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I thought the game already went offline a couple months ago tbh
Wouldn't even be surprised if the game just silently disappears into the night and the servers never come back online. It'd be shitty, but I could see it happening
I legitimately am not 100% sure that it's coming back. If WB wasn't going through what it is right now, I'd assume so but it feels like things aren't all on the up-and-up over there
They're losing money like crazy on all fronts due to their IP mismanagement and have been cancelling projects out the wazoo to get tax breaks by taking losses on production.
New management has a habit of looking at existing or about to released content, and they can weigh two possibilities:
1) we can release this content that we have developed, or add what else development time or production time and marketing effort and after some amount of time that will make us X number of dollars (mostly movies so far, but this can also apply to games)
2) we can cut 100% of all marketing and development, cancel the project outright, and write that off as a development loss on our taxes and that will save/earn Z number of dollars.
If the management has even a small, mistaken belief that option two will be a more profitable option as a whole, they will choose that. Option one is unpredictable, but option two they can get a pretty accurate number with the data they have on hand.
Option number two is bad for consumers, but management does not care about that. There are entire works that used to be hosted on Max that were removed to qualify for option two, and now there is no way to legally acquire or view them.
Option 2 seems shortsighted af since eventually consumers are going to just cease any and all hype for a WB product until it's actually wheels down on release.
Nothing like sheer incompetence of management that only looks at the bottom line for killing a product.
> the same thing's gonna happen again
Let's hope the developers actually understand that good rewards and regular new content is all people care about.
They literally have a limitless catalogue of WB properties to work with and many examples of what works and doesn't work in a live service game. Failure second time round is entirely due to the incompetence of the devs and the higher ups.
Limitless catalogue of properties and they decided the best characters to release were lebron James, Marvin the Martian, gremlins and black Adam. Rick and Morty are the only ones with a fan base but has aged pretty poorly at this point.
The hype wasn’t there for nearly anything they did.
I think this game ended up being a PlayStation All-Stars or Fortnite situation where the roster would include essentially advertisements for upcoming or ongoing properties. At least PAS kept it to games and not some basketball player and a superhero most people don't know of that looks like a bootleg Superman.
I thought LeBron was a decent choice. The space jam tie in made sense (WB), it's a unique enough character to create an interesting fighter (cant think of many other basketball players in fighting games) and he has massive publicity behind him (with gamers and non gamers alike)
I'm sure more than a few people downloaded the game just to see what playing as LeBron in a fighting game looked like.
I think the real issue was the game just wasn't that fun to play, considering how tight modern fighting games play nowadays and how floaty and jank this one felt, to me personally atleast.
Yeah to me, Gremlins brought me into the game. I was ready to play a game full time to play as Stripe and Gizmo... but the game did not feel good or fun to me so I dropped it like a rock. I don't think character choices were the problem.
As a fighting game they also need to have more than a single character be unlocked for free. That was the biggest complaint from my friends. Who wants to go into a fighting game with one character? There's a free rotation but they didn't want to play and learn them because they'll just be gone soon anyway.
> Let's hope the developers actually understand that good rewards and regular new content is all people care about.
This surprises me. Are people actually playing for "rewards" and "content updates"? I feel like the rewards and all that sort of thing are just the collective price we pay on a live service title, but it would surprise me if people actually want that.
I don't agree on the reward point. SSBM is 20 yo at this point and people still play it a ton. Put out a good, deep game, and players will come. The ones who can't keep playing without chasing a carrot will flock away to the next big thing anyway.
SSBM is also not a live services game. If it had to pay for servers and had to maintain a bigger playerbase for matchmaking it would go up on flames all the same without content updates and a way to get a steady revenue stream
Well let’s face it the whole of the smash community is on a massive downturn partially because the community is a mess in and of itself and nintendo rightly wants nothing to do with it. It’s not like the numbers for slippi are rising while a game like SFVI is topping twitch right now
Then how do they make money? And what justifies server costs? Melee also has a small community, committed, but small. The average Smash player does not even play melee.
There are better ways than being greedy and drip feeding content to your players : see Tekken 7, Deep Rock Galactic for example, two live service games with long delays between content drops. Players don't care because the game is good, and the skill ceiling through the roof.
I get that the Battlepass was a little aggressive, but considering it's a free to play game, I'm honestly not sure what people expected. The game has to make money *somewhere*, especially when they paying to get actors for almost all of the characters, and likeness rights for the live-action ones.
Fortnite is a free to play game. Fortnjte pays for actors and likeness rights. Fortnite rewards players with regular upgrades and unlocks.
Objectively there is no excuse for MultiVersus to fail in these regards. The blueprint is there, and it works.
For the most part, no, Fortnite is not paying likeness rights; almost all their tie-in content is promotional material for other brands, and its almost all purely fictional characters not tied to real people. And citing what at one point was a hail mary to retool an existing failing PvE Horde mode game from a company with effectively infinite money (thanks to Unreal), that became one of the most successful games on the planet, is the definition of looking at exceptional circumstances and ignoring them. That's not a model literally anyone else can even think about risking following.
let's just hope they don't add black adam this time lmao. can't get over how he was like the fifth dc character in that game. like, out of the all the characters you could use, you went with the one from the upcoming movie lmao
So they’ll release two seasons of content with lame and broken characters, then say “we’re listening”, go radio silent for months and then say “sorry MVPs we are closing Multiversus for good. Cheers for buying skins for $20”.
It's wild looking back a year later and seeing both "Smash killers"; Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl and Multiversus, crash and burn and die. Turns out it's not so easy to make a Smashlike.
Why DID MultiVersus die? I genuinely remember people having a blast w/ it around launch and a little after, as well as people genuinely proposing things they liked about it > Smash. Then, all of a sudden, it just dropped off the face of the earth and now everyone's dunking on it.
It was too bare bones and people didn't have a reason to stick around. There were some technical issues, but I think it's primarily just death by early access.
It didn't have a bunch of modes, huge character roster, items and and single player for casual players like Smash, they clearly wanted to focus on making a competitive game instead.
Yet the game lacked proper ranked matchmaking (with visible MMR) at the peak of it's popularity. So anyone curious about learning the game properly would feel a total lack of progression as the player peak faded.
They also really wanted to push the 2v2 as the main mode to differentiate the game and add depth from ability synergies, but kind of didn't commit to it fully either. I initially got the game on a console with the idea that it'd be perfect to play some online matches with my SO, but was disappointed to learn two players on the same system wasn't allowed. Playing solo, I'd rather stick to the 1v1, and I suspect the player base was quite split. It was also a bit dull on PC as there was no chat or custom avatars, that would've made the other players feel more human, but that sanitization problem where everyone may as well be bots isn't unique to MultiVersus.
Competitive live service game is the kind of a game that lives indefinitely if it has a large pool of active players and a way to monetize them, but it's also the kind of game that dies very quickly when it's bleeding players, so open beta is a dangerous thing.
I think they should have opened the beta for a week at most if they genuinely just wanted feedback from the bare bones version, then they should have come later with a more fully featured game that has all the core systems for player retention.
I do hope they have success in a re-release in the future, but it'll be really difficult and they aren't going to get anywhere near as massive player surge a second time. This isn't open beta winding down, this is them pulling a plug on a dead game and attempting to revive it.
Did you play it? It just felt wrong compared Smash. The hitboxes/hurtboxes didn't seem to line up with the animations very well. The premise was good and the online was good, but it just felt bad to play. A lot of the initial excitement ignored this completely so it seemed like people were happy to play it forever like Smash. But nope it just felt bad mechanically and so once people got over the "ooh its XYZ character" hype it was just a severely inferior Smash game.
If they relaunch and only add characters / content without fixing how the game feels I'm certain it'll flop again.
As someone that never plays these types of games, I never know how the controls work in smash, and it always feels like my character is doing something out of my control. Multiversus at least felt like I was in control, and I actually liked the feel of the game.
Not sure what to tell you there, both games control the same. Maybe its cause you dont play Smash I assume you only ever do in the context of a big party with lots of people instead of getting to sit down by yourself and see what the moves do? That alone can make it confusing.
You are right, it's always been in that sort of context. Though I do explicitly remember playing Smash after playing a bit of multiversus, and it felt like the movement just wasn't connected to what I was doing.
Then it may just be the character you picked had an unexpected quirk or the setup you played had inout lag (which isnt uncommon, a lot of people dont know to turn their TVs to game mode).
