Anyone else trying the game out this weekend?

I finished downloading it this morning and gave it a try. So far it seems ok but maybe just a bit bland, definitely getting a Marvel Ultimate Alliance feel from the game.

Im hoping that once I level up a bit and get more powers then I'll start having more fun. Im playing as Thor at the moment and just running up to people smacking them with my hammer isnt the greatest.

Im also still finding it a bit weird seeing multiple versions of heroes running around at the same time.

I downloaded this after watching the Unprof. Fridays stream and after a little over 5 hours i'm really enjoying it(played as Hulk). I enjoyed it so much that i pre-purchased it on Steam, supposedly that'll get me into closed beta so i won't have to stop playing after Sunday.

i was rolling around in a group with 6 hulks. based on that alone this game seems alright.

Seems pretty great to me. I can't remember why but i really didn't like Diablo 3 at all... played through it once and was done. Loved Diablo 2. This is basically that so I'm enjoying it a lot. It was super laggy tho. Running around wtih Cyclops for now.

Ive been playing the closed beta for a while and having a lot of fun. There's still a lot of work since its way too easy right now (no difficulty choice either) and a lot of the skill trees are basically unfinished but I'm having a lot of fun regardless.
I just hope that there is a lot of post-launch support with new areas/missions to do, I'd love to come back every 6 months with a new hero.

It's actually more fun than I anticipated. Visible gear or not, the characters and storylines have an undeniable draw.

I sincerely hope they don't lock too much up behind this whole free to play thing. I'm all for that model as long as you have the option to acquire equal (or ideally better) loot just by playing the game.

I started out as Black Widow and wasn't really feeling it. They gave me 2000 spacebucks for some reason so I bought Ms. Marvel and she's pretty cool! This stress test is SUPER laggy though.

Since last weekend every got put to a flat amount supposedly so they could test out their prices.

So far the model does seem totally fair though its important to know that they have not actually revealed the prices. Though we do know that some costumes are 3x the prices of basic characters which is odd.
Though right now you pay for Characters/Heroes (Classes basically), Costumes, XP/Drop Buffs and Respec potions. All of which has a chance to drop in-game but I haven't seen Characters drop often enough in-game to want to wait till the end of the game to play the class I really want so I just went ahead and bought my Character. Assuming they haven't changed the drop rates the Respec drop often enough for general play, you might only need more if you are testing out stuff for end-game and the XP seems to the right amount for general play but, again, you might want to the buffs to grind up Characters for end-game.

This game does not seem to be very good. I have not followed the development so I don't know how close to final this beta version is but the lack of difficulty modes and the emphasis on (I presume) scalable hubs seems to break the game. In a single-player instance you are pretty much unstoppable all of the time except in specific boss encounters but you can potentially get into trouble running around in the area map alone because it seems to be populated to account for all of the players in the local area. What is potentially worse is that, properly specced, a single character can take out large groups of high-level enemies (a group of a half-dozen sentinels plus trash mobs, for example) in seconds so rolling around in a group is probably pretty boring unless everyone is very under-leveled.

Using two 1-hour 50% XP boosts, I managed to level a single character from 8 to 26 in one session (and using a rarity boost I went from greens to all purples in one chapter). That can't be the intention, can it? The last few skills seem to unlock at sub-30, so I can't imagine that the cap is too much higher than that.

I will probably end up playing a bunch of this game simply for the perverse thrill of kiting dozens of enemy units around and then dumping OP AoEs on them and watching the game glitch out (the way that broken 'dead' units de-rez is actually a neat effect) but there doesn't seem to be much of a game here. There is definitely fun to be had with it and the Marvel flavor is strong but the lack of challenge and the broken economy and the F2P store are all causes for concern. I hope that there are difficulty modes or a big retune coming.

So has there been any information on the conversion rate of actual money to in-game currency, and how much characters will cost?

