It’s been a year since the release of Square Enix’s Avengers video game, and we’ve spoken extensively about the good, the bad, and the wall running in the original campaign and its three main DLCs from the first year. With Crystal Dynamics’ new roadmap confirming a relatively quiet remainder of 2021, where the only substantial additions will be a new “raid” against Klaw, and Spider-Man’s arrival on the PlayStation 4 & 5 version, now seemed a good time to look ahead to the heroes and storylines we might get in 2022, and beyond.
Bucky, Jennifer, Carol, and Rhodey?
There have been two significant datamines for Marvel’s Avengers so far: the first came in August 2020, before the game’s release, which revealed placeholder data and voice files for characters that were added to the game, like Black Panther and Kate Bishop, and a whole host of other characters. The second, from February, indicated four of the characters on the list were coming after T’Challa and Spider-Man: the Winter Soldier, She-Hulk, Captain Marvel, and War Machine.
Assuming Crystal Dynamics haven’t chosen to rush other characters into development, we’ll likely see each of those heroes get added to the game every 3-5 months, just as the Hawkeyes and Black Panther were added over the course of 2021. I must admit, as much as I love all these characters, Winter Soldier, She-Hulk and War Machine aren’t the most exciting additions, given how similarly they’ll play to Black Widow, Hulk, Captain America, and Iron Man: their prioritization is a throwback to when the game didn’t allow more than one of the same character in multiplayer, which is partly how we got Kate and Clint Barton.
in Kamala Khan's bedroom
Still, they’re all important supporting players for many of our main heroes, which means there’s lots of potential for compelling drama eg. it was established in the prequel novel Avengers: The Extinction Key that this universe’s Cap doesn’t know Bucky is alive yet, and it doesn’t appear Jennifer is the She-Hulk either. Likewise, Tony will need someone to help him take back control of Stark Industries from AIM, and a War Machine DLC would be a great way to pay off Justin Hammer’s appearance in the unlockable audio files.
Captain Marvel is easily the most exciting expected addition, given she’s enormously powerful; is the mentor of protagonist Kamala Khan (an Easter egg in New Jersey at the start of the game indicates they’ve met); and she has the most history with the Kree, the looming threat of the game. (Not to mention she has a romantic history with James Rhodes.) Her arrival ought to move the story forward in a major way, bringing in Kree adversaries like Ronan the Accuser and the Supreme Intelligence, and possibly a new space base for the Avengers.
The Ultron Family:
The Kree aren’t the only bad guys on the horizon, given all the foreshadowing that Hank Pym’s A.I. Roy will become Ultron (if you needed further proof, he’s named after the character’s co-creator, Roy Thomas.) Ultron will probably take over AIM’s robotic troops, giving them a much needed facelift and some personality, and hopefully cause the organization’s overarching prominence to finally recede. His awakening will also likely lead to Hank being injured, forcing the Avengers to find Hope Pym and Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man and the Wasp, and the birth of Vision.
It’ll be interesting to see how Ant-Man, Wasp, and Vision could work in the game’s engine: Vision’s ability to phase through boundaries can be overcome by having the screen go dark, ala Beyond: Two Souls, while Giant-Man and Wasp are already in the game thanks to Kamala — it’s the insect duo’s shrinking abilities that are going to need the most work, as the cameras and enemies aren’t designed for tiny heroes. Some fans have suggested they could function like the invisibility powers in the game, but that doesn’t take into account the time and speed they need to run and jump across a map, which would be much faster than any non-flying hero so far. (Even the LEGO games didn’t make Ant-Man that much smaller than his opponents.) Still, given the characters have been Avengers longer than most, they’ll be well worth it.
Continued belowMagic and Mutants:
You can’t have Vision without Scarlet Witch, and it seems the developers understand that from her offscreen appearance in the War for Wakanda DLC, which also teased Quicksilver, Doctor Strange, Loki, and many more magic users. Wanda and Strange would be phenomenally fun characters to play, and the Sanctum Sanctorum would certainly make for a spooky but cosy new base of operations.
Quicksilver, who wasn’t datamined, is a major question mark: he would break the game even more than Vision and Ant-Man, so it’s easy to imagine him going the way of his MCU counterpart, or being injured and stripped of his powers like Dr. Pym. Incidentally, Pietro lost his powers at one point in the comics, and attempted to restore them via Terrigenesis: he was also married to the Inhuman princess Crystal, and the father of her daughter Luna, which brings us to our next section…
Inhuman Royalty:
For a game where the Inhumans play such a huge role, it’s strange that the only sign the Royal Family of Attilan might be included has been a datamined logo resembling Black Bolt’s costume: the Kree are coming to Earth, and we’re supposed to believe they’ll stay out of that confrontation? Furthermore, Black Bolt, Medusa, Crystal, Karnak, and Gorgon all have unique power sets, and Lockjaw’s inclusion would be delightful — imagine summoning him into battle, and then petting him for being such a good boy at an outpost afterwards.
