Five months since launch and the popular mobile game Marvel: Realm of Champions continues to grow, with its third update the title's biggest expansion yet. Delving into the House of Asgardia, one of Battleworld's domains run by the powerful War Thor, players will receive plenty of Asgardian customizations for their warriors, along with adding a new game mode that has them engage in boss battles against rival houses and Barons.
In an exclusive interview with CBR, Creative & Art Director Gabriel Frizzera and Development Director Ethan Young teased what players can expect in the new update, explained how the game reimagines and blends the diverse elements of the Marvel Universe on the composite land of Battleworld and detailed what War Thor and her house brings to the game's story.
You've reimagined the Marvel Universe with Realm of Champions. What was it about reimagining War Thor that you wanted to bring with this update?
Gabriel Frizzera: When we created the first fifteen houses about three years ago now, we wanted them to all be created together so they could all play against each other in a very interesting way; create drama and the long-term storytelling we want to create. We want to represent each house through a very strong personality and that personality will rise from the seed of the original character: In the case of Asgard and Thor, one of the things that Thor has is that it's all about glory in battle.
When we imagined this character, she's War Thor but not the War Thor from the comics, she takes that mantle after Odin breaks the Bifrost to save Asgard from the Maestro and then Asgard changes because, without Odin, the whole land freezes and the only place that can still keep life is Asgardia, the capital. Everybody rushes as refugees to this city and that changes Asgardia from this place that was only blonde gods with blue eyes into a melting pot with people from all the Nine Realms but they're all united with this bad feeling of revenge. They all want to elect somebody that will take the next step, when Asgard is ready to come back to the world, to get their revenge.
War Thor is this fierce, seven-foot-tall character who carries two hammers: One is a fire hammer and one is an ice hammer. We created her visually to represent the different [realms] Muspelheim and Jotunheim and she herself is from Vanaheim so she represents this new reality and united front of several different realms of Asgardians really pissed off and ready to go to battle as soon as possible so she fit like a glove. The other Barons -- you had Tony Stark in the first few months -- try to play nice; they know they're going to war but let's just try to play these games and everybody can play together and solve our problems. But then War Thor comes like "I'm not playing your games, I'm playing my games! Anyone who wants to follow me will follow me!" It's an interesting thing to play with in the story.
How is it to play with Asgardia's player customizations in the game?
Frizzera: When you take a base Thor [build], it's very basic, you're just carrying a hammer but then you can customize and change the way that you play it; you can take another hammer like Stormbreaker instead of Mjolnir, for example. And there'll be more hammers from the history of Thor and it'll change the way you play but you're still going to be a version of a Thor. Some hammers will make you more of a melee guy to fight close and be like a bruiser, some hammers will be for charging lightning and attacking people from a distance. It's actually up to the player to take [their] Thor to a different direction but you are part of the army of the War Thor.
Ethan Young: Just to elaborate on that in terms of the gameplay, when we were coming up with the abilities and thinking how these Thors play within gameplay, we looked at Thor as this all-around champion who can do a little bit of everything. He's in the mix, he can deal damage, he's very durable and take a lot of damage as well. Like Gabe was mentioning, different weapons and gear sets [lets] you fine-tune and customize the play-style to your liking.
Mjolnir is a classic brawler weapon and a little of everything, he can deal and withstand damage. Stormbreaker, the ax, is an aggressive, more [damage-per-second] style brawler but still with some durability. It was really interesting coming up with these abilities and we wanted to make Thor really all-around and able to do a little bit of everything and players can customize different things to suit their play-style.
With of all of the Nine Realms in Asgardia, what fantasy elements did you want to bring and design for player customizations that weren't there before?
Frizzera: The first thing is customization; the gear for all the houses take cultural cues from what the house is about. What kind of materials they use, what kind of resources and energy, what kind of culture: If you take the Hulk, for example, it's all made of junk because that's how they built their land, on top of destroyed desert military installations. Thor is a bit different: Thor is the closest we have to a straight-up fantasy character. He has the traditional armor and capes but even if you just watch the movies, Thor is something different than if you read the comics for forty years like I did.
