What did it cost?: Beating Marvel's Avengers

I first played Square Enix's "Marvel's Avengers" video game during the Playstation 4 beta test in August 2020. I blogged about it here. Nearly two years later, I reached 100% trophy completion on the game.

To quote the movie "Avengers: Endgame," did I do it? Yes. What did it cost?

A solid start

As I mentioned in my post back in 2020, I enjoyed playing the beta. I thought the game had a lot of potential. When the game officially released, I picked it up immediately. I burned through the short campaign and had a good time. The story was interesting, the gameplay was fun and, once I came to grips with the voices and likenesses of the characters being different than their counterparts in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, I really enjoyed having a new spin on the superheroes we've come to know and love over the past decade and a half.

I particularly grew fond of Ms. Marvel - a character that I had, essentially, no prior knowledge of before getting my hands on this game. She was spunky, she was funny and, more than anything, I resonated with her because she was an Avengers fan. The familiarity I gained from the video game has helped me enjoy the new Disney+ series, "Ms. Marvel," which I think has been great, through three episodes.

The best-laid plans

I think that, with "Marvel's Avengers," the developers' plan was the give players a quick, single-player story mode, then focus on what they wanted to be the "meat and potatoes" of the game: the post-campaign, online multiplayer. Although I'm not a huge proponent of online multiplayer (who am I kidding? I actively try to avoid having to play with or against other gamers online), I can see how they thought this would be desirable. "Team up with your friends as the Avengers!" On paper, sounds super fun. Cash in on Marvel Mania and all that.

But there were a couple problems.

First of all (and this isn't their fault), I have very few friends. Very few friends that 1) have Playstations, 2) bought "Marvel's Avengers" and 3) want to play online with me. So that was a problem. I played online with another person two times, I think, and both times, I had to drive over to my brother's house, tie him down to a chair, duct-tape the controller to his hands, then drive all the way back home, get online and pray that he didn't turn off his console in the meantime. It was literally like pulling teeth. Long story short, I played this game alone 99.7% of the time, so the "online multiplayer" aspect did absolutely nothing for me. I'm sure it would have made things easier, ultimately, but that just wasn't the case for me.

Secondly, the post-campaign content was very repetitive, to say the least. "Avengers" provides a handful of mission types, along with a handful of locations in which to play them. However, if you're playing multiple missions in one sitting, they really start blurring together and, basically, all end up feeling the same. Get to the waypoint. Beat up a wave of bad guys. Open a treasure chest. Get some gear that, more often than not, is worse than the gear currently equipped to your hero. Go to the next waypoint. Rinse and repeat, over and over. It got to the point where I could basically put my fingers on autopilot and knock out pretty much anything the game threw at me.

One good thing was that you could level up your characters pretty quickly. You could sometimes gain two to three levels per mission, which was nice. Progression was fast. That is, until the developers pushed a software update that made it significantly more time-consuming to gain experience points. Why on earth they'd do that and how on earth that made sense is beyond me. At that point, in March 2021, the game was infamously losing players - people were sick of the repetitive nature of the missions and just stopped playing - so what did they do? Ah, yes. They made it harder on everybody else who was still coming back.

That bothered me a little bit, but I made sure to max out all of my heroes before the patch went live, so it didn't affect me as much as it may have others. What did bother me, though, was that, on top of slowing down the flow of experience points, they then added microtransactions (in-game purchases, for real money) that allowed players to buy XP boosts. They literally made the game harder and expected players to pay to get the game back the way it was. That is just straight up moronic. They knew the game's popularity was struggling and they intentionally made choices that resulted in people wanting to play it even less. What the heck?

Once this started happening, I took a break from playing. I didn't touch it or even think about booting it up for months. I never completely uninstalled it, but I wasn't going to give it much attention if they were, basically, going to make it "pay-to-win." No, thanks.

The content roadmap

Initially, I think Square Enix probably thought, "People love Marvel, we make a Marvel game, people love our Marvel game." Seems like a solid formula. They promised, very early on, that they would release additional content for the game as time went on - most notably, new playable heroes. At the time of writing, they have come through on that promise, with post-launch characters Hawkeye, Kate Bishop, Black Panther and (exclusively on Playstation) Spider-man, with Jane Foster's "Mighty Thor" character slated for release coinciding with the MCU's "Thor: Love and Thunder," which hits theaters next week.

Overall, I've felt like the storylines accompanying these new characters have been fun - particularly, Black Panther, who introduced the Wakanda region to the game, which was truly a breath of fresh air, compared to grinding out missions on the Eastern Seaboard, Utah's Badlands and the other couple original locations.

I see a lot of headlines about what's to come, further down the line, for "Marvel's Avengers," but I have a hard time taking those rumors seriously, considering that this game has, for all intents and purposes, been a massive flop, but hey, if they release a character that I'm interested in, there's a chance I'll pick the game back up and play. (Note: I do not care about Jane Foster, even in the slightest.)

In fact, I just Googled "Marvel's Avengers Roadmap" and I'm seeing some reports that Square Enix's long-term plans for additional content in the future have been scrapped altogether. Nice.

The pains of being a completionist

As I've lamented in previous blogs, I've developed into a bit of a Playstation trophy hunter, largely thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. We've all been at home more than usual these past few years, so why not beat a bunch of my old video games, right?

Without getting too crazy about it, I landed at an uncommonly high completion percentage for "Avengers." I've got a buddy that is a hardcore trophy hunter - like, doesn't settle for less than 100% on most games - but he will never touch this game. Has no interest in it, as far as I know. But I knew if I was crazy enough to get 100% on "Avengers," he'd be proud of me. I only had a couple trophies left. I knew it wouldn't be easy, and it wouldn't be quick, but my buddy Chris would be proud of me if I did it.

