Power" meter, which refills slowly over time, or quickly when you damage an enemy. It's a pretty simple system, but suffers from the fact that it really doesn't work like any fighting game I've ever played. When you're trying to break into an existing genre, you've got to court the gamers who are already big fans of the genre by giving them a control set they can identify with. Once your company has made its bones in the genre, the player base will cut you more slack when it comes to unusual control schemes. This slows down innovation, I admit, but it usually results in a better game when the development team has little experience in working in the genre.

Also worth noting, there is a nasty bug where if a player is killed, and then falls into a pit, the player appears in T-pose, interpenetrating with the other player's victory animation. I encountered this situation fairly often, so I'm not sure how this bug made it through, but it does speak to the theory that the game was rushed.

Menu System

I really liked the menus for Marvel Nemesis. Clean graphics, good use of audio, easily navigated. Bonus points for making Versus Mode the first choice on the main screen, instead of Story Mode; fighting games are all about Player vs. Player. Kudos to the UI team on this one!

The Manual

Marvel Nemesis falls victim to one of my videogame pet peves: the manual gives me spoilers about surprises in the plot. Seriously, if your game has any pretenses of building any sort of dramatic tension, do not put phrases in the manual along the lines of, "but no one knows his true intentions," or "some think he may be plotting something." Maybe nobody reads the manual but me these days, but please, I know where to find spoilers for any game online, if I want them. Don't put them in the damn manual.

Versus Mode

Having already talked about the control issues, I just want to say a couple words about unlockables in a fighting game. Unlockables are a touchy subject with a lot of designers. Each of us thinks we know the best way to do them, how often they should get unlocked, how many there should be, etc. In Marvel Nemesis the only way to unlock more characters for Versus Mode is to play through Story Mode. I'm of the opinion that Unlockables should either be unlocked via the mode in which they appear (i.e., we unlock more Versus characters by playing lots of Versus matches), or by a generic points system (as in Soul Calibur II) Also, if I was king, I would have had all the Marvel characters unlocked from the beginning, with only the Imperfects getting unlocked during play. Most people who buy the game will want the famous characters when they play their friends, and fighting games are, for a lot of us, entirely about Player vs. Player.

To the designers' credit, though, the game has a cheat code input menu option, where a player who bothers to go online and look up the proper cheat code can enter it to unlock any of the game's content. I'm a big fan of including this in a game. If I'm gonna pay $50 for your game, I wanna have a chance to see all the content, no matter what.

Story Mode

I think a lot of the reviews on other websites have gone over the failures of this mode already. The fighting system and camera just don't handle multiple simultaneous opponents as well as this mode demands. Mission difficulty seems to vary randomly, with an extremely hard mission followed by 3 or 4 incredibly easy ones before slamming the Player with another monsterously difficult one. After completing a difficult mission, I never felt that I had gotten more skilled at the game, just that I'd gotten lucky on that particular attempt on the mission. It is unfortunate that the most brilliant moment of the entire game happens near the end of this mode, because I have a feeling that most players will get frustrated and give up before they see it.

Near the end of the game, the scientist Van Roekel reveals his "combat form." Van Roekel is, of course, your typical final boss character. He's powerful, he's fast, etc. The first time you see Van Roekel in combat, the player controls him, and uses him to kill one of the heroes in the player's roster. So often in fighting games, the final boss is just some tough guy who is generically "evil," and gets his ass handed to him by the player. Marvel Nemesis lets the player enter into combat as the big bad guy, and basically turn one of the characters the player has been using into a pile of mush. This first of all acts as a demonstration of just how tough the final boss is, but it also shows the player that Van Roekel isn't "cheap," because the player is taking damage here and there, too. Playing this battle blew my mind. It's such a simple idea, but it's so effective. It empowers the Player, but simultaneously shows just how much harder she needs to work if she wants to beat Van Roekel in the end.

Most of you aren't going to play Marvel Nemesis until you reach that point, so you're just going to have to take my word for it. This is one of my new favorite moments in fighting games. I desperately want somebody to take this idea and put it in a better fighting game so that we can all experience it and agree on how cool it is.

* Corrected 10/3/05

Comments

[albino]

Nihilistic never made Vampire Bloodlines. They made "Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption". Troika made Bloodlines. You'd know this if ever played a game before. But I guess you hate videogames.

[ClockworkGrue]

Kudos for the fact check, albino. I'm not sure I understand the personal attack, though.

[albino]

I was joking. Sorry if you were offened.

[Singe]

Loved the article!

I also was underwhelmed with the final product. It looked good at E3, but in hind sight it seems that they didn't show the story mode because they knew it wouldn't wow anybody.

[radiopillows]

This article made alot of sense to me. I wouldn't say it was a bad game, so much as it is painfully mediocre. I would have prefered to see a story line based around real Marvel comic characters and not the crummy Imperfects. And fixed controls with 4 player combat ala Powerstone would have been keen as well.

[ArC]

Regarding the art direction -- I thought it looked a bit like the "EA house style" -- from their regular sports games to NBA Street, FIFA Street, Fight Night, NFL Street, Def Jam, there's a certain glossy "realistic" look to EA games that seems to be exactly what Marvel Nemesis is also aiming for.

[canadiankorean]

Wasn't Nihilistic working on Starcraft Ghost?
I guess Blizzard knew these guys aren't the greatest team to create games and gave them the boot.

[taiki]

After seeing some of the matches from a Marvel Vs Capcom 2 tournament as late of 2005, I started wondering the same thing about Marvel Nemesis... It was such a stinker... What possessed marvel to move away from Capcom? How much more money could they be making from thier franchises with EA?

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