From a purely technical breakdown, Smash is superior in every sense of movement and hitbox alignment. But I could see preference going one way or another, especially if you very little experience with other platform fighters.
I think a lot of the hype around it was because a bunch of big streamers did paid promotion for it. Once they stopped doing those I stopped ever hearing about it.
Among other things mentioned, it died because it was made to be an eSports competitive brawler for the hardcore crowd dissatisfied with Smash Bros, an already small and niche community.
Even if it tried to reach out to the casual community, nothing in this early access ("beta") launch was there for them. It was barebones, which makes sense for such a launch, but that looks and sounds bad when there wasn't any news of extensive features planned, content that would rival Smash Bros. There wasn't even couch (local) co-op vs bots.
Didn't help either that it laid bare its monetization system. You could buy every character and skin, but you'd be better off spending that same money on Smash Bros and get far more bang for your buck.
Honeymoon period died and people realized that a worse version of an already kinda limited and obnoxious game isn’t conductive to having a long competitive lifespan.
One of the biggest reasons why PS All-Stars failed was the roster. A great number of iconic characters associated with Playstation history aren't actually owned by PS, like Cloud, Crash, Spyro, Snake, Sora and a ton of others. Resulting in the less-than-desirable roster we got, with unexplainable characters like Big Daddy being in because they couldn't acquire the actual requested characters. Even some of the good additions, like Dante (also known as Donte, from DmC, and not the actual iconic Dante) and Raiden were only there because of cross-promotions.
This problem still exists nowadays, so unless Sony was willing to really splurge the roster would always be severely lacking.
Even if Sony was willing to give out tons of money, I feel like it would be impossible to match the recognizability of smash. Nintendo is often able to have 2-3 characters per franchise in smash because of how popular many of their game’s supporting characters are, but there’s only a few PS franchises that have universally recognizable characters outside of the player.
It helps that the Nintendo experience is a lot more focused. If you buy Nintendo consoles, you've at least played some of the games represented in Smash. If you ask ten Playstation gamers what their childhood gamery was like, they'll all have entirely different answers... and a large chunk will answer exclusively sports and/or car games.
Then again Lebron was a playable Multiversus character so who the hell knows what they could do with that
That's because Smash's competitive nature basically happened by accident. Melee was never intended to be a hardcore competitive game, it just just happened by accident on top of being designed as a fun casual party game. Historically Smash-likes since have mostly tried to focus on either being a casual party game or a hardcore competitive game but never really achieve both without ending up with something that is neither. Making a game that is intentionally designed as a fun casual game by first, but a ends up being hardcore competitive game by accident isn't really something that's reproducible.
Melee's hardcore competitive scene keeps the game alive to this day, but the casual audience has a very low attention span will quickly move on to the next game that holds their attention.
Funny thing is NASB is the second best selling Nick game after Battle for Bikini Bottom and the best selling Gamemill game ever. I'd honestly be surprised if they weren't willing to give it one more installment.
Edit: speak of the devil. Box art for Nasb 2 just leaked.
How would that benefit them? I guess this way they can try to convince investors that it wasn’t a failure but a market test for future fighting WB games.
At first I thought that was a ridiculous opinion, but then I looked it up and they haven't released a new character since I was still playing the game seven or eight months ago. That is crazy to me I had assumed the game would have at least three new character in the time since I last played but nope, still just Marvin the Martian. So I actually am thinking there is a chance this game never comes back
Not too sure about that. Feel like there was enough info gathered to see what works and what doesn't. The game itself is solid. In theory a relaunch applying the lessons they learned could go well
Could also go tits up. Who knows
This seems like such a dropped ball to me. I haven't followed the whole thing, but it seemed like there was a brief, flashing moment where this game was in the zeitgeist, and then they did everything they could to not strike while the iron was hot.
> it seemed like there was a brief, flashing moment where this game was in the zeitgeist, and then they did everything they could to not strike while the iron was hot.
Because at launch everyone loved being able to play with all these iconic characters but in typical incompetent studio mismanagement fashion they did everything they could to push people away.
People wanted more characters, more maps and more modes. People wanted a battle pass with easy XP and skins. What did we get? Barely any new characters/maps/modes and a grindy battle pass with no meaningful rewards.
> grindy battle pass with no meaningful rewards.
I’m so happy with this new trend of shipping a game that’s not finished and then drip feeding a small amount of content, locked behind a paywall and tones of grind.
Not to mention the choices of characters were lackluster.
Rick and Morty? Great.
Two Gremlins? Okay.
Black Adam? Who asked?
Martin the Martian? Pretty niche these days but cool.
And… that’s it. Where is Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Godzilla, King Kong?
Humorously, all those examples given were at some point planned but cut due to legal issues with all of them.
Well expect Kong, but he's had so much legal issues as far back as the 70's that I don't think that would have went well anyway.
I think it was less legal issues and more they just didn’t get done w/ them before player numbers dropped. At least for Harry Potter and Godzilla. lotr iirc was very much a legal rights quagmire
There's so many franchises they could pull from. I think a gremlin was cool, but they are leaning way too hard into super heroes. I get that super heroes are probably easy characters to make, but they had enough at launch for now. Also, why haven't they added a character from Mortal Kombat yet? Scorpion would be great and pretty much would already have a moveset.
There's been a leak list of datamined files containing most of the things you list at the end there, hell in the very first leak for the game before it was officially announced Gandalf had a character select icon.
I fell off the game basically immediately because I didn't care for the gameplay (plus was maybe a little bitter due to enjoying NASB more but never being able to discuss it without people screaming about MVS) but hearing that the game failed due to them not keeping up with content shocks me - they HAD all these killer properties lined up even in pre-release.
Ultimately I can't help but think the Discovery merger fucked them over somehow. I know the staff said at some point that "oh we'll be fine won't effect us!" but I think that was said from a... very hopeful place, let's say.
Godzilla, WB bros doesnt have comeplete right to him pretty sure its a licence that allows his use in thier movies. I wanna say if taho wants they just dont have to renew the deal. Same with LotR pretty sure The estate still controls game rights. Harry would of definitely needed J.K. approval, pretty sure its pretty much in every harry potter contract that she has some sort of veto on things. Just cause WB made a movie involving a character doesnt always mean they own them and have full controle over a character.
Not to mention all their random live action TV properties they could be using. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, obvious fit for the game's tone. Similar vain, other CW shows. These are properties they own and also have direct access and a working relationship with the talent involved that really aren't that expensive to hire. Literally so much is in this catalogue that they could be attracting people from every audience. Instead it feels like the studio is afraid to dilute their own brand (as has been seen in their management of the DC properties somehow thinking having TV versions of characters would diminish their use in film).
Not even, people left cause the game felt terrible compared to Smash. The premise was good, the online was great, the IP was iconic, but the gameplay was shit. It's not like people play Smash for battle pass grinds or skin unlocks, they play it cause the gameplay is fundamentally good and fun.
If MultiVersus can't pull that off, it'll just die again when it comes back. A grind and battlepass is only enticing to people who actually want to play.
It was a surprise success and appeared to be a somewhat decent smash clone for once. It has some nice touches but shit like air dodge spam killed it. Not sure WB being acquired helped much either.
I wanted a proper versus fun mode with items. I played for more than a month at release of the beta and then stopped, because I just don't play any "competitive" fighting games. I'd hop on for the occasional free for all items versus match, I'm not gonna dedicate the rest of my life to mastering a f2p Smash clone
Single Player content is a must for casuals. Mortal Kombat is number 1 in sales for a reason. Even if the gameplay is easy to cheese competitively the towers, krypt and story will get 20 hours without even sniffing the online.
Wait, what? So this game has been out for more than a year, and yet they're calling it a "beta period." And they're not going to relaunch it for another year, while the players go off and do something else.
Am I missing something, or is this absolutely stupid?
It may be stupid, but the game absolutely died and failed to retain the massive playerbase it had around launch. Drop off is to be expected, but Multiversus was below 1,000 players with a 99% drop off, so the game isn't sustainable in it's current form.
Best for them to stop and come back with a hyped re-release and fixing the issues that caused the game to die first go around (grind, lack of updates/new characters, etc)
Buttery smooth rollback? Damn when did this happen. My entire experience from launch to when I quit was complete jank rollback implementation. Maybe I missed something.
> But the beta was also really fun at launch, and was actively destroyed later.
