Virtosu Cezar, a former creative director at Virtuos, which helped develop Marvel’s Avengers, has apologized for how the game turned out and cited a “challenging production” for it not becoming what it could have been.
Speaking to Edge Magazine (via GamesRadar), Cezar didn’t go into much detail about the problems that led to the decision to end development on Marvel’s Avengers just a little over two years after it launched, but he apologized for it nonetheless.
“It was a challenging production, let’s say,” Virtosu told Edge. “I apologize for that.”
Virtosu left Virtuos in 2020 for Hexworks and is now working on The Lords of the Fallen, the reboot of 2014’s Lords of the Fallen that got its first gameplay trailer at The Game Awards 2022. The game will be released on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC, but no release date or window has been given as of yet.
As for Marvel’s Avengers, active development has ended for the live-service game, and support will be discontinued on September 30, the same day digital purchases of the title will no longer be available.
The final content update for Marvel’s Avengers was Update 2.7, which added the Winter Soldier and the Cloning Lab Omega-Level Threat. It also confirmed Spider-Man will remain a PlayStation exclusive.
March 31 will see the arrival of Update 2.8, but that will just be a balance update. Following March 31, the cosmetics marketplace will be turned off and credits will no longer be purchasable. Leftover credits will be converted to in-game resources and all cosmetics will be made free for all players.
We called Marvel’s Avengers one of E3 2019’s biggest disappointments and it didn’t get much better from there for the much-anticipated game. There was plenty to love in the game however, especially the campaign, but the whole package just never came together.
In our Marvel’s Avengers review, we said it “has a fun and endearing superhero campaign, but it’s tied to a loot-based post-game that’s so repetitive and unrewarding that it gave me little reason to want to keep playing.”
Hopefully, Marvel’s upcoming games, including Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 and Wolverine and Amy Hennig and Skydance New Media’s upcoming game set in a World War 2-era Paris starring Captain America and Black Panther, fare better.
For more, check out why, despite Marvel’s Avengers and other failed projects, we don’t think live-service games are dying.
Update (2/20/23) – Virtosu Cezar was a creative director at Virtous, not at Crystal Dynamics and not of Marvel’s Avengers. IGN regrets this error and the story has been updated.
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Adam Bankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @AdamBankhurst and on Twitch.
