Marvel's Avengers Team Explains Why They Decided Not to Use Visual Gear

Marvel’s Avengers lets players collect all sorts of different gear items unique to the playable [...]

By Tanner Dedmon

Marvel's Avengers lets players collect all sorts of different gear items unique to the playable heroes that'll augment their stats, but as you equip the items you find in the beta, you'll notice they don't actually change the way that the characters look. They're purely for stats and special effects alone with little to show they're actually equipped aside from some auras on attacks if they deal different types of elemental damage because of an item. The creators of Marvel's Avengers explained this way of implementing gear for players to find by saying having stats and effects were important in a game of this type but that it had to be done in a way that made sense for a Marvel game.

Creative director Shaun Escayg responded to PlayStation Trophies in an interview after being asked about the gear and why it had no visual effects on characters but is a core part of Marvel's Avengers. Escayg said loot that has stats and status effects adds a lot to a combat game like this one, especially when online multiplayer is involved, but the team had to "do something that belongs to the Marvel universe."

"There were definitely a lot of discussions on what loot would make sense and let's cater that to the IP, and from a visual standpoint, it just did not make sense to ... Especially when we had this idea of wanting to portray Thor and his 80 years of glory and the continuation of that, then potential movie tie-in skins, and all sorts of other stuff -- and for a loot system, those are just two sort of contradictory things," Escayg said. "But at the same time, we still want to customize and build the gameplay aspects of it."

Even though the loot doesn't change the way players look, there are still tons of outfits to pick from. Escayg pointed out that some players don't typically prefer systems where the character has to look a certain way to get certain effects, in Marvel's Avengers' case, "there actually is a massive benefit to being able to divorce those two concepts."

Once players find some Exotic Artifacts, he said there will be visual representations of those being equipped. Activating them will make them materialize with their visuals displayed, Escayg said.

We've been playing through the Marvel's Avengers beta ourselves and have put together some tips and guides for the experience below to help you through your first weekend.

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