Marvel Heroes Almost Live

Yes, Marvel Heroes is going live tomorrow, June 4th!  For those of you who were in the beta, but didn't get some kind of Founder's Pack, you will have to wait until tomorrow for access.  I picked up the Wolverine Starter Pack a while ago now and was able to get in yesterday and saw that some things had changed from the beta and figured that I'd give you guys a heads up.  No mind-shattering changes - just new.

Power icons look to have all been given graphics instead of the stand-in text that used to be there.  Quests so far look the same, though I'll say that you bump into the Black Cat at some point when I don't believe she was there before.  So polish type of updates there.

The biggest difference that I noticed from beta was how your S.T.A.S.H. works.  For those who didn't play beta and have no idea what this is, S.T.A.S.H. is your bank - you store everything there.  While in beta you had one tab that made up your storage and everything went there.  Now you can buy extra tabs.  You start out with one general tab and one tab for each hero that you buy with real-life money; you get no tab for heroes that you start with for free or pick up as loot/quest rewards (though you can buy a tab for them).  You can buy extra general tabs and you can also buy tabs specifically for crafting materials.  Each tab costs 300G or about $3.

So far in the game, it looks like crafting loot drops are slightly less common than they were in beta, but as time goes on, I have no doubts that I'll rack up crafting items.  My plan is to keep combining them until I get to end-game and then use my - by then - nice trove of high level crafting items to round out my characters.

I decided to start off with buying just a crafting tab for now, since I do plan to horde those items across all characters.  Otherwise, I didn't see the need for other tabs.  I'm going to play for a while and see if the general tab is all that I need for my other heroes or if I do need to unlock each heroes' tab also.  With the crafting tab in place, I'm not seeing much of a need to store anything for my heroes beyond cool items that they can't use yet due to level.  So if my Wolverine gets an awesome purple Storm drop, maybe that goes into general but not much else.  If you do intend to do some crafting, I do recommend the crafting tab just so that everything else remains uncluttered.

If you're a Founder, what do you like best about the game thus far?  If you're about to get access tomorrow, what are you looking forward to most?  Leave a comment and let me know!

Regardless, I hope that you have a good time - I'm liking Marvel Heroes so far.  My Wolverine will see your character soon.  In the meantime....*snikt* take care and watch your back.  Evil is out there!

MMOs I'm Playing: Marvel Heroes

Though it's still in beta, the NDA is lifted and I've been playing it quite a bit, so I figured that I could comment on Marvel Heroes thus far and how it's progressing.  I'll note the caveat that it's still beta and things can and will change.  The short version of my review is: I like it, but I can see it getting repetitive.

This MMO is brought to you by some of the people who created the Diablo series and the game plays a bit like it in terms of character movement, attacks, and powers/skills to a point.  So if you hated Diablo, this MMO may not be for you.  If you enjoyed Diablo, read on.

Important to note is that the game is free-to-play (no monthly subscription fee) with 100% of the content available to you whether or not you spend money in the game's store.  You'll be given a free hero to start with: Hawkeye, Daredevil, Scarlet Witch, The Thing, or Storm.  Beyond that you'll need to either get a lucky drop of another hero as loot or buy one that you want from the MMO store with real-life money.  Alternate costumes for your hero will also cost and otherwise you'll be able to buy temporary xp and other boosts from the store.  Otherwise, if you have the hero and costume that you want and the other stuff doesn't interest you, you never have to pay another cent again.

The thing that I like most about the game is that the developers did a good job of giving the heroes their comic book feel.  It was a little shaky at first, but through their patches it's really improved.  The characters' animations and quips as they go about daily life fighting crime and interacting with other heroes helps this a lot.

Some of the powers/skills seem shoehorned a bit, as if some of the devs got together and said, "This hero needs another skill, but I've already used everything that this guy/gal is known for" to which the others responded, "Just add a bleed/acid/etc to one that you already have even though it makes no sense for this character."  Then again, I haven't read all of the Marvel comics in existence, so maybe somewhere at sometime they used such a thing.  I just don't remember Spider-Man using corrosive webbing.  All in all, though, I think that that the skills/powers are a good representation of each of the heroes and keep to the character.

Marvel Heroes MMO Beta (The Punisher Gameplay / Commentary)

For this outing on the Marvel Heroes MMO beta, I decided to take out The Punisher and see what he could do.  As it turns out, just like the comic book character, he hits hard and takes no prisoners!

My favorite Punisher powers?  Explosive Rocket - a ranged AOE attack with a REALLY nice damage radius.  Also, Driven By Vengeance - a passive that gives a percentage chance for abilities to cost Vengeance instead of Spirit.  You get a little Vengeance each time you kill a mob.

The Punisher definitely has a lot of possibilities and is very customizable to be the type of character that you like.