Here were the main trophies that gave me trouble:

• Treasure Trove - Open 50 Cache strongboxes
• To the Dark and Back Again - Complete 50 Hive missions
• Holding It Down - Complete 30 War Zones at Challenge III or higher

I went for the "Treasure Trove" trophy first. This consisted of me repeating Vault missions over and over. A "Vault" is a mission where you have to locate an underground bunker and fight off waves of enemies, while periodically running around and fending off computers located around the building. They're not exceptionally difficult but usually took about 15-20 minutes each. At the end of each mission, I would get two or three "cache" treasure chests, and I needed a total of 50 of them. The hardest part about that - and the other quantity-related achievements - is that there is no way of tracking how many you already have, so I was just blindly doing these missions over and over, hoping that I was somewhere in the 40s. Eventually, after several nights of defending vaults for S.H.I.E.L.D., the trophy popped. On to the War Zones trophy.

"Holding It Down" wasn't terrible for a couple reasons: I manually tallied how many I had done, so I knew how many I had left, and I found a mission that I could beat in about five minutes. That's about all there was to it. Just repeated that mission until I hit 30 on my tracker. Boom.

"To the Dark and Back Again" was, truly, the bane of my existence. To get the trophy and hit 100% completion, I had to beat 50 "Hive" missions, which each consist of at least five floors of missions. That's like 250 regular missions. Again, like so many other aspects of this game, it wasn't hard. But it took FOREVER. I wanted to keep a count of how many Hives I had completed but knew I'd done a few in the past, so I didn't know where my tallies actually started. I gave myself credit for having four under the belt and started keeping track from there, but I figured that my count might be five or 10 low. At first, each Hive mission was taking me between 30-45 minutes to beat. The problem was that, in order to get to the "mission" on each of the five or six floors of the building, you had to fight your way through a long hallway. At that pace, it was going to take me 25 hours to get the final trophy. However - and take note, if you ever plan on going through this utter insanity yourself - I discovered that if I used a hero that could fly (Iron Man or Thor), I could just fly over the enemies in the halls and go straight to the door that would get me to the main mission on each floor. Let me tell you this: my Thor got really, really powerful.

Using this new strategy, I found that I could beat a Hive mission in about 18 minutes, barring any unusual delays. Thankfully, this shaved hours off of the time I originally thought it was going to take me to complete this task, but it still ended up being approximately 12 hours of literally running the same Badlands mission over... and over... and over... and over... and over... and over again. Twelve hours of it!

The biggest problem that I found about using my Thor for this task is that he was already at the maximum power level, so the rewards for completing the mission were not useful to me at all. If I would have been using a lower-powered character, at least I could have possibly gotten more powerful gear, but, with Thor, anything I got in exchange for the work I put in was recycled immediately. It hurt my soul.

For those that are curious (probably everyone who is still reading this blog), my tally was four off of what I gave myself credit for, so I surprisingly got the trophy - and the elusive "platinum" trophy for 100% completion - as I notched my 46th tally on the index card.

The epic journey concludes

My wife once sent me a meme of Thanos resting after curb-stomping the Avengers in "Infinity War." The meme said something like, "Me, enjoying the final minutes of a game I love before I immediately uninstall it and never playing it again."

That was me, for like five seconds after getting that last trophy on the eve of June 16, 2022. I enjoyed the feeling of triumph for about 30 seconds, then quit the game and powered down the console. I haven't touched "Marvel's Avengers" since. I've never say never, but I can tell you this: if I ever play that game again, I'm so happy that I don't have to play it the way that the developers want me to play it. Whoever thought that "Complete 50 Hive Missions" was even remotely comparable to "Complete 30 War Zones" is out of their mind. If anything, it should have been, like, 10 Hive missions and 50 War Zones. That would have been way more reasonable. Anyway, it will be such a relief to just play "Avengers" for fun in the future, with which ever character I want and doing whatever missions I feel like doing - absolutely not the mind-numbing grind I just put myself through.

At least I can look at this any time I want:

Ooh. Ahh.

Am I glad I did it? Uh, I mean, according to the numbers calculated by PSNProfiles.com, I think I'm part of about 8% of people who use that website to track their gaming stats that have gotten the platinum trophy (and, apparently, one of the 1.10% of total Playstation users), so that's cool, but willingly subjecting myself to that dastardly, monotonous death march was probably not worth it, in the end. As the classic saying goes, "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."

I kid you not, finishing off those Hive missions was four or five nights of extreme boredom. I tried to get in as much gaming late those nights as I could because, the more I played when my wife and son were asleep, the less I'd have to play when they were awake. I joked with a coworker that this accomplishment would be something I could tell my grandkids about, but I don't want them to be ashamed of me.

I snapped this in-game picture of one of Thor's finishing moves as an accurate depiction of how I felt when I finished. "Marvel's Avengers" had me down for the three-count:

I'm sure this post has just been a ringing endorsement for the game, hasn't it? Let me say this: I mostly enjoyed the game. It certainly wasn't all bad. The main thing is that I think the repetitive nature really wears on you after a while, so it's really best in small doses, here and there. It should not be played - and I absolutely do not recommend that anyone play it - the way that I did. It was pain. Such terrible pain.

But hey, my squad ended up looking pretty sick, when all was said and done, so you've got to appreciate that.

What is your most regrettable video gaming achievement? Let us know in the comments section, on Twitter (here and here) or on Facebook.

Farewell.