The Rest of the Datamined Names:
While the Winter Soldier would be a complementary character for Black Widow, it’s weird he’s apparently been prioritized over Captain America’s other sidekick, the Falcon, given Sam Wilson is Captain America in the MCU now. Thankfully, Sam was also datamined with Quake, Mockingbird, and Mar-Vell. Quake makes a lot of sense, given the Inhumans’ prominent role, and she’d give the roster another Asian hero; however, while Mockingbird has a romantic history with Hawkeye, and a very platonic one with Bucky and Black Widow, she would play too similarly to Sam and Natasha.
Mar-Vell is, frankly, the datamined name least likely to be added to the game: he exists now to simply be Carol Danvers’s Uncle Ben, and after the movies and WandaVision, if there’s going to be a gameplay alternative for her, it should be Monica Rambeau — she was, after all, the first female Captain Marvel in the comics, and the game should have a Black woman as a playable character over another white, male one. (For the record, I would still feel this way if Mar-Vell was made a woman like his MCU counterpart.)
Asgard:
Loki made an appearance at launch, in the side missions posing as his brother in Norway, so a reckoning between him and Thor is inevitable, but it’s hard to imagine the God of Thunder will return home anytime soon, between AIM, the Kree, and Ultron. Still, it would be fun to wander a Jack Kirby-inspired version of the Halls of Asgard, and to chat to Sif, the Warriors Three, Heimdall, Balder and Odin between missions, as well as to fight Frost Giants, Dark Elves, trolls, and everything else lurking in the Nine Realms.
Is it possible an Asgard DLC could make Loki a playable hero? Perhaps, especially if a greater threat like Surtur shows up, but it would be odd if Amora and Skurge were also villains, and they weren’t carrying out a scheme for the God of Lies. It’d also be great to have one of the Valkyries — Brunnhilde, Rūna (the version based on Tessa Thompson’s take), or Jane Foster — be added to the roster, or even all of them (if you can have two Hawkeyes, and two Hulks, you can definitely have more than one Valkyrie.)
Street Heroes:
Personally, I’ve been hoping Daredevil, Luke Cage, Iron Fist et al. will be added to the roster because the odds of a triple-A release starring them is far less likely than a new X-Men or Fantastic Four game. However, the announcement of Midnight Suns and Insomniac’s Wolverine game made me realize that isn’t so unlikely, so I guess we’ll see: if there isn’t a Daredevil-centric game in a few years time, and Avengers is still being updated, then the developers should certainly prioritize the defenders of New York. If not, then there’s always another longtime Avenger (who isn’t also an X-Man) that they can add.
Continued belowM.I.A:
Obviously, the Avengers game cannot just live on new characters alone, no matter how much we all want them: the overall fun has to improve too, and the game is still pretty much a series of corridors where you fight a horde of bullet sponge robots and goons. Sure, battling a swarm of troops is part of the Avengers experience, but so is taking on a team of supervillains (think the Masters of Evil, the Black Order, or the Wrecking Crew), and hopefully the game can build towards that kind of chaos and excitement.
Speaking of villains, it was disappointing MODOK, the Super-Adaptoid, Klaw, and Crossbones haven’t been added to the daily rotation of Villain Sectors, and that the Black Panther DLC didn’t add assignments and levelling rewards from the Wakandan faction. Ultimately, I think the game needs to be more consistent in what it has to offer: the developers had been hoping to add a Wasteland Patrol mode over the summer, which is an excellent idea, but roaming the East Coast, Wakanda, and Utah without constantly hopping in and out of the Quinjet would be great too.
Despite its flawed execution, the Avengers game universe has been the most intriguing alternative to the comics and the MCU since the cancellation of Disney XD’s Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and I hope it continues long enough so that, say, at least half of what’s mentioned here happens. Otherwise, I worry it really will become the gigantic disappointment it’s been written off as, and if that happens, Marvel might not even conclude it as a comic.
Well, that was a depressing thought: let’s just try to enjoy Square Enix’s Guardians of the Galaxy in the meantime, shall we?