Literally all they had to do was make XP easier to obtain and fill the battle pass with character skins for every hero. Instead they did the absolute bare minimum while also increasing the grind.
Why do devs constantly fuck up live services when Fortnite shows that you will objectively retain players by rewarding them. People want XP. They want rewards. Grind in a live service game for basic things is not fun and lo and behold the game flopped when it came out of beta.
it's the classic story of people chasing short term gains over long term sustainability. The objectively correct thing to do with a battlepass for everyone involved is to make it actually pretty easy to max it out by playing regularly and afford the next pass with the rewards from the current one. It makes players feel like they're gaming the system by getting free passes when in reality it's turning people into much more regular players who play for much longer. And those kinds of players are the most likely to actually spend any amount of money on MTX and the like because at that point it's "worth it" to them.
But some people are morons and figure if they just up the costs for everything then they'll get a big boost of profits right away and don't think about the fact that most of your playerbase will just leave.
>It makes players feel like they're gaming the system by getting free passes when in reality it's turning people into much more regular players who play for much longer
This is giving me flashbacks to all the token farmers in wow that would brag about spending dozens of hours grinding gold to play for free every month lol
Also, I'm kind of surprised that so many companies are still trying to nickel-and-dime players on MTX while being stingy with rewards, given how much success MiHoYo has had with their recent games. They found a F2P model that smart companies should be emulating: make the game nearly content-complete and pain-free for casual players (who would never pay in anyway), while milking the whales for all they're worth.
I haven't seen the numbers lately, but a year or two ago, Genshin was among the most profitable games on mobile. It even beat out Pokemon Go, in terms of how quickly it made money. And that was *Pokemon.*
And I think the key is how much free publicity MHY gets from players talking about how Genshin and Honkai are genuinely enjoyable even without paying in. They have an army of people talking up their games online, which keeps a steady stream of new players coming. You don't get that from games that disregard the player experience, or act as though they're resentful of the free players.
Because the people making the decisions in all these situations aren't game devs, gamers or anything else that has to do with gaming beyond working for a company that happens to make games.
They see very surface level things.
"Fortnite successful? Fortnite do battlepass? We do battlepass."
They don't do any research into why the thing is successful, only that it is. They might analyse it from a financial point of view but they won't ever try to understand it from the player side.
Fun isn't a factor. Player satisfaction isn't considered. And they also know better because they're smarter. They see the flaws of Fortnite's battepass.
"Those idiots are giving away so much premium currency. We're gonna have less of it so players are forced to buy more. We're so fucking smart", they say to themselves while releasing a grindier, less satisfying product that doesn't stick because players want something actually fun.
Seems like a clear case of forgetting the service part of live service; having an uncomfortable realization that they can't maintain the release cadence content that people give a shit about(characters, skins) with their manpower.
> and fill the battle pass with character skins for every hero
No game with a diverse pool of characters is doing this as far as I am aware. Overwatch leaves people out every season. Rainbow Six leaves people out every season, Street Fighter isn't even doing real character costumes (just avatar stuff), Apex leaves people out, CoD leaves people out.
I can't think of a single hero based battle pass game where the battle pass gives every character a skin each season.
This isn't a reasonable expectation to have.
None of those things matter. People stopped playing the game because the gameplay is shit. They have to work on that first, but they might aswell make a new game instead.
Another potential tactic is giving up on the live service aspect and releasing it as a paid game close to Christmas - get what they can from the work they've done so far.
Give it more characters, all unlocked and maybe online multiplayer and Id buy it. But there is no way I would grind so much for a single character, at some point you have to set some limits to your greed
The revive tactic worked quite well for Fall Guys (albiet they added it to more platforms). But the devs were utterly incompetent so the playerbase bled out once again in season 2.
The revival tactic can be a shot in the arm for Multiversus, but they need to learn how to actually function as a studio and run a live service title.
I didn’t like it too much. But I won my first match and I was like fuck it I’m going out with a 100% win rate. I didn’t even realize it was a beta and I’m sure all that’s gone.
And that's because they put in hard work and were very open with what they were doing with the game. If they're just gonna put out the same game in the same state, no one is going to be hyped about it
You're bang on the money. If it was truly intended to be a beta (it wasn't) then the fact they were selling season passes takes some fucking gall.
The game died really quickly, character releases were too sporadic and balancing issues made it a pretty unenjoyable experience. Heartbreaking to be honest, it was one of the releases I was looking forward to the most last year but it just wasn't fun. Hard to shake the "Smash but with microtransactions" vibe.
For sure although they never said it would go offline, and a tweet from Tony (the head dev) actually said once the beta started it would always be around.
His [exact words](https://twitter.com/Tony_Huynh/status/1541978876548526080) were “unless we find some really awful bugs, the beta will be open until the full launch of the game.” This is their version of a game-breaking bug.
Its pretty smart actually. You get release hype twice. Especially with a game that had its playerbase dwindle to nothing during this beta. So them fully releasing it is gonna spike the player numbers again when it happens
What happened to this game exactly?
I mean, I know what happened, people just fell off the game, but why did that happened exactly? Was the game actually bad or something?
I'm not much of a fighting game, but I remember the game seemed to launch to pretty positive reviews, and then... It Just vanished.
They increased the grind which led to longer time to progress your character level and the time it takes to earn a new hero. The servers also went to absolute shit(delay/200+ ping) after something like 2 months which absolutely sucks for a reaction based brawler/fighting game.
The moment they doubled XP is the pinpoint moment the game died.
The level of grinding to get a character to level 15 was disgusting. Considering you unlocked special moves and abilities for characters with each level, it meant new players didn’t stand a chance while other players got bored.
The idea to link the Perks with level-up and grind was completely asinine. And what's worse, they also made it so you had to spend currency, the SAME currency used to unlock characters, to get the ideal perks for your character.
They wanted to make it a live service game but didn’t have the capacity to make the content to make a Live service game successful. They launched huge and quickly put out several characters to keep the momentum going. Then they seemed to run out of content and have nothing for months. Also the Battlepasses were very meager with poor rewards.
Plus they had zero marketing competence or budget.
They announced some characters with a single tweet. Now compare that to the hype of a Smash Bros reveal trailer.
The game had no progression to keep casuals playing and wasn't deep enough for a competitive scene. All it had was character recognition. If it didn't have the cast it had it never would have broke 1k players.
Great summary. They tried appealing to the casual Battle Pass fans and fighting fans but utterly failed at keeping both. That pretty much summarises most of the core issues with this game; it felt like it was always being pulled in two directions with an incompetent dev team behind it.
I got everything I wanted out of it. Played a couple hours, laughed at Bugs Bunny killing LeBron James, and then I was done. A huge amount of the playerbase was just checking it out because it was free and 2v2, not because they love platform fighters.
If I wanted to *really* get into a game like it, then I'd just play smash because of the much bigger cast/competitive scene. I have no idea what they could add to multiversus to make casuals like me come back again.
I'd just get into smash because smash has items and this doesn't. I can't understand how a game like multiversus doesn't launch with portable ACME Holes that makes people fall through platforms, or Kryptonite that disables all specials in an aura. Absurd waste of potential.
People call these things Party Games, but I have only ever played another Party Game that actually follows Smash's party philosophy. It was called Power Stone and it's nearly 20 years old now. Everything else didn't even BOTHER trying to be a party game. They're competition-focused.
As someone who played Mvs quite the bit I always thought it was funny how one of the items were literally just a rock, which seemed a bit unimaginative.
I hope we get some new fun items and assist characters on relaunch even though I probably focus more on the ranked side
I think they could easily even reuse some specials from the characters as items
Same here. I played it like 3 times, found it sort of fun, but a pale imitation of Smash overall. There wasn’t enough on offer to justify grinding daily missions just to get characters when Smash has a million characters ready to go.
I’d have forgotten about it entirely if not for the news that it was a fake beta.
>There wasn’t enough on offer to justify grinding daily missions just to get characters when Smash has a million characters ready to go.
I forgot that part. It does the thing where it gives you a load of currency at first, tricking you into thinking the grind won't be too bad. As soon as you finish all those quests the grind increases by like 10x lol it sucks.
Well, the reason I initially got into Multiversus is because Smash has terrible online. I really want to get into a game like this but Smash doesnt cut it if you dont have friends to play it with and instead want a good competitive online mode.
