https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4sPiQByYcw

As I have said in the thread about PS4's Spider-Man, that game is my one Switch regret. Well - regret eliminated!

This was a huge surprise when I first saw it last night. I think many, if not all of us, have fond memories of the X-Men Legends/Ultimate Alliance series, and had little to no hope of it ever making a comeback. Yet here it is, bigger, bolder, and ready to go wherever you go too!

Not only that, but this potentially marks the return of the X-Men to big-name Marvel video games after being absent since - what, LEGO Marvel Superheroes about five years ago?

I'm pretty disappointed. The X-Men Legends/MUA series was one of my favorites, and I still boot it up now and then, especially after an Avengers film releases.

Console exclusives are the worst, and attaching exclusivity to a game like this is just ludicrous.

I got Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for the Wii and played through it quite a bit. Was OK but not great, but I will definitely keep an Eye out for this game. Part of my dislike was that the Wii sticks didn't gel that well with the game Controls anyway.

I feel for the fans who don't have a Switch, really I do, but hey, it's great for me, so I admittedly can't feel TOO badly. And if it has to be exclusive, a Nintendo console really is the best machine for it to go exclusive on, since to me at least, the Legends/Alliance series was at its best when you could get four players in one room all working together. And nobody does that as well as Nintendo does.

I hate console exclusives with a BLINDING FURY. I was pissed when Bayonetta 2 went to such a weak system, and now Bayonetta 3 is going to be on Switch?

And now this.

It's one thing for games like Halo, God of War or Mario Kart are exclusive... yeah, the companies own them, it makes sense. But do they really think locking it into just that one system is that great of an idea? Especially when the first 2 games were multi console?

In the case of Bayonetta 2, the game wasn't going to be made until Nintendo financed it. That could just as easily be true of UA3, especially since Team Ninja is being brought on as the new developer.

If anything, this is making me far more optimistic, as I wasn't too keen on the first MUA after enjoying X-Men Legends 2 so much. The art style alone has me sold, but I'm hoping the new developer makes it a little less like Diablo and a little more like Ninja Giaden (not 3).

We had a pretty good HCR group on Xbox Live back in the day and we played the heck out of the Legends and MUA titles. I had like 5 or 6 different save files for different groups of people being online at any given time. I loved it.

MUA was a much better game than MUA 2, though. MUA 2 cleaned a lot of stuff up, but they removed far too much of the series' soul. The lack of outfits, the lack of permanent unlocks, the removal of more and more RPG elements, etc.

Yeah, it definitely felt a bit soulless to me. Or rather, as a bad port that didn't quite work out - it felt like it could have been a decent game on Another console.

I'm guessing that the bolded is what's really going on, here.

I think the original MUA might be the only game I've ever played where I went back and deleted my save files *just* so I could go back and have the experience of unlocking everything again. The kid's been begging for a Switch for a while now, and I haven't purchased a game system since PS2. This might be enough to get me to drop a couple hundred bucks...

Ultimate Alliance 2 was a let-down for me, so I have high hopes that this gets the series back to what made it great. I know that focusing on the Civil War storyline was inherently limiting in how the game could be played, but I found myself missing the wide array of villains to go up against as well as the complete lockdown of character abilities. One of my favorite things in Legends/Alliance was picking and choosing which abilities my heroes could use and specialize in to really customize my teams to my liking, and Alliance 2 took that away for... reasons? I dunno.

If Alliance 3 gives that back to me, I'll be more than pleased. I already know I'm getting actual villains back, so that's one check in the win column already.

One of the things MUA 2 focused on was multiplayer games not having to take breaks for leveling. So what they did was:

1. Got rid of gear
2. Made stat increases automatic
3. Only give you 4 powers, so you don't have to choose (see, they're doing you a faaaavor....)
4. Let you do leveling during the action, without going to the menu

And I think to some extent they must have thought the price for doing this wasn't too high. After all, certain powers were just flatly superior to others in MUA, so why even let people use the other ones, right?

Wrong. You can't remove that many RPG elements and expect people to be okay with it.


I think at this point I'm just hopeful that MUA 3 really takes off and works out, and then they somehow port it.

Yeah. It just removed the roleplaying charm that was in the first three games. Honestly, the Disney Infinity Marvel games in 2.0 were better in regards to the character leveling and customization aspects than MUA2, which - they weren't roleplay actioners, they were sandbox brawler/explorers.

I find myself thinking back to X-Men Legends 2, where I had my go-to team, I had them customized for very specific roles (Cyclops was the bombardier, Colossus the tank to go rush in and occupy the enemies, Nightcrawler to do the same but instead of soaking up damage, just straight up avoid it altogether, and Sunfire to unleash burn and radiation status effects). Stuff like that wasn't even a factor in Alliance 2, and it devolved into "How well can you push the buttons?".

Dear lord, I hated the skill tree in Disney Infinity 2. Part of it was playing with an impatient... Six-year-old? Has it been that long? Anyway, the kid wanted to buy upgrades as soon as he could and I wanted to try to build up the character's skills in an effective fashion. Our playstyles didn't mash well then.

Heh. Yeah, playing it on my own, I didn't have that problem. I could work the skill trees as I wanted to, planning what I wanted to do ahead of time and working towards getting there at my own pace.

By the time I actually played Infinity with a kid, my characters were all leveled up any dang way, so the kid never had the opportunity.