Earlier this year Marvel Strike Force was moving at a breakneck pace, not giving players much chance to even prepare for all the things FoxNext was throwing at them, but the team appeared to heed the feedback from frustrated players and slow things down a bit. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but things look to be speeding up again and I’m already feeling a bit overwhelmed.
FoxNext recently dropped a new developer update outlining the plans for the release of the forthcoming Brotherhood of Mutants characters, some long asked for QoL changes, and a new system that no one was asking for.
Let’s start off with the Brotherhood of Mutants. We’ve known for some time now that the remaining Brotherhood characters would all have their own campaign events leading into a Legendary event to unlock Magneto, but what was news to me is how compressed the timeline is looking to be. The first new release will be Juggernaut in early November, but the blog also notes that Magneto’s Legendary event will kick off in late November. Wait, what?
Is FoxNext expecting players to have three separate teams ready to go for each character event and then have a full slate of leveled up Mutants and/or Brotherhood ready to go for Magneto all by the end of the month? I was expecting to have a lot more time, but if the datamining is accurate, players will need to have a team of Mystics, Villains, and a combination of Blasters and Support all ready to go in very short order if they want any chance of unlocking Magneto anytime soon. My only hope at this point is that all events will last through the end of the year and simply run concurrently, though this would then put players in the position of having way too much stuff to do on a daily basis. I get that the holidays are coming up soon, but maybe it would be better not to rush all of this stuff out there?
In even more frustrating news, FoxNext announced yet another new layer of progression with an upcoming Red Star Promotion feature. Red Stars allow you to convert existing gold stars on characters into red ones, which will power up a character by acting as a multiplier of all of their stats (this includes stats from gear). Powering up characters is already a huge ordeal in MSF with the frequent level cap bumps, orange ability upgrades to consider, Stark Tech, and now this Red Star feature. And worse of all, things like Stark Tech and Red Star promotions are incredibly bland. Boosting stats isn’t fun, it’s just extra work. FoxNext needs to come up with horizontal ways to develop characters, not just vertical ones.
Thankfully, the developer update wasn’t all bad news. The long awaited quality-of-life upgrade, the ability to save preset squads, is coming in patch 2.1. Saved squads will also function outside of Blitz with the ability to save squads for Raids as well. Great. But even this feature is not arriving without controversy. Players will have a number of squad slots available for free at launch, but FoxNext has plans to allow players to purchase additional slots later. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but for things like Blitz, those who have more slots saved will have a much easier time competing.
At this point, I’m just hoping the Brotherhood unlocks aren’t as bad as they sound reading through the blog and that saved squad slots aren’t prohibitively expensive to purchase. Red Star promotions just flat out sound like a huge mistake, especially at this point in the game’s life.
What’s your take on all of this? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!