We tried to blend influences from the comics because Thor from the comics is more traditional fantasy than Thor from the movies which is a bit more sci-fi. We tried to take a step to see how those things we would make sense in our cultural setting so the different realms within the house bring their own cultural cues and some will be more advanced; the dwarves' forge where they make weapon seems pretty hi-tech to me. So we tried to bring that: Everything is hi-tech but seems harsh because it's been forged but the light elves from Alfheim, they're Lord of the Rings-esque so who do you blend those things?
The Destroyer armor, which is one of the armors you can dress your Thor as, what if you had a more refined version of that that was made by the elves? So we have a golden version that is very shiny and everything has to make sense to us, even if we don't show the rationale to the [players] half of the time but everything is there -- we have little blurbs for all the gear -- because if it doesn't make sense to us, we don't want to do it. [Laughs] Thor and Asgard is like the purest fantasy, it's a fantasy universe with sci-fi touches whereas the Sorcerer Supreme and the Vishanti all over the place, with the Nightmare Realm and Dark Dimension. Thor is more straight-up but we still have a big playground.
This is a big update. What did you what to add to and change up from the base game with this?
Young: There is so much! This is, by far, the biggest update and one I'm incredibly excited about. The thing I'm probably the most excited about is we're introducing a new game mode: One thing I think Realm lends itself to really well is boss fights and that's something we haven't delved into deeply as of yet. In 3.0, [there's] going to be a boss fight where you fight Skaar, one of the Barons.
And this is so exciting for a bunch of different reasons: I think it's a precursor to some incredibly cool boss fights that we're going to do down the road. It introduces a new play-style, new gameplay and we've also pulled in the camera a little bit. I think it's going to be really shocking and really incredible to players when they see all these really cool customization options for different champions. Thor, in particular, has really incredible gear sets and when you can see those up-close when you're fighting Skaar in this boss fight, it really just makes the game look different in a good way; it looks incredible and plays incredible.
That's a mode I'm incredibly excited about but there's a laundry list of really cool improvements and new features in this 3.0 update but that's the one I think is exciting both because it's super-fun to play but also because it opens the door for really cool boss fights we're going to continuously introduce down the road; both cooperatively and competitively, there's really cool things we can do there.
Frizzera: That is one way we're bringing the Barons into the fray. At first, you start as a recruit and you're very low on the totem pole but then we start introducing the bosses and the bosses are the Barons and they'll come with different ways to fight. You might see War Thor coming and using her double hammers to fight against you. I'm really excited to fight the Barons, they're really interesting characters and to see them in different ways will be amazing. For me, 3.0 is the realization of a lot of things that we wanted to do with the game and slowly building towards.
Realm is, by far, our most ambitious project so we had to learn a lot of things from scratch: How to make a cool, meaningful PvP game, how to create new customizations, how to create a different world and then everything came together. Mobile games are good because of that because, at launch, you release a limited experience and then expand in different directions. Contest of Champions is six years old and we're still not complete, we're still releasing new things, new modes, new characters, new stories. Realm is made for that, to create boss battles is just one step in the direction we want this game to be.
Like you were saying, you've been working on this game for a long time. With the game now out for several months, how it is it seeing to fruition and how has the feedback from the fans been?
Frizzera: I'm on the forums pretty much everyday. [Laughs] I know a lot of what the people have been saying for a long time and they want the promise of this game to be realized because we blew off the doors at the beginning saying that we wanted to build a new universe where you can play with your friends and customize your characters. Of course, they want everything to happen at once and I understand completely as a gamer: I want to see everything in Battleworld and see boss battles and full customizations with all the pieces from my favorite characters. People want to see the universe take shape and they want to explore this world and go to different places and see the story, which is something people have taken to because you can go very linearly through chapters and see the different houses and get rewards.
Gameplay-wise, we've been learning a lot because as much as we play in the office and learn different combinations and strategies, it really only comes to fruition when a big population of players take it into real situations. We learned quite a lot and had to rebalance characters and make some decisions differently, some modes didn't hit quite as well as we expected and some were a hit. Considering the game as a platform is a good way to see this project because it's going to change and evolve but all based in this universe we created. New modes will come and go, new champions will become meta champions and others will have to be rebalanced. It is a long journey and 3.0 is definitely the first major pillar for what the game is going to be when it's going to be the game we wanted to make for three years. We want to give the biggest statement right now of this is where we want to go.
