Crystal Dynamics has explained the reasoning behind the upcoming change to the XP earning rates of Marvel’s Avengers.
In a post on Reddit, the official Avengers developer account explains the reasons behind the new changes to XP, which are set to slow down levelling speeds, increasing the grind for players who want to max out their character’s levels.
According to the post, the problem comes from the fact that players “could end up levelling up (“dinging”) 2 to 3 times per mission – with missions taking about 10-20 minutes in length.
“The problem we were seeing, and hearing, was that you would immediately get more skill points than you had time to review, apply, and get used to, before embarking on your next mission and gaining your next few levels,” the post continued.
“We don’t want the levelling up experience to be too overwhelming or diminish exploring each skill purchase.” the developers explain, and so they have “smoothed out the higher-level curves to make it so you were less likely to “ding” more than once or twice per mission at the higher end.”
The post went on to say that early levelling has been smoothed out in order to help players “feel more like a Super Hero faster.” The original blog post outlining the changes made to the levelling process is available here.
Reactions to the post are mostly negative, with the top voted response from antca87 saying “This is a terrible move. Levelling up was never the issue. The lack of content was.” Other comments go more in-depth on the reasons it doesn’t work, with user Axelchrono saying: “This doesn’t make sense. At all. The reason people were calling the game a braindead button masher at first was because the depth of the combat is locked to the very late stages of each character’s skill tree”.
As of November last year, Marvel’s Avengers had failed to turn a profit, with Square Enix president Yosuke Matsuda saying “sales of Marvel’s Avengers were lower than we had expected and unable to completely offset the amortization of the game’s development costs”.
The post Crystal Dynamics explain changes to ‘Marvel’s Avengers’ levelling grind appeared first on NME.