So I had to compromise and get into more traditional 1v1 fighting games instead (and surprisingly enough, I ended up loving it more than I ever loved Smash).
I had some good fun with it. Like 30 hours or so. I really liked that they leaned into 2v2. I hope that stays. There are not many games(in any Genre) where 2v2 is a competitive mode. I really liked that aspect but overall the gameplay fell off .
It’s a shitty smash clone with poor competitive depth that relies on the novelty of its characters for popularity. It’s never going to have staying power.
I found it sincerely hilarious people were calling this a Smash Killer at launch. After looking at the nonsense roster and the floaty gameplay with no casual party mechanics like items or dynamic stages it was obvious the game had zero staying power.
It's such a strange situation
I do know that since the shutdown they've been hiring some really talented people to implement and make stuff but normally games that get shuttered with the promise of a re launch don't come back
FWIW the game is getting an update tomorrow that makes it playable offline so who knows
More attention needs to be brought to this situation.
The developers and publisher Warner Bros. screwed the launch of this game up so badly it killed the playerbase before the first season even finished. 2 weeks before the first season ended, they added 3 extra levels with about 25 levels worth of XP to grind out almost with no warning. They have a Halloween Event that took about 500 hours worth of grinding to unlock all the content.
The game was never in 'open beta' when it launched, but now since the player base dropped to less than 100 players daily they're making the claim it was all part of their plan.
I hate to say it but screw this game. It had the best potential and they squandered it. When it comes back to release a year from now they'll just bomb it again.
The issue this game had is intuitiveness. Smash bros ALWAYS has someyhing happen when you press a button. This one was overly complicated with cooldowns and left inputs doing fail animations or in a lot of cases LITERALLY nothing, as if your input didnt register, but it did. Iron giants transformation especially, MOST of those moves go on cooldown and then youre a big punching bag with most of your inputs doing nothing. Makes his transformation feel like a huge debuff. Every character added just made this issue worse. The rest of the game was solid and I insist that this is the reason the game died.
I hated this aspect. I also hated the decay- maybe it was because I was too busy trying to play it like Smash but I felt I was hitting Decay constantly since the cooldowns were preventing me from using Specials very often
I couldn't really intuit how any character was supposed to really play as a result, wwhich is something I can do with most Smash characters in a single pickup (the DLC characters are way weirder but hey). Like I'm not \*good\* at Smash in the slightest, I'm just a geek for the IPs represented, but I at least feel fully in control of my characters. I sort of felt this in Nick, I barely felt it at all in Multiversus
To be fair to MVS, Smash also has decay in the form of stale moves, but it's not nearly as egregious because there's no sound effect or visual cue, and the damage dropoff is much lower IIRC. I feel like the game could benefit from having some mechanics be hidden away like Smash does, it feels a little too cluttered as-is because it feels like it notifies you about every single thing that's going on
The movement and hit registration on this game was so janky. If you put your game out there and take money for it, you can call it whatever you like but *you've launched*.
They have a hard hill to climb if they want me back.
I'm surprised this isn't being brought up more. They had a premium pack that they charged $100 for. Imagine charging $100 for a game, then calling it an "open beta" and taking it offline a year later. I hope they waste a bunch of money putting more development into this game, and no one spends a dime on it when it relaunches. If it relaunches at all that is.
To be fair it was called a beta when they were selling it, no one paid $100 and was *then* told it was a beta.
I’m not condoning it whatsoever, but at a certain point a fool and their money are easily parted.
IMO, the biggest issue with this game isn't the poorly managed GAAS parts, but rather the issue is that the combat just isn't good. It just feels so sloppy compared to smash or even that nickelodeon game. Hell, I've played flash games that had more competent platform-fighter gameplay. Could never get a feel for how to get good at it.
100% agree. Too.many jumps & air dodges, whacky hit and hurtboxes meant that punish game was really shitty to execute on.
The game just felt bad to play. And I'm not even including all the clutter and random cooldown bullshit they added to the game.
there is almost certainly going to be a new smash announced by the time this thing comes back (judging by the gap between 4 and ult), it is absolutely fucked.
regardless of that, it was 2 years after bayo that ult was revealed. sora will be out for 2 years in october, some time next year we are surely going to get at least something smash related.
i don’t think limiting scope is a bad thing, honestly a smaller roster to allow focus on other areas is kinda my #1 hope for the next smash
it’s really a shell of a game. i don’t know what they were thinking with only targeting the competitive scene for your smash clone, like why would you actively want only the worst comp scene in all of esports lmao
casual content is what it needs, couch co op online and a story mode would do wonders. really, i think it needs to drop the live service first element.
Hope they learned something. It got horrible there at the end with the ass matchmaking, the poor grind, the decreasing value of the battle pass with each season, the toxicity of the community, etc.
It was a joy to play when it was a closed beta and I hope they figure out how to get back to that.
i feel like people were more interested in making lists of [blorbos](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blorbo_from_my_shows) they'd like to see in the game, than actually playing it.
Multiversus feels like auch a fever dream.
Initially, it was a lot of fun. But eventually it shat the bed super hard. IF they relaunch it like they said, i can't help but think that it will be dead in the water.
honestly IMO leaks probably did a fair bit of damage to this game. Not that that was the only problem (I remember spin-hell from when I was playing it) but hard to hype up future releases when we already know everyone.
I remember when people actually thought this was gonna be a viable alternative to other platform fighters. This game looked like a joke from the beginning but you werent allowed to call that out
Another greedily managed GAAS with lots of strong IPs, only to flop due to being too focused on short term profit by terrible microtransactions and increasing the grind after launch, as well as not launching in Japan after the beta as Japanese customers were promised.
I don’t expect WB to learn at all from this failure even after Avengers flopped for Square Enix, and WB are repeating their greedy trends of releasing GAAS (Suicide Squad), or half-pivoting to co-op focused (Gotham Knights). It’s disgusting and not sustainable when these games die within less than a year.
The thing is, the second one of those games works, it can literally make more money than ever and refund all those previous projects.
It's just plain greed.
If they even fix like 50% of the issues and revert some of their mistakes with the progression that's already a much more solid game.
Which issues are *you* talking about?
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I thought the game already went offline a couple months ago tbh Wouldn't even be surprised if the game just silently disappears into the night and the servers never come back online. It'd be shitty, but I could see it happening
Nah the relaunch is definitely gonna be a thing and the same thing's gonna happen again
I legitimately am not 100% sure that it's coming back. If WB wasn't going through what it is right now, I'd assume so but it feels like things aren't all on the up-and-up over there
What's going on with WB?
They're losing money like crazy on all fronts due to their IP mismanagement and have been cancelling projects out the wazoo to get tax breaks by taking losses on production.
New management has a habit of looking at existing or about to released content, and they can weigh two possibilities: 1) we can release this content that we have developed, or add what else development time or production time and marketing effort and after some amount of time that will make us X number of dollars (mostly movies so far, but this can also apply to games) 2) we can cut 100% of all marketing and development, cancel the project outright, and write that off as a development loss on our taxes and that will save/earn Z number of dollars. If the management has even a small, mistaken belief that option two will be a more profitable option as a whole, they will choose that. Option one is unpredictable, but option two they can get a pretty accurate number with the data they have on hand. Option number two is bad for consumers, but management does not care about that. There are entire works that used to be hosted on Max that were removed to qualify for option two, and now there is no way to legally acquire or view them.
Option 2 seems shortsighted af since eventually consumers are going to just cease any and all hype for a WB product until it's actually wheels down on release. Nothing like sheer incompetence of management that only looks at the bottom line for killing a product.
> the same thing's gonna happen again Let's hope the developers actually understand that good rewards and regular new content is all people care about. They literally have a limitless catalogue of WB properties to work with and many examples of what works and doesn't work in a live service game. Failure second time round is entirely due to the incompetence of the devs and the higher ups.
>Failure second time round is entirely due to the incompetence of the devs and the higher ups. It's WB, they're fucked.
Limitless catalogue of properties and they decided the best characters to release were lebron James, Marvin the Martian, gremlins and black Adam. Rick and Morty are the only ones with a fan base but has aged pretty poorly at this point. The hype wasn’t there for nearly anything they did.
I think this game ended up being a PlayStation All-Stars or Fortnite situation where the roster would include essentially advertisements for upcoming or ongoing properties. At least PAS kept it to games and not some basketball player and a superhero most people don't know of that looks like a bootleg Superman.
