Marvel's Avengers has had a wild ride since its launch earlier this fall. The game was delayed from an early summer release to give the team more time to put on the finishing touches, but despite that effort the AAA title still launched with a laundry list of bugs on most platforms and a bit of an endgame content drought according to some parts of the community. Early patches have been mostly dedicated to stomping out bugs, but the latest big patch actually made some content additions and quality of life improvements, as well.
From the first days of Marvel's Avengers many players had some valid complaints about how the world hubs and daily tasks work. Unflattering comparisons to the world hub in Anthem emerged right away and players had some pretty solid feedback about how the Helicarrier and the Ant Hill could be improved in the short term. The latest update actually adds a third hub world (or Outpost as they are called in-game), but also makes two crucial improvements to the current experience.
The latest patch arrived earlier this week and, although it didn't add Kate Bishop, it did bring some new endgame mission types and some much needed quality of life improvements. The first is simple - Running/sprinting in the hub worlds. This access to increased speed at the Outposts makes a massive difference and suddenly going to visit vendors and other points of interest doesn't feel like nearly as much of an obstacle.
The second change allows players to pick up the daily tasks and assignments from either faction without actually visiting every physical location independently. This cuts down on some serious load times and running around and makes it so that players can just get started by visiting one location and picking up all the quests for the day. That means less time doing busy work and more time jumping right into actual gameplay and missions. This is another great improvement and definitely seems to indicate that the developers are carefully listening to player feedback and making smart changes.
Obviously the initial priority has been to remove gamebreaking and performance bugs from Marvel's Avengers, but it's very exciting to see things start to shift more towards quality of life improvements and new content. This update added a new type of daily endgame mission for the hardcore grinders, but players are still hungry for even more content. The original Kate Bishop announcement indicated that she would be released in October and Clint's Hawkeye would follow in November, so hopefully that means another content update is on the way sometime in the next two weeks before the month is over.
With Marvel's Avengers already experiencing some dwindling playerbase issues on PC and other platforms, it's very important for the devs to continue improving the game with quality of life improvements and new content to keep the current playerbase engaged and start to offer reasons for new players to dive in.
As the holiday shopping season begins to approach, it will be interesting to see whether or not Marvel's Avengers gets a price cut. The game is new enough that it would be surprising to see it deeply discounted on Black Friday or other big shopping days, but with a shrinking player base, it will be very important for the game to get an influx of new players invested as new content and additional QOL changes hopefully continue to arrive in the coming months.
One of the promises from the latest developer update was that there would be more frequent engagements with the community and more open lines of communication, so hopefully news about what changes are coming next will be arriving within the next week or so and continue throughout the rest of the year.
Marvel's Avengers is out now on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One, with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X versions currently in development.