The Founders Packs that you can pre-order each come with a set amount of in-game cash - the Premium packs that unlock 4 characters come with $30 worth of "G" for example, but there's no indication of exactly how much "G" that equates to, and how much that will buy you in the actual game. One character? Two?

$60 for a premium pack that only comes with four extra characters seems steep. Especially since you only get to choose ONE of the free characters when the game launches. So pre-ordering for $60 gets you six characters at most, along with an extra costume for each of the characters in the premium pack you chose. So if that $30 of in-game cash isn't enough to net you at least a few more characters, it seems really expensive to me.

Uh this game seems sort of dumb I mean it is just another diabl..... hey... wait... I can play as Rocket Racoon?

Downloading now.

There is supposed to be a large patch coming in the next few days so things may change soon but currently the conversion rate is undecided and characters vary wildly in cost, popular characters are around 2000G while others are as low as 650G. Skins are mostly over 1000G. Currently, characters drop in-game at around 3 per playthrough, though it seems very unlikely that would continue at that rate beyond the beta. If gold ends up being 100:1 to the dollar then this game is going to be horribly over-priced, even 200:1 would make it $10 for an Ironman or Thor at their current prices.

The "Heroic Trio" premium pack is supposed to represent $120 in "value." It contains three characters, nine skins, $30 of in-game currency, and about 2000G's worth of potions. If we assume a 100:1 conversion ration then that's about $10 per character ($30), $5 per skin ($45), 3000G ($30) and 2000G ($20) in potions which adds up to about $125. This seems close to the in-game pricing for those particular characters and costumes, which doesn't seem like good value, really.

I think the value sounds all right, but what bothers me is that so much of this is locked behind a paywall. Considering the format of 'xp boosts/characters/skins' is basically lifted wholesale from LoL, that game's model of having the characters at least be affordable via in-game currency seems like it would be more appealing.

There are random drops of both costumes and characters from the bosses in game so, in theory, you can farm for characters but unlike League of Legends where you can discover new classes you would want to play in Marvel Heroes you already know you want to play as specific heroes so I don't think most people want to play the entire game as someone, and a class, they don't like to earn the character/class they do want.
It meant I, and friends, ended up just pre-purchasing the characters we wanted so we can truly enjoy the game.

@pazy: Yeah, that's a nice perk, but it really doesn't work for me, especially given that I put like 8 hours in over the open beta and got no character tokens. Unless a pretty fluid market opens up for character trades, that is.

Yeah, Ive probably logged 40+ hours in closed beta but Ive only had one character drop and it was for one of the starting characters (Scarlet Witch). I don't think the dropping of heroes is enough for most people.
I still think its a better "Free" model than most F2P games but truthfully I would say that its a cheap £7/$10 game if you just purchase the character you want.

I really loved Marvel Ultimate Alliance but this game doesn't really do anything for me. The gameplay is too similar to Diablo 3 (which I have nearly 100 hrs in already) to really win me over and Heroes seems to lack a lot of the polish that MUA had. Also being F2P means almost all the characters are locked initially with no way to earn them through progression which was one of the major gameplay hooks for me playing MUA.

If you're really bananas for Marvel, aren't put off by having to spend some money to get a lot of that content and enjoy Diablo 3 style ARPG gameplay then this game seems pretty attractive. For me though I'm not enough of a marvel fan to really justify paying for anything beyond what is given to me initially.

As someone suggested earlier, it'd be nice if they allowed you to purchase costumes and boosts and items with currency you earn in-game so it at least I get the illusion of being able to earn Iron Man's Mk.2 suit instead of seeing only dollar signs everywhere and feeling put off the whole game.

It seems that they're going to keep the current system for putting points into your ultimate powers by consuming character tokens, so there could be a healthy trade market for character tokens if people tend to play a small subset of characters.