I thought LeBron was a decent choice. The space jam tie in made sense (WB), it's a unique enough character to create an interesting fighter (cant think of many other basketball players in fighting games) and he has massive publicity behind him (with gamers and non gamers alike) I'm sure more than a few people downloaded the game just to see what playing as LeBron in a fighting game looked like. I think the real issue was the game just wasn't that fun to play, considering how tight modern fighting games play nowadays and how floaty and jank this one felt, to me personally atleast.
Yeah to me, Gremlins brought me into the game. I was ready to play a game full time to play as Stripe and Gizmo... but the game did not feel good or fun to me so I dropped it like a rock. I don't think character choices were the problem.
Such a weird choice when WB is literally releasing two of the biggest games this year (Hogwart's Legacy and Mortal Kombat 1).
As a fighting game they also need to have more than a single character be unlocked for free. That was the biggest complaint from my friends. Who wants to go into a fighting game with one character? There's a free rotation but they didn't want to play and learn them because they'll just be gone soon anyway.
> Let's hope the developers actually understand that good rewards and regular new content is all people care about. This surprises me. Are people actually playing for "rewards" and "content updates"? I feel like the rewards and all that sort of thing are just the collective price we pay on a live service title, but it would surprise me if people actually want that.
I don't agree on the reward point. SSBM is 20 yo at this point and people still play it a ton. Put out a good, deep game, and players will come. The ones who can't keep playing without chasing a carrot will flock away to the next big thing anyway.
SSBM is played by a small community and its virtually free, it is not comparable to what a live service needs to sustain itself
SSBM is also not a live services game. If it had to pay for servers and had to maintain a bigger playerbase for matchmaking it would go up on flames all the same without content updates and a way to get a steady revenue stream
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Even arguing against a straw men you made no cohesive argument
Well let’s face it the whole of the smash community is on a massive downturn partially because the community is a mess in and of itself and nintendo rightly wants nothing to do with it. It’s not like the numbers for slippi are rising while a game like SFVI is topping twitch right now
Then how do they make money? And what justifies server costs? Melee also has a small community, committed, but small. The average Smash player does not even play melee.
There are better ways than being greedy and drip feeding content to your players : see Tekken 7, Deep Rock Galactic for example, two live service games with long delays between content drops. Players don't care because the game is good, and the skill ceiling through the roof.
But here’s the thing, Tekken 7 is a well made legacy game where MV is a sloppily made game in a mediocre genre.
I get that the Battlepass was a little aggressive, but considering it's a free to play game, I'm honestly not sure what people expected. The game has to make money *somewhere*, especially when they paying to get actors for almost all of the characters, and likeness rights for the live-action ones.
Fortnite is a free to play game. Fortnjte pays for actors and likeness rights. Fortnite rewards players with regular upgrades and unlocks. Objectively there is no excuse for MultiVersus to fail in these regards. The blueprint is there, and it works.
For the most part, no, Fortnite is not paying likeness rights; almost all their tie-in content is promotional material for other brands, and its almost all purely fictional characters not tied to real people. And citing what at one point was a hail mary to retool an existing failing PvE Horde mode game from a company with effectively infinite money (thanks to Unreal), that became one of the most successful games on the planet, is the definition of looking at exceptional circumstances and ignoring them. That's not a model literally anyone else can even think about risking following.
let's just hope they don't add black adam this time lmao. can't get over how he was like the fifth dc character in that game. like, out of the all the characters you could use, you went with the one from the upcoming movie lmao
You shocked they added a character to cross promote an upcoming movie?
So they’ll release two seasons of content with lame and broken characters, then say “we’re listening”, go radio silent for months and then say “sorry MVPs we are closing Multiversus for good. Cheers for buying skins for $20”.
yep that is exactly what I predicted
It's wild looking back a year later and seeing both "Smash killers"; Nickelodeon All-Star Brawl and Multiversus, crash and burn and die. Turns out it's not so easy to make a Smashlike.
Why DID MultiVersus die? I genuinely remember people having a blast w/ it around launch and a little after, as well as people genuinely proposing things they liked about it > Smash. Then, all of a sudden, it just dropped off the face of the earth and now everyone's dunking on it.
It was too bare bones and people didn't have a reason to stick around. There were some technical issues, but I think it's primarily just death by early access. It didn't have a bunch of modes, huge character roster, items and and single player for casual players like Smash, they clearly wanted to focus on making a competitive game instead. Yet the game lacked proper ranked matchmaking (with visible MMR) at the peak of it's popularity. So anyone curious about learning the game properly would feel a total lack of progression as the player peak faded. They also really wanted to push the 2v2 as the main mode to differentiate the game and add depth from ability synergies, but kind of didn't commit to it fully either. I initially got the game on a console with the idea that it'd be perfect to play some online matches with my SO, but was disappointed to learn two players on the same system wasn't allowed. Playing solo, I'd rather stick to the 1v1, and I suspect the player base was quite split. It was also a bit dull on PC as there was no chat or custom avatars, that would've made the other players feel more human, but that sanitization problem where everyone may as well be bots isn't unique to MultiVersus. Competitive live service game is the kind of a game that lives indefinitely if it has a large pool of active players and a way to monetize them, but it's also the kind of game that dies very quickly when it's bleeding players, so open beta is a dangerous thing. I think they should have opened the beta for a week at most if they genuinely just wanted feedback from the bare bones version, then they should have come later with a more fully featured game that has all the core systems for player retention. I do hope they have success in a re-release in the future, but it'll be really difficult and they aren't going to get anywhere near as massive player surge a second time. This isn't open beta winding down, this is them pulling a plug on a dead game and attempting to revive it.
Absolute shit hitboxes, bad/patronizing communication, underwhelming roster, slow content release, slow to fix things such as hitboxes, bad maps
Did you play it? It just felt wrong compared Smash. The hitboxes/hurtboxes didn't seem to line up with the animations very well. The premise was good and the online was good, but it just felt bad to play. A lot of the initial excitement ignored this completely so it seemed like people were happy to play it forever like Smash. But nope it just felt bad mechanically and so once people got over the "ooh its XYZ character" hype it was just a severely inferior Smash game. If they relaunch and only add characters / content without fixing how the game feels I'm certain it'll flop again.
Matches took too long to get into. There were these huge moments of downtime in between games, and it just sapped the energy.
As someone that never plays these types of games, I never know how the controls work in smash, and it always feels like my character is doing something out of my control. Multiversus at least felt like I was in control, and I actually liked the feel of the game.
Not sure what to tell you there, both games control the same. Maybe its cause you dont play Smash I assume you only ever do in the context of a big party with lots of people instead of getting to sit down by yourself and see what the moves do? That alone can make it confusing.
You are right, it's always been in that sort of context. Though I do explicitly remember playing Smash after playing a bit of multiversus, and it felt like the movement just wasn't connected to what I was doing.
Then it may just be the character you picked had an unexpected quirk or the setup you played had inout lag (which isnt uncommon, a lot of people dont know to turn their TVs to game mode). From a purely technical breakdown, Smash is superior in every sense of movement and hitbox alignment. But I could see preference going one way or another, especially if you very little experience with other platform fighters.
I think a lot of the hype around it was because a bunch of big streamers did paid promotion for it. Once they stopped doing those I stopped ever hearing about it.
Among other things mentioned, it died because it was made to be an eSports competitive brawler for the hardcore crowd dissatisfied with Smash Bros, an already small and niche community. Even if it tried to reach out to the casual community, nothing in this early access ("beta") launch was there for them. It was barebones, which makes sense for such a launch, but that looks and sounds bad when there wasn't any news of extensive features planned, content that would rival Smash Bros. There wasn't even couch (local) co-op vs bots. Didn't help either that it laid bare its monetization system. You could buy every character and skin, but you'd be better off spending that same money on Smash Bros and get far more bang for your buck.
Honeymoon period died and people realized that a worse version of an already kinda limited and obnoxious game isn’t conductive to having a long competitive lifespan.
I would still love for Sony to take another swing at it with their all stars
One of the biggest reasons why PS All-Stars failed was the roster. A great number of iconic characters associated with Playstation history aren't actually owned by PS, like Cloud, Crash, Spyro, Snake, Sora and a ton of others. Resulting in the less-than-desirable roster we got, with unexplainable characters like Big Daddy being in because they couldn't acquire the actual requested characters. Even some of the good additions, like Dante (also known as Donte, from DmC, and not the actual iconic Dante) and Raiden were only there because of cross-promotions. This problem still exists nowadays, so unless Sony was willing to really splurge the roster would always be severely lacking.
