If you’re a Marvel Heroes fan, you may be delighted to know that the game is back through an emulation effort by Crypto137, alongside other volunteers. MHServerEmu is aimed at reverse engineering the game originally developed by Gazillion Entertainment, and it seems that the progress has reached a threshold that the 0.3.0 build was announced as being officially released.
It's been nearly 8 years since Marvel Heroes Omega shut down, and the assets for the game have since been scattered to the depths of the Trion basement, which now seems to be a graveyard for what was left of the beloved superhero MMOARPG. Luckily, Crypto137 and the volunteer team of developers have been working at rebuilding the game since 2023, and it seems to have made some substantial progress. The team is attempting to restore the game to the last live version of the game, but their blog states they will potentially work towards getting a pre-Biggest Update Ever (BUE) state working in the future. The BUE overhauled Marvel Heroes in many ways that were somewhat unpopular for some players.
In a short trailer released on the Marvel Heroes Reddit (and on their official Discord) you can see that the game has a lot of the functionality of the Marvel Heroes of yore. Powers, enemy AI, pets and team-ups, loot drops, levels, inventory, and your personal stash, are all in the game and mostly functional.
"It was the 10th anniversary of Marvel Heroes' launch, and I saw some tweets posted by David Brevik about it," Crypto137 told me. "In the same month Diablo 4 came out, which reminded me of Marvel Heroes with its MMO-ish elements, but also left me extremely disappointed." Eventually Crypto137 attempted to contact the old MHO client via a custom server. After connecting with a volunteer and combining their tools, the emu version of Marvel Heroes began to take shape. Marvel Hero Item Base creator Alex Bond joined the team and shortly thereafter progress began to take off. The site, which was once hosted at marvelheroes.info, is now hosted by MHBugle owner Ravendeth.
Now, 13 months later, the duo alongside several volunteers, have recreated the game pretty closely. "While it makes use of Unreal Engine 3 as a frontend for things like graphics and sound, the simulation layer that controls all game logic is completely custom," Crypto137 said. "One way I like to describe it is that it's built like Diablo 2 Resurrected, but there are no "old" graphics to switch to. This means we had to reverse engineer not only things like Calligraphy and the game network's protocol, but also a lot of features traditionally handled by game engines, like entity management, collision detection, and random number generation."
According to Crypto137 Calligraphy is a proprietary framework developed by Gazillion. It manages game data, rules for level generation, drop rates and much more. The data is mirrored between client and server, which means the client contains a lot of information that is usually server-only.
You can follow along with the progress via Discord, or on their official blog, which provides the developmental journey to fans in great detail. Despite all the progress with 0.3.0 being a major milestone, there is still quite a lot of work left to do. The team considers the game to be in an "early alpha" state, and it's difficult to really determine the state of each hero at this point. To grasp the state of the game at any given time, you can check out the roadmap they have put together in Github.
Marvel Heroes has gone through quite a difficult past. The PC version of the game went through several iterations, and had a few shakeups before the team at Gazillion streamlined their focus through the console release of Marvel Heroes Omega. The game eventually met its end when Disney decided not to renew the license, which came not long after Gazillion CEO Dave Dohrmann had sexual misconduct allegations brought against him. Marvel has had a difficult time keeping some flagship multiplayer titles running, with Marvel’s Avengers also shutting down development just one year ago.
For fans of Marvel Heroes, we may see a second life here. Despite Disney being very careful with who they license their properties to, we’ve been happy to see that another emulated title, SWG Legends, an emulated version of Star Wars Galaxies, is still alive and well, so we’re hoping to see MHServerEmu thrive over the next few years. You can download the server via their blog or through Github, but take note that users must have a legal copy of Marvel Heroes in order for it to work. MHServeremu does not provide copies of the Marvel Heroes client.
[Edited per developer request for clarification over context, MHBugle ownership, and definition]