That's fine for people who have some experience with the characters and know who they prefer but buying characters sight unseen is kind of a crap-shoot so $10 per (or $20 for a founders pack right now) seems a bit excessive. Hopefully the prices will settle a lot lower as/if they continue to roll out new characters.

Closed beta ends today (in about 30 minutes) and early access begins tomorrow.

It's been interesting to watch this game develop over the last couple of weeks, to see the game sort of come together with the final big content patches and the introduction of the end-game, then watching the game coming apart at the seams and tearing itself to pieces. In the last few days I've experienced the powers toolbar just breaking in the middle of an instance rendering the player defenseless, stance changes breaking the gauge which governs them and breaking the toolbar, the social functions of the game collapsing leaving the area chat and party invite system unusable for the last few days, and in my last handful of attempts at the final boss, both solo and grouped, he has broken or desynced when players die leaving him invisible and incorporeal to the player character while still able to deal damage himself. It's been weird.

Assuming that the game is fixed and stable on launch (June 4), Marvel Heroes is a fun but shallow arpg whose main draw is grouping a bunch of superheroes together and rolling through the content as an unstoppable force, brushing aside dinosaurs and giant robots as if they are redshirts. It's not bad. Or Good. Marvel Heroes.

the gcredits/dollar ratio is 1:100

I think they spread themselves all over the place - it is hard to keep a billion toons that are wroth playing/balanced. I'm wondering what the "end game" will be like.

Honestly this game bored the crap out of me. I got in the beta a long time ago, was super excited, loaded the game up, then went "Uuuhhhhh, this is what they came up with after like 8 years?". This game was announced before DCUO even came out, then they said, "Wait no, nevermind" then they said "Ok yeah we're making that". And it just seemed so bland.

The enemies are all the same, which AIM guys I can see that because they're henchmen, but the guys on the street there's only like 4 different guys. And they're all guys, I don't remember seeing a single female villain run at me to die.

There were unnecessary loading screens. I was in an open world area out on the street, then run up to a red door that took me to the rooftop of the building. Never went inside or anything, so why wasn't that area just part of the same open area instead of having to load into it?

And just the fact of 10 people all playing Hulk in the same area seems dumb to me. Hulk is strongest there is... until there are nine more Hulks, then who's strongest? The 17 Ben Grimms standing around?

I think that you might be conflating the history of this game with the Marvel MMO which never materialized. According to both Gamespot and IGN, that was a Microsoft/Cryptic effort which was canceled in 2008.

No, I'm neither conflating nor confusing this with that Marvel MMO, this IS that Marvel MMO that was announced then cancelled. It was "cancelled" then handed over to Gazillion.

They had gameplay footage a long time ago that showed this exact same model of game. You play as an existing Marvel hero in a 3rd person view (in this instance it was Angel), with the Diablo HP and Mana bubbles and hotkeys. They even touted being able to use environmental objects as weapons back when that was a big deal.

I would link that footage, it showed up on youtube but I did a search for it long ago and it had been removed, and I expect doing a search now would only yield a thousand or more results of the new game.

From the little information that I managed to google, it seems like Gazillion started on this project in 2009. I believe that they were also making Super Hero Squad Online at that time. I think that Marvel Heroes was officially announced (as Marvel Universe Online) right after Super Hero Squad shipped in April of 2011. This version of the game bares little resemblance to the game being described here so it seems like there may have been a change in scope and features in the intervening time (or all that "one Wolverine per instance, create your own continuity, play through major events of the Marvel Universe" stuff was never going to happen.)

Marvel Heroes is definitely rather underwhelming (though I find I'm warming to it the more I play) but I don't think that it's entirely fair to expect it to fulfill the promises of people tangentially involved in the development or an "8 year" development cycle that this specific game didn't actually have. It manages to come up short on its own merits, no historical context required.

I'd be interested to know if anyone has spotted Angel in the game though. You'd think that if they made a model for him he'd be in there given that the game is a little lacking in terms of hero quest givers, npcs and merchants.