PAX East 2013: Marvel Heroes’ Brevik & Olebe chat up their improved MMO Action RPG

GZ: A lot of people, even though it’s an MMO, like to solo these kinds of games. Is that something you’ll be able to do with Marvel Heroes?

David Brevik: Yeah, you don’t ever have to group up with anybody to do anything in the game. You can do all the story, you can play through the whole thing by yourself. The instances scale based on the number of people in them and the outdoor activities are just a dynamic social interaction. People come up and cooperative. You can choose to do the public events or you don’t have to, but there’s no reason that you can’t be out there just doing your own thing.

GZ: I remember back at New York Comic Con you mentioned that Brian Michael Bendis is doing the writing for Marvel Heroes, is that an ongoing process?

David Brevik: Yeah, we just talked to him two days ago. We’re still working with him, it’s going well. I’m really happy with the story, I think it’s going to be awesome. We have a nice animated intro. There’s about an hour worth of motion comics that play periodically through big quests or sometimes they set up villains.

GZ: So you’re coming up on launch, but that’s not really the end of the line is it?

David Brevik: The Marvel universe is really big and we’ve just scratched the surface. There’s lots of fun things we can do. Because it’s an MMO and this is really the beginning, we can keep adding to it, making it better and better, more and more content.

I’m really excited about that, it’s not something I’ve ever done before. When Diablo 2 came out we made the expansion but that was really it. We did some patches and things like that but for the most part that was the end of development. The idea of being able to build on something over a period of years is really compelling. We can really do some outrageous stuff. We’ve got some really great ideas that are going to make this very distinct.

GZ: It’s easy to court the Diablo fan to Marvel Heroes, but what about someone who doesn’t really like Diablo, what do you say to them?

David Brevik: Do you like Marvel? (laughs) You know, Marvel Ultimate Alliance is a great game that’s Diablo-like and used the Marvel heroes. When we’re making a game, there are lots of people that don’t like Diablo, but that’s okay. We’re not going to make a game that’s for everyone. The only thing I would say is that they really have nothing to lose by giving it a try. It’s free, download it, give it a try, if you don’t like it just delete it. You know? It’s not a big deal. But, give it a try, it only takes a few minutes.

GZ: There have been a lot of launch disasters in games lately, is that something you’ve had to consider?

David Brevik: That’s something I stay up at night shaking about. This is always my biggest fear. That said, we’ve been through this before, and I think that we’re more prepared now than we’ve ever been. We’re in the beta phase right now, we’re inviting thousands of people a week at this point. We’re going to have some really big tests to really stress our infrastructure and hopefully we won’t have any launch day issues.

GZ: So I have one more question on behalf of Lance Liebl, GameZone’s senior editor. He wanted me to ask, is Gambit going to be in the game?

David Brevik: (laughs) That is the number one requested character. I can say, his model is done and that’s all I can say!

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The last time I personally saw Marvel Heroes was back at New York Comic Con last October. The game I saw at PAX East 2013 last weekend was almost unrecognizable in comparison. It’s rare that even when I see a game early, the final game looks that different, but I’ll tell you Marvel Heroes is looking awesome. I had a chance to speak with David Brevik, president of Gazillion Entertainment, and Leo Olebe, VP Marketing.

GZ: So you have these motion comic cutscenes in the game now, you have full voice acting, care to talk about that?

Leo Olebe: Yeah actually, you reminded me, we announced yesterday that Steven Blum is the voice of Wolverine. We also have Fred Tatasciore as The Hulk, we’re bringing back Christopher Daniel Barnes as Symbiote Spider-Man. The big announcements yesterday were Keith David as Nick Fury — he’s awesome, our art director described him as “a chocolate voice in a silky bowl.” We also announced Clark Gregg as Agent Coulson, so he’s reprised his role. The last one we announced was Nolan North as the voice of Deadpool.

GZ: You’ve also announced that you’re adding PvP to the game, correct?

Leo Olebe: Yep, we announced that we’ll have PvP at launch. It’s basically faction-based PvP, hero vs. hero. It’s not dueling though, it’s going to be fully dynamic special PvP zones. There will be event-based activities so there’s a reason that you’re doing it.

David Brevik: There will be objectives. It’s not a match play version of PvP, that’s something that we still could potentially add, but our PvP is going to be zone-wide, three-faction war.

GZ: How are the factions divided up?

David Brevik: There’s a story premise behind it that is not completely ironed out so I don’t want to say it yet, but there will be story reasons and the three factions will be associated with that.

GZ: It seems that PvP and factions open up the potential for playing as villains at some point, right?

David Brevik: It sounds like fun, doesn’t it? (laughs)

GZ: Anything else new announced at PAX?

Leo Olebe: We announced the end game yesterday. We talked about a feature called Ultimate Power. So let’s say you’re playing as Thor and you defeat a boss and another Thor drops but you already have Thor. Well, that turns into a Hero Token that you can use to level up your Ultimate Power, which unlocks at, like, level 30. You use it in high-end content, the end game and whatnot.

GZ: Can we expect the typical end game content you’d get in an MMO?

Leo Olebe: And the high level content you’d expect from an Action RPG as well. Getting epic loot, leveling up your hero to whatever max level is, we haven’t decided yet, leveling up all of your crafting abilities. We’re going to have all of those classic things that you’d find in an Action RPG end game, and then we also have our own end game that we’re bringing to the table.

I don’t think we’ve specifically talked about things like difficulty modes other than to say, the guy who invented them happens to be sitting to your right, and I think he would be fairly interested in something like that, maybe. (laughs)

David Brevik: Oh yeah, I’m interested alright. One of the things we have that’s unique for the end game is this challenge system. It’s a series of challenges that unlock and also rank up in higher and higher difficulties. It’s kind of a web of all sorts of really great events and sequences that you unlock and play.