Announced at E3 2021 in June, Eidos-Montreal’s upcoming action-adventure game Guardians of the Galaxy will place players in the role of Peter Quill, or Star-Lord, as he leads the titular band of misfits to prevent a little problem that they caused: the destruction of the universe. Because all the well-known members of the group will be present in the title — Gamora, Rocket Raccoon, Groot, and Drax the Destroyer — Guardians of the Galaxy seems a good opportunity for a bit of multiplayer à la Marvel’s Avengers.
This will not be the case, however. The other members of the Guardians of the Galaxy team will not be directly playable and will instead be controlled by AI, although they can be issued commands during combat. This will allow the creation of attack chains, which combine different characters’ unique abilities, to cause increased damage to enemies. Otherwise, the Guardians will act and make decisions independently.
Guardians of the Galaxy apparently wasn’t always intended to be solely a single-player game, though. Before becoming a game director at Guerrilla Games in 2018, Simon Larouche worked at Eidos-Montreal for a year. On his LinkedIn page, it specifies that his role was to work on Guardians of the Galaxy as “Online Gameplay Director – Multiplayer (canceled).” Larouche started at Eidos-Montreal in March 2017, which coincides with the time period when news of a Guardians of the Galaxy game being in early development first leaked.
There could be a few reasons why a multiplayer mode in Guardians of the Galaxy might have been canceled, the foremost being the poor performance of Marvel’s Avengers, which has faced consistent player discontent since it released in September 2020, the most recent cause being a bug that displayed the IP addresses of PS5 players onscreen. This hypothesis doesn’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny, however, because Larouche left Eidos-Montreal in February 2018, over two years before the launch of Marvel’s Avengers, presumably with the game’s multiplayer already cancelled.
Either way, Guardians of the Galaxy may still prove to be the Marvel game fans have been hoping for since Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man titles. While players may be a bit guarded with their excitement after the mixed reviews of Marvel’s Avengers, the game should be judged on its own merits. Guardians of the Galaxy will be story-driven, interspersed with a lot of action, and will recreate the friendly, and sometimes unfriendly, banter between the eponymous Guardians. In an interview during the E3 2021 showcase, Dan Abnett, who wrote stories for some of the original comics, stated that Star-Lord was “fantastic and absolutely in the spirit of what these characters are.”
Guardians of the Galaxy will release on October 26, 2021, for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: SegmentNext