And in the bummer department...Disney shuts down Marvel Heroes

Marvel Heroes was a weird game.

I took two swipes at it. I tried the game soon after the initial PC release in 2013 and it didn't really grab me. Nonetheless, I gave it another shot when it was ported to consoles as Marvel Heroes Omega earlier this year, even going so far as to toss them $20 for Deadpool and early access to the closed beta. In the end, after the content wipe that took place when the game went to open beta, I didn't stick with Deadpool, opting instead to weird out with a Squirrel Girl main.

The game was kind of an open Diablo-style dungeon crawler, but the kicker was that large areas were shared between lots of players, so there could be a bunch of the same character running around with each other. I spent time playing as Hulk, Moon Knight, Nova and a couple of other randoms that I was surprised to see in a game.

The issue that I had with the game was that there was very little to do after running through the admittedly meaty story line. There was a hard wall built into the game to stop players from progressing in the end-game without buying stuff with real money. It took me a while to zero in on precisely where that wall was, but once I found it, it irritated me to no end. Eventually, I bailed on the game. I didn't see much of a point of leveling up more heroes, just to ram headfirst into that brick wall.

Regardless, I had a lot of fun with the game up until that point. I loved the combination of well known and obscure heroes, and the dungeons were decently fun to stomp through. So when I read today on Kotaku that Disney was pulling the contract from Gazillion games and shutting the game down, I felt the same familiar pangs that I felt when City of Heroes went belly up. Just because I'm not playing the game currently doesn't mean that I want it to go away. I take a certain comfort that games I used to play are still out there in the world, and when one dies, I mourn a little.

I was never part of any community in Marvel Heroes. I don't really feel like the game was set up to nurture interaction between players. But I do feel bad for the people still enjoying the game, and of course the Gazillion employees and staff, who will surely be greatly impacted by this decision. 

I do wonder if Disney has some other plan for the Marvel heroes in the online gaming space. DC Universe Online is still plugging away, so there is clearly an audience for hero MMOs. I suppose time will tell, but for now, its a sad day for fans of Marvel Heroes.