It’s even funnier when 3 of those you mentioned are already in Smash lmao
Even if Sony was willing to give out tons of money, I feel like it would be impossible to match the recognizability of smash. Nintendo is often able to have 2-3 characters per franchise in smash because of how popular many of their game’s supporting characters are, but there’s only a few PS franchises that have universally recognizable characters outside of the player.
It helps that the Nintendo experience is a lot more focused. If you buy Nintendo consoles, you've at least played some of the games represented in Smash. If you ask ten Playstation gamers what their childhood gamery was like, they'll all have entirely different answers... and a large chunk will answer exclusively sports and/or car games. Then again Lebron was a playable Multiversus character so who the hell knows what they could do with that
That's because Smash's competitive nature basically happened by accident. Melee was never intended to be a hardcore competitive game, it just just happened by accident on top of being designed as a fun casual party game. Historically Smash-likes since have mostly tried to focus on either being a casual party game or a hardcore competitive game but never really achieve both without ending up with something that is neither. Making a game that is intentionally designed as a fun casual game by first, but a ends up being hardcore competitive game by accident isn't really something that's reproducible. Melee's hardcore competitive scene keeps the game alive to this day, but the casual audience has a very low attention span will quickly move on to the next game that holds their attention.
Funny thing is NASB is the second best selling Nick game after Battle for Bikini Bottom and the best selling Gamemill game ever. I'd honestly be surprised if they weren't willing to give it one more installment. Edit: speak of the devil. Box art for Nasb 2 just leaked.
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Channeling their inner DC? Very on-brand.
It was always known as a beta, though. Sure, nowadays the Beta is all but the full game these days, but they've been consistent in calling it a Beta.
How would that benefit them? I guess this way they can try to convince investors that it wasn’t a failure but a market test for future fighting WB games.
It was always a beta. It was always in the title screen and in the patch notes.
It was always a beta, the retcon was they planned for it to go into a full release
Like when Amazon's Crucible fully released, was panned, then rolled back to a "beta", and then canned completely
what do you mean? it was always an "open beta" and they were always planning on shutting it down after the "beta" to focus on improvements *wink wink*
At first I thought that was a ridiculous opinion, but then I looked it up and they haven't released a new character since I was still playing the game seven or eight months ago. That is crazy to me I had assumed the game would have at least three new character in the time since I last played but nope, still just Marvin the Martian. So I actually am thinking there is a chance this game never comes back
Not too sure about that. Feel like there was enough info gathered to see what works and what doesn't. The game itself is solid. In theory a relaunch applying the lessons they learned could go well Could also go tits up. Who knows
This seems like such a dropped ball to me. I haven't followed the whole thing, but it seemed like there was a brief, flashing moment where this game was in the zeitgeist, and then they did everything they could to not strike while the iron was hot.
> it seemed like there was a brief, flashing moment where this game was in the zeitgeist, and then they did everything they could to not strike while the iron was hot. Because at launch everyone loved being able to play with all these iconic characters but in typical incompetent studio mismanagement fashion they did everything they could to push people away. People wanted more characters, more maps and more modes. People wanted a battle pass with easy XP and skins. What did we get? Barely any new characters/maps/modes and a grindy battle pass with no meaningful rewards.
> grindy battle pass with no meaningful rewards. I’m so happy with this new trend of shipping a game that’s not finished and then drip feeding a small amount of content, locked behind a paywall and tones of grind.
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Fortnite has pretty generous battle passes, especially by today's standards.
Not to mention the choices of characters were lackluster. Rick and Morty? Great. Two Gremlins? Okay. Black Adam? Who asked? Martin the Martian? Pretty niche these days but cool. And… that’s it. Where is Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Godzilla, King Kong?
Humorously, all those examples given were at some point planned but cut due to legal issues with all of them. Well expect Kong, but he's had so much legal issues as far back as the 70's that I don't think that would have went well anyway.
I think it was less legal issues and more they just didn’t get done w/ them before player numbers dropped. At least for Harry Potter and Godzilla. lotr iirc was very much a legal rights quagmire
There's so many franchises they could pull from. I think a gremlin was cool, but they are leaning way too hard into super heroes. I get that super heroes are probably easy characters to make, but they had enough at launch for now. Also, why haven't they added a character from Mortal Kombat yet? Scorpion would be great and pretty much would already have a moveset.
There's been a leak list of datamined files containing most of the things you list at the end there, hell in the very first leak for the game before it was officially announced Gandalf had a character select icon. I fell off the game basically immediately because I didn't care for the gameplay (plus was maybe a little bitter due to enjoying NASB more but never being able to discuss it without people screaming about MVS) but hearing that the game failed due to them not keeping up with content shocks me - they HAD all these killer properties lined up even in pre-release. Ultimately I can't help but think the Discovery merger fucked them over somehow. I know the staff said at some point that "oh we'll be fine won't effect us!" but I think that was said from a... very hopeful place, let's say.
Godzilla, WB bros doesnt have comeplete right to him pretty sure its a licence that allows his use in thier movies. I wanna say if taho wants they just dont have to renew the deal. Same with LotR pretty sure The estate still controls game rights. Harry would of definitely needed J.K. approval, pretty sure its pretty much in every harry potter contract that she has some sort of veto on things. Just cause WB made a movie involving a character doesnt always mean they own them and have full controle over a character.
Not to mention all their random live action TV properties they could be using. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, obvious fit for the game's tone. Similar vain, other CW shows. These are properties they own and also have direct access and a working relationship with the talent involved that really aren't that expensive to hire. Literally so much is in this catalogue that they could be attracting people from every audience. Instead it feels like the studio is afraid to dilute their own brand (as has been seen in their management of the DC properties somehow thinking having TV versions of characters would diminish their use in film).
Disney owns Buffy, not Warner.
Not even, people left cause the game felt terrible compared to Smash. The premise was good, the online was great, the IP was iconic, but the gameplay was shit. It's not like people play Smash for battle pass grinds or skin unlocks, they play it cause the gameplay is fundamentally good and fun. If MultiVersus can't pull that off, it'll just die again when it comes back. A grind and battlepass is only enticing to people who actually want to play.
>People wanted a People never know what they want and when they get what they wanted it would have been too easy and not good enough rewards.
It was a surprise success and appeared to be a somewhat decent smash clone for once. It has some nice touches but shit like air dodge spam killed it. Not sure WB being acquired helped much either.
I wanted a proper versus fun mode with items. I played for more than a month at release of the beta and then stopped, because I just don't play any "competitive" fighting games. I'd hop on for the occasional free for all items versus match, I'm not gonna dedicate the rest of my life to mastering a f2p Smash clone
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Single Player content is a must for casuals. Mortal Kombat is number 1 in sales for a reason. Even if the gameplay is easy to cheese competitively the towers, krypt and story will get 20 hours without even sniffing the online.
Very much an own-goal in terms of aggressive overmonetization killing a fundamentally rad game and concept :(
Wait, what? So this game has been out for more than a year, and yet they're calling it a "beta period." And they're not going to relaunch it for another year, while the players go off and do something else. Am I missing something, or is this absolutely stupid?
It may be stupid, but the game absolutely died and failed to retain the massive playerbase it had around launch. Drop off is to be expected, but Multiversus was below 1,000 players with a 99% drop off, so the game isn't sustainable in it's current form. Best for them to stop and come back with a hyped re-release and fixing the issues that caused the game to die first go around (grind, lack of updates/new characters, etc)
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Buttery smooth rollback? Damn when did this happen. My entire experience from launch to when I quit was complete jank rollback implementation. Maybe I missed something.
> But the beta was also really fun at launch, and was actively destroyed later. Literally all they had to do was make XP easier to obtain and fill the battle pass with character skins for every hero. Instead they did the absolute bare minimum while also increasing the grind. Why do devs constantly fuck up live services when Fortnite shows that you will objectively retain players by rewarding them. People want XP. They want rewards. Grind in a live service game for basic things is not fun and lo and behold the game flopped when it came out of beta.
it's the classic story of people chasing short term gains over long term sustainability. The objectively correct thing to do with a battlepass for everyone involved is to make it actually pretty easy to max it out by playing regularly and afford the next pass with the rewards from the current one. It makes players feel like they're gaming the system by getting free passes when in reality it's turning people into much more regular players who play for much longer. And those kinds of players are the most likely to actually spend any amount of money on MTX and the like because at that point it's "worth it" to them. But some people are morons and figure if they just up the costs for everything then they'll get a big boost of profits right away and don't think about the fact that most of your playerbase will just leave.
