At New York Comic Con this past weekend, fans were able to get their hands on some new characters headed to Marvel: Contest of Champions.
Marvel: Contest of Champions is a free-to-play mobile fighting game where your favorite Marvel heroes go up against each other in battle. Some heroes include Captain America, Spider-Man, The Punisher, Star-Lord and many more, with new heroes being released throughout the year.
I was lucky enough to sit down with the Producer of the game, Luke Takeuchi, and chat about what fans can expect in future updates and how important the fans are to the game.
Joey Marrazzo: Are there plans for quality of life updates for the game?
Luke Takeuchi: “In terms of user experience improvements, we are rolling out a lot of stuff. Coming out in next build, one of the things we’ve talked about is, we’re going to make some improvements to how the user sees and accesses their currencies and energies.
It’s probably going to be one of those things that’s a nice user experience, quality of life improvement. Also moving forward, we are investigating what some of the more quality of life improvements we want to keep making, so we want to keep doing that on a consistent basis for our users.”
JM: Do you plan on updating older heroes that came out when the game first launched?
LT: “We don’t have any specific dates right now but one of the things we’re always talking about is more consistent meta updates for champions going back to some of our launch champions and earlier ones that haven’t really seen a lot of love
We want to update a ton of champions, we’re looking through a list right now. We don’t have exact dates on when this is going to start, but when you look at the entire lifetime of the game so far, every year champions have gotten more and more complex, now with some of the characters we’ve released this year like Doc Oc, Goblin, and Morning Star.
With the new variable system, characters are more complex now and they can do a lot. Versus going back to some of the old champions when we launched the game.
If you go to their info page its like 3 lines long. Some of those champs are still usable, but back in the day we didn’t have the tech we have now so we are certainly keeping our eye what are some of those champs we want to go back and update, give a facelift, and kind of revitalize the use of the new system we have now. Whether its improve synergies or abilities, it’s something we’re looking at on an on-going basis.”
JM: For the veteran players that want more challenging modes, is there anything they can look forward to?
LT: “Yup. In terms of modes, there’s stuff in the works right now but it’s a while out. It’s something we’ve been evaluating, and over the coming months, players will see a lot of cool stuff coming out. In this month alone, we have some challenging content that’s going to be coming out. Thor: Ragnorak is coming out so we always pair our champion challenge in.
Next week we will be announcing another hardcore challenge mode. This is all more in the PvE solo challenges. What players want to see is more cooperative or competitive game modes for a challenge, we’re looking at how we could release that in the future, but players should know we are looking at that stuff.”
JM: What is the strategy when it comes to nerfing or buffing champions?
LT: “In terms of our strategy, we have different strategies for different things. With the character updates, we want to get to a point where we are doing more consistent meta updates in the game as opposed to once every two years have massive changes because players get used to them and use them in strategies.
One thing we want to get into the process of is doing more regular updates to characters and masteries. That’s something we are working on right now is getting into a place where we can do them. When it comes to our strategy for buffing or nerfing if something is overpowered, we have to nerf it.
It depends on the characters on a character by character basis for sure, but the one thing we always want to look at is, instead of directly nerfing one character, are there ways we can buff up other ones to make good counters.”
JM: Lastly, do you have a message you want to send to your fanbase that loves playing your game?
LT: “We love our players and honestly, this year has been a crazy year for us in terms of the number of releases and we’ve had some rocky releases. The big thing is that we wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for our fanbase. We read the forums, we read Reddit, we read all our social media, we see what gets posted.
But the biggest thing is we want to let players know we are striving to do better. Whether its features and content we are rolling out or the stability performance for the game overall. This year for us internally has been a lot of focusing on stability and performance, and of course our build last week was not up to the par we wanted it. So we’d gone over the weekend, got a new build up and running, and now we’ve hot fixed some of the gameplay issues that got introduced.”
Marvel: Contest of Champions released an all-new Marvel character Morningstar in the game along with classic Marvel hero Blade. These new characters will be making their in-game debut later this month.
I would like to thank Luke for spending the time to talk to me. You can download Marvel: Contest of Champions on your iOS or Android devices.
