Long Post: The Curse of Being First -- Why Iron Man Struggles
ESF
Member Posts: 2,045 ★★★★★
Hi, folks! Long post incoming about my experiences with Iron Man as a playable character over the years in various games, including MCoC and now MRoC.
As always, for those who don't want to read all the way to the end, the TL: DR version is this: Iron Man is usually among the first playable characters in Marvel-based games, and his kit is usually among the least powerful characters because developers typically don't scale Iron Man's burst damage and utility very well in early builds. The character almost always starts behind in basically every meta I can recall and usually never catches up, and sadly, we have seen it in both MCoC and now MRoC.
Iron Man has the speed and destructive capacity of a fully armed fighter jet, the raw power of a tank, and the durability and sustainability of a battleship. Repulsor rays and the Uni-Beam punch through stone and metal. Onboard missiles destroy vehicles and tanks. The armor can punch through walls and stone, lift tons of weight. It can withstand high-caliber bullets and explosions, being punched by Thor and the Hulk. That's base stuff; never mind the targeting systems, onboard computing and various other things.
Now, answer this question: Does that sound like any Iron Man you've played in most video games? Especially on the first build?
Now answer this question: Isn't that the description of an Iron Man you WANT to play?
Why is there such a discrepancy -- dating back decades -- between the Iron Man of comics lore and the Iron Man we get in games?
What drove me to write is that if you've played MRoC, Kabam's newest release, you already probably know that the Iron Man kit is...well. The SP1 is...not great. The SP2...literally fires multiple projectiles that might not hit a single thing. While the SP3 is very good, it takes forever to charge and, once used, recharge.
No force field or energy absorption. No stun. No knockback. No AoE (area of effect). No all defense down. No armor break...yep.
That's just Iron Man upon new game release AGAIN -- not only not in the meta, but somehow doing nothing well enough to even come close to being in the meta.
Iron Man in MRoC needs a rework...on Launch Week.
This is not surprising for those of us old people who have played Marvel video games for years and years.
Anyone remember Avengers Alliance? It took basically four uniforms to get an Iron Man that was usable.
Marvel Future Fight? I think he had five uniforms before his Endgame uniform made Iron Man usable.
Marvel Heroes? Basically the same amount of uniforms and rebalances.
OG Iron Man in MCoC? Well. Every single person who has one desperately wants a monstrous rework...because it is basically unplayable.
Even Iron Man IW, while a very solid kit, was the defensive character upon release while Captain America IW hit harder offensively and has significant utility.
But why? Why is that?
Iron Man: Armed like a fighter jet, powerful like a tank, sustainable like a battleship. The pinnacle of military might.
Why doesn't Iron Man ever feel that way?
I think it's because early releases of games try so hard to make everything balanced, they actually eliminate almost every good thing about Iron Man that should make him stand apart.
In early builds of games with leveling systems, yeah, it's ridiculous, but a 3/30 Hawkeye, a 3/30 Thor, a 3/30 Black Widow, and a 3/30 Iron Man all hit almost exactly the same.
No matter what you do, in early builds, the DPS of early character releases is almost exactly the same.
I have called it "The Curse of Being First" for basically 35 years now.
In almost every game, characters like Hyperion, Ghost and Aegon come 12-18 months after the game drops.
Most of us have heard of "power creep" before, because it's real. The only thing worse than being among the first releases in a comic=based video game is not being released at all.
Medusa gets Armor Shatter and multiple furies when awakened. Vision (Aarkus) gets Armor Shatter and immense power gain.
OG Iron Man gets an RNG-based chance to have a short Armor Break and Armor Up.
See what I mean?
So, yeah.
I am hoping that a StarkTech massive overhaul comes to MCoC. I have been hoping that for years, written about it before.
Sadly, I am gonna have to expand my hopes that a StarkTech overhaul in MRoC doesn't take that long.
That's it! Thanks for reading!
As always, for those who don't want to read all the way to the end, the TL: DR version is this: Iron Man is usually among the first playable characters in Marvel-based games, and his kit is usually among the least powerful characters because developers typically don't scale Iron Man's burst damage and utility very well in early builds. The character almost always starts behind in basically every meta I can recall and usually never catches up, and sadly, we have seen it in both MCoC and now MRoC.
Iron Man has the speed and destructive capacity of a fully armed fighter jet, the raw power of a tank, and the durability and sustainability of a battleship. Repulsor rays and the Uni-Beam punch through stone and metal. Onboard missiles destroy vehicles and tanks. The armor can punch through walls and stone, lift tons of weight. It can withstand high-caliber bullets and explosions, being punched by Thor and the Hulk. That's base stuff; never mind the targeting systems, onboard computing and various other things.
Now, answer this question: Does that sound like any Iron Man you've played in most video games? Especially on the first build?
Now answer this question: Isn't that the description of an Iron Man you WANT to play?
Why is there such a discrepancy -- dating back decades -- between the Iron Man of comics lore and the Iron Man we get in games?
What drove me to write is that if you've played MRoC, Kabam's newest release, you already probably know that the Iron Man kit is...well. The SP1 is...not great. The SP2...literally fires multiple projectiles that might not hit a single thing. While the SP3 is very good, it takes forever to charge and, once used, recharge.
No force field or energy absorption. No stun. No knockback. No AoE (area of effect). No all defense down. No armor break...yep.
That's just Iron Man upon new game release AGAIN -- not only not in the meta, but somehow doing nothing well enough to even come close to being in the meta.
Iron Man in MRoC needs a rework...on Launch Week.
This is not surprising for those of us old people who have played Marvel video games for years and years.
Anyone remember Avengers Alliance? It took basically four uniforms to get an Iron Man that was usable.
Marvel Future Fight? I think he had five uniforms before his Endgame uniform made Iron Man usable.
