The man who made Diablo now brings that quality gameplay experience to Marvel Heroes Online, the new free-to-play game from Gazillion Entertainment.
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Marvel Heroes Online
How have you designed this game for both casual gamers and more hardcore gamers?
That’s always been something I’ve really tried to do as a design philosophy. A long time ago, it doesn’t really apply anymore, but we had this thing that I called, “the mom test.” Can my mom play this game? She used to be kind of computer inept; she isn’t anymore. She can actually play the games really well now, but before she didn’t play games at all.
That’s the mentality I like to take when I’m creating games. Can somebody really pick this up very easily? Can they get around just by pressing a couple of buttons, and it comes naturally? Slowly, over time, add a new power, a new button, and it blossoms before them. Pretty soon, it can be a very complicated game, but we’ve slowly added things over time so people adjust. That difficulty goes up and up, and it becomes this very deep experience.
How are you working out the free-to-play model for this game?
It is a real free-to-play game. You’ll be able to play through the entire experience completely for free. The things that we’re going to be selling is stuff that just overall enhances your experience, things that aren’t mandatory at all. We aren’t going to sell power. We aren’t going to sell special levels or anything like that. The stuff that we’re going to do is mainly just stuff that is completely optional. A lot of the stuff that we’re going to sell, you’re also going to have the ability to actually earn in the game.
Who did you work with from Marvel on this game?
The story is being written by Brian Michael Bendis. It’s a unique story just for this particular game; it’s the only place you can find the story. He’s written a lot of different things. We call him the super scribe, he’s written so much. We’re very excited about that story. We’re also working with Marvel. They’ve introduced us to a variety of artists that have done a bunch of comic books for them in the past. We’re using them to draw the motion comics. The comics are being drawn by a variety of these different artists and some very famous ones.
