Back in 2012, a couple of months before The Avengers was released, Marvel: Avengers Alliance, a turn-based Facebook game, debuted. And like the movie that followed, it would attract countless users, with its addictive gameplay and epic scope, pitting dozens of heroes against just as many villains (the roster of characters would grow exponentially as the game evolved).
- Marvel Avengers Alliance 2 Gameplay
- Play Marvel Avengers Alliance
- Marvel Avengers Alliance 2 Gameplay Ps3
With the release of Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 (it just came out last week), the gameplay, graphics, and narrative have all advanced, to deliver an even more action-packed and enthralling experience. (Just like last time, Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 comes out ahead of another anticipated cinematic experience—this time it’s the star-studded Captain America: Civil War.) And we got to chat with Justin Woods, a senior producer on the new game, who told us what it was like following up the phenomenally popular original game with a sequel the fans could get behind.
- Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 is an action role-playing video game, the sequel to Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.It was released September 15, 2009. The game was jointly developed by Vicarious Visions (PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360), n-Space (Nintendo DS, PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Wii) and Savage Entertainment (PlayStation Portable), and is published by Activision.
- From what's been released so far, Marvel's Avengers seems to focus too much on story and cinematics. There's been some gameplay trailers lately, in that aspect it seems okay from what we've seen so far.
Known in Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 as fusion attacks, combining heroes' powers into a single powerful attack is an easy way to amp up the fun. Generally this takes the form of Iron Man reflecting his unibeam off of Captain America's shield or Wolverine's claws, or Spider-Man webbing up an arena full of enemies only for Hulk to smash down on them.
The last game came out in 2012. When did you start thinking about follow up? How did convos lead to where you are now?
That’s a great question. So, they actually hired me in 2012, right around the time the first Avengers film came out, so about, roughly about a month after the game came out. In the two years I was running that game with some other folks, we had talked about doing a sequel and were just waiting for the right time. And then the mobile market really took off and it was really obvious that we wanted to make a mobile game. When we started talking about what mobile game do we wanted to work on, we had all these people in the office who had all of this 3D experience, whereas [the first one] was a 2D game. In 2013 we had a conversation and said “Hey, let’s start to prototyping what a 3D Avengers Alliance game would look like and throw it on mobile.” So we started prototyping it in January 2014 and the rest, as they say, is history.
Marvel Avengers Alliance 2 Gameplay
![Alliance Alliance](/uploads/1/2/6/4/126439506/878681244.jpg)
How do you look at where the games fit into the Marvel Universe?
The way we see the games are sort of unwritten books. Imagine if someone gets a storybook and the pages are not filled yet—it’s actually a platform for storytelling. So, what we really are excited about with both of these games is that they just give us an opportunity to tell new stories, and introduce new characters that maybe you’re familiar with or maybe you’re not. The game appeals to people who are comic fans, but it also appeals to people who are fans of the films, and I like to say that if you like any Marvel characters in any incarnation, you are a Marvel fan. I think there is upwards of 150 playable characters or something like that in the first game now, and we already have about 40 in the new, and we’re just going live this week, and that’s because we want to get as many different experiences and characters in the game as possible.
How would you describe the gameplay?
We would tend to call it a turn-based JRPG, or a Japanese role playing game. Players who have played the Final Fantasy games might be familiar with this style game where you have three people on your team, up to three people on the other team, and you’re selecting actions one at a time, and watching them play out in a turn-based fashion.
This being an online experience, what can people expect from the updates?
First of all, I talked about how we’re going to be launching new characters all the time. We’re also going to be launching new chapters all the time, and our chapters have, right now, have six missions of three difficulties each, so there’s a great deal of depth in every single chapter. We also have a feature called “special operations,” and that’s something we’ve carried over as a concept from Avengers Alliance—it’s a time-limited, slightly shorter chapter and it’s really focused around a one hero. It’s a really fun, exciting, engaging, deep piece about these characters rather than an overarching narrative over the entire universe.
With customization and constant updates, will fans see elements from Captain America: Civil War or upcoming comic book events?
Well, Marvel has been an amazing partner for us, and one of the things we’re really excited about is that they have opened up to us the ability to tie into publishing events and the comic books, or the events in the TV shows, or Netflix series, as well as events in the film. But you touched on something that was really interesting there which was customizability, and I realize that I haven’t mentioned one of the cool things that’s different about Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 that we’re really excited about is that every hero can have customized abilities. What I mean by that is that you have three different ability swaps for every single hero, but there are up to eight different abilities that you can earn and unlock for each of those heroes, and then each of those abilities have a set of progression tied to them as well that you can level them up or rank them up and make them more powerful, and add additional statuses and game play in those abilities. The amount of depth in one of these heroes is really, really great.
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What should people playing Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 know going into the game?
To the fans who are new fans we built a brand new story from the ground up just for them. We built an experience tailored to what mobile gamers want in their games and we gave a very fresh, new experience that it’s a great jumping-on point. You’re not missing out on anything if you’ve never played the original game, the story is not going to be something that is confusing to you if you’ve never played the original game. At the same time, because of all of those fresh takes, and for the new mobile experience and that new story, we think original players are going to want to play both games because they have enough different to offer between the two of them. We really hope that players are going to be interested in playing and participating in both, learning the stories and secrets of both, and building out their roster of heroes to build the ultimate Avengers Alliance.
Marvel Avengers Alliance 2 Gameplay Ps3
You can download Marvel: Avengers Alliance 2 now on iOS, Android, Amazon, and Microsoft, right now.