Square Enix and Eidos Montreal are on the road to redemption with their commitment to Marvel video games right now. After the very rocky start that Marvel's Avengers got off to, developers have mostly listened to fans and fixed a lot of issues while also adding some long-requested content. On top of all of this, Square Enix revealed a brand new Marvel game at E3 this year, Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. The game's trailer showed that it would be very different from Avengers, giving players a single-player, story-driven experience that will hopefully redeem Square Enix and Eidos Montreal in the eyes of fans.
With Square Enix seemingly taking two very different approaches with its Marvel games from here on out, it opens up an opportunity to extend the strategy to other Marvel properties. The Fantastic Four and the X-Men are perhaps the biggest Marvel teams aside from the Avengers or the Guardians, but they have yet to get their own major modern video game. Considering the dynamics of each team, they could both fit perfectly into the structure that has been set up with Marvel's Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, giving fans some unique games with the benefit of hindsight.
Giving The Fantastic Four The Guardians Of The Galaxy Treatment
The reveal trailer for Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy showed that the game would put a stronger focus on playing as one hero at a time, while using the team's other members as support for combat. It's a system that appears to rely on coordinating the abilities of each hero to create one cohesive force, and the Fantastic Four would really benefit from a similar gameplay design.
The Fantastic Four is already known for using their abilities in the most synergistic way possible in the comics, and this could be translated to a game in a plethora of different ways. Following the same structure of GotG, it would make the most sense if a Fantastic Four game had players focus on Mr. Fantastic as the main character, while the rest of the team took the role of AI companions. Not only would this ensure that gameplay is geared towards the one character that players will be controlling, but it could also prevent the story from getting muddled by keeping the narrative focused in one place.
Giving The X-Men The Avengers Treatment
While the approach that Square Enix and Eidos Montreal took with Marvel's Avengers was the subject of some controversy, it doesn't mean that the live-service Marvel game idea needs to be completely abandoned. If an X-Men game is going to be made under a similar structure to Avengers, it just needs to learn from the mistakes that were made with that game.
One of the biggest things that an X-Men live service game would benefit from is the dozens of different mutants that would be available for players. Perhaps the most frequent complaint about Avengers has been the fact that not many characters have been added since it released in September, and the characters that have been added feel very similar. The X-Men are such a diverse team of heroes that it would honestly be very hard to make them feel like they all play the same. The constant flow of characters available could also have the potential to keep endgame content from getting stale, another big complaint of Avengers.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy is certainly a big deviation from what Square Enix and Eidos Montreal tried doing with Marvel's Avengers, but that doesn't mean that the live-service model needs to be abandoned. If done right, the X-Men are probably one of the best superhero teams in all of comics to make a live-service game out of. And if it turns out that Guardians of the Galaxy's structure is a big enough success, giving the Fantastic Four a similar game would be too good of an opportunity to pass up. Hopefully as Marvel asserts itself more in the console gaming world, fans will get a greater range of properties to choose from.
Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy releases October 26, 2021 on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. Marvel's Avengers is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.