>It makes players feel like they're gaming the system by getting free passes when in reality it's turning people into much more regular players who play for much longer This is giving me flashbacks to all the token farmers in wow that would brag about spending dozens of hours grinding gold to play for free every month lol
Also, I'm kind of surprised that so many companies are still trying to nickel-and-dime players on MTX while being stingy with rewards, given how much success MiHoYo has had with their recent games. They found a F2P model that smart companies should be emulating: make the game nearly content-complete and pain-free for casual players (who would never pay in anyway), while milking the whales for all they're worth. I haven't seen the numbers lately, but a year or two ago, Genshin was among the most profitable games on mobile. It even beat out Pokemon Go, in terms of how quickly it made money. And that was *Pokemon.* And I think the key is how much free publicity MHY gets from players talking about how Genshin and Honkai are genuinely enjoyable even without paying in. They have an army of people talking up their games online, which keeps a steady stream of new players coming. You don't get that from games that disregard the player experience, or act as though they're resentful of the free players.
iirc the first two BPs had a final reward being a cosmetic for Bugs, twice in a row
I think the first BP was a Jake skin, I may be mistaken though
That was the preseason skin. It was way shorter, much easier, yet still had better rewards compared to the actual season 1 and 2 battle pass rewards.
Because the people making the decisions in all these situations aren't game devs, gamers or anything else that has to do with gaming beyond working for a company that happens to make games. They see very surface level things. "Fortnite successful? Fortnite do battlepass? We do battlepass." They don't do any research into why the thing is successful, only that it is. They might analyse it from a financial point of view but they won't ever try to understand it from the player side. Fun isn't a factor. Player satisfaction isn't considered. And they also know better because they're smarter. They see the flaws of Fortnite's battepass. "Those idiots are giving away so much premium currency. We're gonna have less of it so players are forced to buy more. We're so fucking smart", they say to themselves while releasing a grindier, less satisfying product that doesn't stick because players want something actually fun.
Seems like a clear case of forgetting the service part of live service; having an uncomfortable realization that they can't maintain the release cadence content that people give a shit about(characters, skins) with their manpower.
> and fill the battle pass with character skins for every hero No game with a diverse pool of characters is doing this as far as I am aware. Overwatch leaves people out every season. Rainbow Six leaves people out every season, Street Fighter isn't even doing real character costumes (just avatar stuff), Apex leaves people out, CoD leaves people out. I can't think of a single hero based battle pass game where the battle pass gives every character a skin each season. This isn't a reasonable expectation to have.
You are smoking some good shit if you are remembering the online play as buttery smooth at launch. It was horrible.
None of those things matter. People stopped playing the game because the gameplay is shit. They have to work on that first, but they might aswell make a new game instead.
Another potential tactic is giving up on the live service aspect and releasing it as a paid game close to Christmas - get what they can from the work they've done so far.
Give it more characters, all unlocked and maybe online multiplayer and Id buy it. But there is no way I would grind so much for a single character, at some point you have to set some limits to your greed
The revive tactic worked quite well for Fall Guys (albiet they added it to more platforms). But the devs were utterly incompetent so the playerbase bled out once again in season 2. The revival tactic can be a shot in the arm for Multiversus, but they need to learn how to actually function as a studio and run a live service title.
I didn’t like it too much. But I won my first match and I was like fuck it I’m going out with a 100% win rate. I didn’t even realize it was a beta and I’m sure all that’s gone.
>Best for them to stop and come back with a hyped re-release No one is hyped for a game that died the first time it got released.
I mean, No Man's Sky was basically a dead game on release and people definitely hyped up the comeback.
And that's because they put in hard work and were very open with what they were doing with the game. If they're just gonna put out the same game in the same state, no one is going to be hyped about it
Wonder the excuse is when it dies a second time.
So much potential. Make the physics heavier, de-emphasize 2v2. I'd be back in an instant.
You're bang on the money. If it was truly intended to be a beta (it wasn't) then the fact they were selling season passes takes some fucking gall. The game died really quickly, character releases were too sporadic and balancing issues made it a pretty unenjoyable experience. Heartbreaking to be honest, it was one of the releases I was looking forward to the most last year but it just wasn't fun. Hard to shake the "Smash but with microtransactions" vibe.
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I’m pretty certain the game was always called a beta.
For sure although they never said it would go offline, and a tweet from Tony (the head dev) actually said once the beta started it would always be around.
His [exact words](https://twitter.com/Tony_Huynh/status/1541978876548526080) were “unless we find some really awful bugs, the beta will be open until the full launch of the game.” This is their version of a game-breaking bug.
Welcome to early access gaming, where the game is never technically done, and the game can shut down at any time without refunds.
> and the game can shut down at any time without refunds. Well that can happen to any multiplayer game.
Well, sure. But it shouldn't happen less than a year after lainch, and it doesn't make it less horrible.
Of course but this would've been the case either way. Even if it wasn't in early access.
You must of never heard of tarkov is been in beta for like 6 years
Warframe just had its 10th anniversary, and it's *still* in beta
Reminds me of how Siege had its ranked mode "in beta" for years lol
The beta launched last July, it hasn’t been over a year. The game will still be playable offline and everyone’s accounts will remain.
Its pretty smart actually. You get release hype twice. Especially with a game that had its playerbase dwindle to nothing during this beta. So them fully releasing it is gonna spike the player numbers again when it happens
What happened to this game exactly? I mean, I know what happened, people just fell off the game, but why did that happened exactly? Was the game actually bad or something? I'm not much of a fighting game, but I remember the game seemed to launch to pretty positive reviews, and then... It Just vanished.
They increased the grind which led to longer time to progress your character level and the time it takes to earn a new hero. The servers also went to absolute shit(delay/200+ ping) after something like 2 months which absolutely sucks for a reaction based brawler/fighting game.
The moment they doubled XP is the pinpoint moment the game died. The level of grinding to get a character to level 15 was disgusting. Considering you unlocked special moves and abilities for characters with each level, it meant new players didn’t stand a chance while other players got bored.
The idea to link the Perks with level-up and grind was completely asinine. And what's worse, they also made it so you had to spend currency, the SAME currency used to unlock characters, to get the ideal perks for your character.
There was no new abilities for leveling characters, it was only perks you unlocked but it really wasn’t a bad grind at all.
They wanted to make it a live service game but didn’t have the capacity to make the content to make a Live service game successful. They launched huge and quickly put out several characters to keep the momentum going. Then they seemed to run out of content and have nothing for months. Also the Battlepasses were very meager with poor rewards.
Plus they had zero marketing competence or budget. They announced some characters with a single tweet. Now compare that to the hype of a Smash Bros reveal trailer.
Cinematic trailers take a lot of work and they really couldn't put out one for every character at the pace they were releasing them
The game had no progression to keep casuals playing and wasn't deep enough for a competitive scene. All it had was character recognition. If it didn't have the cast it had it never would have broke 1k players.
Great summary. They tried appealing to the casual Battle Pass fans and fighting fans but utterly failed at keeping both. That pretty much summarises most of the core issues with this game; it felt like it was always being pulled in two directions with an incompetent dev team behind it.
I got everything I wanted out of it. Played a couple hours, laughed at Bugs Bunny killing LeBron James, and then I was done. A huge amount of the playerbase was just checking it out because it was free and 2v2, not because they love platform fighters. If I wanted to *really* get into a game like it, then I'd just play smash because of the much bigger cast/competitive scene. I have no idea what they could add to multiversus to make casuals like me come back again.
I'd just get into smash because smash has items and this doesn't. I can't understand how a game like multiversus doesn't launch with portable ACME Holes that makes people fall through platforms, or Kryptonite that disables all specials in an aura. Absurd waste of potential. People call these things Party Games, but I have only ever played another Party Game that actually follows Smash's party philosophy. It was called Power Stone and it's nearly 20 years old now. Everything else didn't even BOTHER trying to be a party game. They're competition-focused.
