A question to the mods or anyone with insight.

I know Miike has direct access to devs... this is really a question for them.

In the beginning stages of MCoC, we saw several reskinned "new" champions.

Cyclops... Magneto... Iron Fist... MM/CM... SIM/IM... etc.

Why was this? To buff the roster? Give players better opportunities to get a champ?

Genuinely curious about this practice that, thankfully, stopped.

Comments

Thi101

This is taken from the Character Wishlist Thread 3.0 in the “Suggestions and Requests” category... maybe it answers your question.

3) Why do you bother adding (X re-skinned character) when you've not even had a chance to add (x character not in The Contest)?

A: While some people are not a fan of character re-skins, MANY of our players are. The Marvel universe is one with a lengthy lore, and almost every beloved character has gone through some sort of costume change or shift at some point in their super-powered careers. These differences offer a good opportunity to re-introduce players to content they may not have managed to obtain the first time around, and allowing new players to pick up a certain champion while still keeping things a bit fresh. Our goal is to have a healthy balance between release types.

DNA3000

I know Miike has direct access to devs... this is really a question for them.

In the beginning stages of MCoC, we saw several reskinned "new" champions.

Cyclops... Magneto... Iron Fist... MM/CM... SIM/IM... etc.

Why was this? To buff the roster? Give players better opportunities to get a champ?

Genuinely curious about this practice that, thankfully, stopped.

@Thi101 has the "official" response above. I can offer an additional inside-ball answer. It is often the case for many MMO and MMO-like games that you see stuff similar in concept to reskinned champs - content that seems to be superficially different from existing content but very similar under the hood. This tends to happen after launch, and for a while beyond it. The reason why I believe this happens is that when you're creating a game the people you need are different than when you're supporting a game. You need a lot of platform and tools people during pre-launch development that you don't need when you're supporting a game you've already launched. So while you do have content designers, you also have a lot of engine and customization people, platform people, architects, toolchain designers, and other non-content designers as well. Once you launch, many of those people slowly go away and get replaced with more content designers. A dev team often has a much higher capacity, and more experience making content for the game a year after launch than a day after launch.

But there's still a need to add as much content as possible quickly immediately after launch, because nothing kills a new game quicker than the perception it is slow to add new content. So things like reskins tend to be used in the early days, and then abandoned over time as the need to use them drops and the capacity to produce more original content rises.

I don't have first hand evidence this is true for Kabam and MCOC, but it would be consistent with how other games I've played have evolved.

Woozie

My guess would be when the game launched they could only create so many champs and instead of spending more and more time developing new ones they would've just repackaged existing ones as they have the same Special Attack Moves and movements for the sake of diversity and saying things like "30 PLAYABLE CHARACTERS!!" and stuff like that I'm assuming. Now that they have time it doesn't really happen anymore (unless movie updates which makes sense).

Sundance_2099

I read an article on Forbes magazine's website a year or more back and Gabe was saying about this very thing. Like some of what's said already, he said it was because Kabam was a small company when they started and they needed to make as many champions as possible with the limited team and so you got a lot of recycled move-sets (not just specials) and victory animations and even the character models are essentially reskinned (Cap America, Star-Lord and a couple others are more or less the same 3d model with different skins on. Most of the early women are too.) Gabe then said as the team was expanded - Kabam made money and could hire more people - they were then able to move away from the recycling of models, moves and so on. This clued me in to the fact we were never going to get Shadowland Daredevil and the reskinned Hulkbuster that were still allegedly coming and the Ultimate Scarlet Witch and Marvel Now Doctor Strange were highly unlikely too.

DNA3000

This clued me in to the fact we were never going to get Shadowland Daredevil and the reskinned Hulkbuster that were still allegedly coming and the Ultimate Scarlet Witch and Marvel Now Doctor Strange were highly unlikely too.

The players want certain things and the developers want to make certain things and the company wants to sell certain things. The game usually gets the things that are close to the intersection of all three. If you can figure out a way to make all three groups happy, your odds of getting your idea into the game rise considerably. Even the developers themselves face this challenge internally.