Marvel Heroes? Basically the same amount of uniforms and rebalances.
OG Iron Man in MCoC? Well. Every single person who has one desperately wants a monstrous rework...because it is basically unplayable.
Even Iron Man IW, while a very solid kit, was the defensive character upon release while Captain America IW hit harder offensively and has significant utility.
But why? Why is that?
Iron Man: Armed like a fighter jet, powerful like a tank, sustainable like a battleship. The pinnacle of military might.
Why doesn't Iron Man ever feel that way?
I think it's because early releases of games try so hard to make everything balanced, they actually eliminate almost every good thing about Iron Man that should make him stand apart.
In early builds of games with leveling systems, yeah, it's ridiculous, but a 3/30 Hawkeye, a 3/30 Thor, a 3/30 Black Widow, and a 3/30 Iron Man all hit almost exactly the same.
No matter what you do, in early builds, the DPS of early character releases is almost exactly the same.
I have called it "The Curse of Being First" for basically 35 years now.
In almost every game, characters like Hyperion, Ghost and Aegon come 12-18 months after the game drops.
Most of us have heard of "power creep" before, because it's real. The only thing worse than being among the first releases in a comic=based video game is not being released at all.
Medusa gets Armor Shatter and multiple furies when awakened. Vision (Aarkus) gets Armor Shatter and immense power gain.
OG Iron Man gets an RNG-based chance to have a short Armor Break and Armor Up.
See what I mean?
So, yeah.
I am hoping that a StarkTech massive overhaul comes to MCoC. I have been hoping that for years, written about it before.
Sadly, I am gonna have to expand my hopes that a StarkTech overhaul in MRoC doesn't take that long.
That's it! Thanks for reading!
20
Comments
I mean, it's just...it's amazing to me. All kind of developers, genres, formats
Iron Man hardly ever is top of the meta and usually isn't even IN the meta
But it is not a question of balancing, usually. It usually comes down to three things. First, when a game is new, the amount of game mechanics the game can support is very low, relatively speaking. This is always true because no game operator waits long enough to have a super-mature game engine before launching. They launch as soon as they can launch. And as soon as possible generally means the bare essentials necessary to make anything playable at all. As a result, generation one entitles tend to be relatively simple and relatively straight forward in what they can do.
Second, as you mention, power creep is a thing. People always compare the new shiny to the current stuff. No matter how much you try to make all the new stuff have a similar level of power to the old stuff, the temptation is too great to make the new stuff just a little better. And honestly, if developers didn't do that players would get bored with the game and leave in droves. So second generation stuff is always, on average, a bit better than first generation stuff, and third generation is always better than second generation, and so on.
These two are obvious, and I think most players would say of course. Here's the one you probably haven't heard. Later generation stuff is made by later generation developers. The original development team for every game has design goals and ideas, and tries to fit the game within those boundaries. First generation developers don't want to break the game right out of the gate: they tend to be more conservative designers. Super aggressive designers - in terms of power strength - don't tend to work out in ramp up and launch dev teams. They want too much, they try to add too much, they push farther faster than the rest of the game can accommodate. The developers who make the launch stuff in the game need to be cautious, disciplined, and produce things that will work on day one. Extra time balancing and rebalancing all of their crazy ideas just puts everyone else further behind schedule.
But when the game grows and matures, those same developer attributes can be confining. The new developers that join the team "grow up" wanting to do more, but constantly being told that they shouldn't. Guess what happens when the veterans move on and those developers become the dev leads? Power creep often becomes power leap frog, because the people in charge have a ton of pent up ideas on where the old generation was too conservative.
So why don't the new generation of developers go back and boost up all the pre-existing stuff? Well, they sometimes do. But there they run into three problems. First, who wants to work on the old stuff? Most creative people want to work on the new stuff much more than tweak the old stuff. And second, there's fewer constraints on new stuff than old stuff. New stuff has no preconceived notions. Old stuff can't just be radically changed into something totally new. Making a new thing is all about brainstorming on a whiteboard. Adjusting old things is all about having meetings with people who want to tell you which things shouldn't be changed. There are existing players who want that stuff, or at least some aspects of it, and your own work peers will be more than happy to tell you that. Repeatedly. And third, the amount of effort it takes to do a radical overhaul of something is practically the same as making something totally new. So the incentive to do that is much lower: you're essentially destroying existing content to make new content.
So yep, all this stuff happens in games like this, which I've been saying for over five years should be looked at as following the MMO trajectory way more than the mobile fighting game trajectory. Since Iron Man is so popular of a Marvel character, you're almost certainly correct that Iron Man ends up with the problems you've specified because he's almost always first in a lot of games. And first *always* has these problems, because they are practically unavoidable.
Man, is it frustrating. MRoC...man. It is frustrating. Don’t know if you have tried it yet, but once you hit maybe 400 Battle Rating, it’s almost impossible to carry an Iron Man kit on a strike team.
It is so frustrating.
https://forums.playcontestofchampions.com/en/discussion/173526/omg-lol-i-see-what-you-did-with-silver-surfer-kabam#latest
This was the post btw in anyone is interested.
But that's kind of deliberate: when I'm playing a new game like this, I make zero effort to min/max anything. Or even max anything. I'm only spending resources to level, and I just equip the best gear that drops randomly and I'm selling the rest, because I know there's literally nothing I can do at this stage of the game that will mean anything in a month. Either I will play enough to outlevel everything I'm handed now, or I'll quit. Either way, when I'm still trying to figure out if the game is something I actually want to play, its better to stick to dancing with the ants.
his missiles (incinerate damage), make his beams inflict shock, give him a way to like multiply his shock/incinerate mentioned previously to get some massive damage, and give him a consistent armor break on basic attacks like cap marvel movie