Young: I think one of the unique things with mobile games, we launched in December, and I think mobile game sets are relatively tight or lean at launch and then you add-on. One of the things that's really encouraging for us is that people are really clamoring for more and I think a lot of people recognize the potential for this game. As Gabe mentioned, 3.0 is really the first really substantial stepping stone of realizing that vision of what the game can be in unlocking that potential. And we still have a lot of really cool things we want to do and I think there's so much potential for us to explore and do. It's been really reaffirming to get players' feedback and hear them talking about the things that they want and seeing how that aligns with our plans and what we want to do...we've learned a ton from player feedback, it's been really useful and helped shape our roadmap for what we're working on.
Frizzera: We know this dance, that we spend so much time working on this and people play right through it overnight and ask for the next thing so we're already working on 4.0, which is another big build for us, where we put all the stuff we couldn't fit in 3.0 because it's already a big update. It is a continuous roadmap and we have a long road mapped out.
Now that this is out of your head and the fans are playing it, what is something that's surprised you?
Frizzera: The Marvel fandom is really interesting. I've been working with Contest of Champions since 2013 and it always surprised me how diverse the fandom is; it's not one fandom, it's several. If you focus on one kind of taste, other people come to you and tell you what they want. There's one section of the Marvel fandom that likes badass, dark characters like Venom, Wolverine, Punisher. There's another group that represents who they are in real-life and Realm is an attempt to bring all those groups together, in a way, and have each one of the houses represent the different fandoms of Marvel; not only their favorite characters but the styles of fantasy that they like.
That's why Battleworld is really interesting: Everybody coexists but, side-by-side, you've got Brooklyn and Asgard. If I like Thor and fantasy, I'll gravitate to Asgard; if I like Spider-Man and urban fantasy, then you have the Web Warriors in the Spider Guild or the super-tech in the House of Iron. People are asking for different things but they're always very particular asks so I chew on everything and try to make my own version because, creatively, if you listen to everybody you end up with nothing. You have to have enough personality to do your own thing, put it out and see if people enjoy it and if they try something new...we all live in our own little bubbles of fandom and we try to get them to cross the borders with different characters and customizations.
Young: One thing we've learned on the gameplay side that's consistently surprised me is the emergent meta and how players use different champions. As we developed them, we have preconceived notions of how those champions will play and how effective they'll be. We playtest them pretty extensively internally and it always amazes when we release these things out to players and fans just how quickly and uniquely players are able to develop their own play-style and combinations of gear and abilities to create new gameplay. It's so fascinating to me and, with a game like ours that is so complex and there's different permutations of things that can happen in combat, it always surprises me.
I'm sure it'll be the same case with Thor: As we release Thor, we have ideas how we think Thor is effective and I'm sure players are going to figure out new ways to use him, new gear to put on him and new ways to make him even more effective. That's the cool thing about live-operating a game, we see these changes in these emergent play-styles and we get to react to them and take that feedback and incorporate it into a subsequent release.
What are you most proud now getting to share 3.0 with the fans?
Frizzera: Personally, I want them to read the cutscenes that we made. We invited Marvel artists to collaborate with us and make the pieces for the different houses and in different styles to create the variety of the world. We created those sometime ago, I wrote some of them and got to it read and it's so good to see different voices in this universe and as they go through the chapters, they get to piece together the story of Battleworld at their own pace. That and the boss battles are just so exciting.
Young: I feel the same way and this may seem like a copout answer from me but I feel so excited about the boss battles and for players to experience that. I think it's only a small amount of what we're going to be able to do in the future so it's exciting to get this out and players playing it and get feedback and it's going to be a precursor to some really cool boss fights. Realm lends itself so well to having really epic boss fights. We're going to take what we learn and put it towards boss fights in the future and I personally just love the mode and had a lot of fun playing it.
Developed by Kabam, Marvel Realm of Champions is available now on the App Store and Google Play for iOS and Android devices.