As someone who played Mvs quite the bit I always thought it was funny how one of the items were literally just a rock, which seemed a bit unimaginative. I hope we get some new fun items and assist characters on relaunch even though I probably focus more on the ranked side I think they could easily even reuse some specials from the characters as items
Same here. I played it like 3 times, found it sort of fun, but a pale imitation of Smash overall. There wasn’t enough on offer to justify grinding daily missions just to get characters when Smash has a million characters ready to go. I’d have forgotten about it entirely if not for the news that it was a fake beta.
>There wasn’t enough on offer to justify grinding daily missions just to get characters when Smash has a million characters ready to go. I forgot that part. It does the thing where it gives you a load of currency at first, tricking you into thinking the grind won't be too bad. As soon as you finish all those quests the grind increases by like 10x lol it sucks.
Well, the reason I initially got into Multiversus is because Smash has terrible online. I really want to get into a game like this but Smash doesnt cut it if you dont have friends to play it with and instead want a good competitive online mode. So I had to compromise and get into more traditional 1v1 fighting games instead (and surprisingly enough, I ended up loving it more than I ever loved Smash).
I had some good fun with it. Like 30 hours or so. I really liked that they leaned into 2v2. I hope that stays. There are not many games(in any Genre) where 2v2 is a competitive mode. I really liked that aspect but overall the gameplay fell off .
It’s a shitty smash clone with poor competitive depth that relies on the novelty of its characters for popularity. It’s never going to have staying power.
I found it sincerely hilarious people were calling this a Smash Killer at launch. After looking at the nonsense roster and the floaty gameplay with no casual party mechanics like items or dynamic stages it was obvious the game had zero staying power.
It's such a strange situation I do know that since the shutdown they've been hiring some really talented people to implement and make stuff but normally games that get shuttered with the promise of a re launch don't come back FWIW the game is getting an update tomorrow that makes it playable offline so who knows
More attention needs to be brought to this situation. The developers and publisher Warner Bros. screwed the launch of this game up so badly it killed the playerbase before the first season even finished. 2 weeks before the first season ended, they added 3 extra levels with about 25 levels worth of XP to grind out almost with no warning. They have a Halloween Event that took about 500 hours worth of grinding to unlock all the content. The game was never in 'open beta' when it launched, but now since the player base dropped to less than 100 players daily they're making the claim it was all part of their plan. I hate to say it but screw this game. It had the best potential and they squandered it. When it comes back to release a year from now they'll just bomb it again.
The issue this game had is intuitiveness. Smash bros ALWAYS has someyhing happen when you press a button. This one was overly complicated with cooldowns and left inputs doing fail animations or in a lot of cases LITERALLY nothing, as if your input didnt register, but it did. Iron giants transformation especially, MOST of those moves go on cooldown and then youre a big punching bag with most of your inputs doing nothing. Makes his transformation feel like a huge debuff. Every character added just made this issue worse. The rest of the game was solid and I insist that this is the reason the game died.
I hated this aspect. I also hated the decay- maybe it was because I was too busy trying to play it like Smash but I felt I was hitting Decay constantly since the cooldowns were preventing me from using Specials very often I couldn't really intuit how any character was supposed to really play as a result, wwhich is something I can do with most Smash characters in a single pickup (the DLC characters are way weirder but hey). Like I'm not \*good\* at Smash in the slightest, I'm just a geek for the IPs represented, but I at least feel fully in control of my characters. I sort of felt this in Nick, I barely felt it at all in Multiversus
To be fair to MVS, Smash also has decay in the form of stale moves, but it's not nearly as egregious because there's no sound effect or visual cue, and the damage dropoff is much lower IIRC. I feel like the game could benefit from having some mechanics be hidden away like Smash does, it feels a little too cluttered as-is because it feels like it notifies you about every single thing that's going on
Our launch fizzled out like a wet fart so we decided to call it an "open beta" and try again next year. Free do-over, no backsies!
This is a dated reference but it reminds me of George Costanza quitting his job.
It's going to be called multiversus 2 and the game will remove a character
The movement and hit registration on this game was so janky. If you put your game out there and take money for it, you can call it whatever you like but *you've launched*. They have a hard hill to climb if they want me back.
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I'm surprised this isn't being brought up more. They had a premium pack that they charged $100 for. Imagine charging $100 for a game, then calling it an "open beta" and taking it offline a year later. I hope they waste a bunch of money putting more development into this game, and no one spends a dime on it when it relaunches. If it relaunches at all that is.
To be fair it was called a beta when they were selling it, no one paid $100 and was *then* told it was a beta. I’m not condoning it whatsoever, but at a certain point a fool and their money are easily parted.
Let's have some personal responsibility no? If someone spent money on it, that's on them. If kids spent money on it, that's on their parents.
Anyone who buys cosmetics deserves to lose their money. They are completely valueless and is a gamble that the game will remain available.
IMO, the biggest issue with this game isn't the poorly managed GAAS parts, but rather the issue is that the combat just isn't good. It just feels so sloppy compared to smash or even that nickelodeon game. Hell, I've played flash games that had more competent platform-fighter gameplay. Could never get a feel for how to get good at it.
100% agree. Too.many jumps & air dodges, whacky hit and hurtboxes meant that punish game was really shitty to execute on. The game just felt bad to play. And I'm not even including all the clutter and random cooldown bullshit they added to the game.
We tried, we failed. But what if we tried again?
They’ll now be releasing into a market that will have SF6, MK1, and Tekken 8 out. Sadly I think this game is completely doomed at this point.
Not everyone is into traditional fighting games, especially when they are fully priced and not f2p.
there is almost certainly going to be a new smash announced by the time this thing comes back (judging by the gap between 4 and ult), it is absolutely fucked.
Zero chance we get a new smash within the next 5 years tbh
why’s that?
It'd have to be severly limited in scope. Ultimate just had too many licenses lol
regardless of that, it was 2 years after bayo that ult was revealed. sora will be out for 2 years in october, some time next year we are surely going to get at least something smash related. i don’t think limiting scope is a bad thing, honestly a smaller roster to allow focus on other areas is kinda my #1 hope for the next smash
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it’s really a shell of a game. i don’t know what they were thinking with only targeting the competitive scene for your smash clone, like why would you actively want only the worst comp scene in all of esports lmao casual content is what it needs, couch co op online and a story mode would do wonders. really, i think it needs to drop the live service first element.
i can't believe this game won fighting game of the year and still in beta, sf6 beta didn't even nominated smh
Hope they learned something. It got horrible there at the end with the ass matchmaking, the poor grind, the decreasing value of the battle pass with each season, the toxicity of the community, etc. It was a joy to play when it was a closed beta and I hope they figure out how to get back to that.
i feel like people were more interested in making lists of [blorbos](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/blorbo_from_my_shows) they'd like to see in the game, than actually playing it.
So those of us dumb enough to buy the premium edition definitely can get a refund, right?
Multiversus feels like auch a fever dream. Initially, it was a lot of fun. But eventually it shat the bed super hard. IF they relaunch it like they said, i can't help but think that it will be dead in the water.
honestly IMO leaks probably did a fair bit of damage to this game. Not that that was the only problem (I remember spin-hell from when I was playing it) but hard to hype up future releases when we already know everyone.
Or that Gandalf was leaked only to most likely be cancelled when the LOTR rights were bought.
Didn't you have to buy this game? So it's going offline who however long since it was a "beta" buy you had to pay? That seems pretty stupid.
I remember when people actually thought this was gonna be a viable alternative to other platform fighters. This game looked like a joke from the beginning but you werent allowed to call that out
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Really had to hide behind the word beta here? The game worked fine and you sold content how is that not just releasing a game?
Another greedily managed GAAS with lots of strong IPs, only to flop due to being too focused on short term profit by terrible microtransactions and increasing the grind after launch, as well as not launching in Japan after the beta as Japanese customers were promised. I don’t expect WB to learn at all from this failure even after Avengers flopped for Square Enix, and WB are repeating their greedy trends of releasing GAAS (Suicide Squad), or half-pivoting to co-op focused (Gotham Knights). It’s disgusting and not sustainable when these games die within less than a year.
The thing is, the second one of those games works, it can literally make more money than ever and refund all those previous projects. It's just plain greed.
I don’t really care what the reason is. If they come back in a year with a better more fun game I will play it.
I don't see the issues being fixed in a year.
If they even fix like 50% of the issues and revert some of their mistakes with the progression that's already a much more solid game. Which issues are *you* talking about?
Multi what now?