Last week, I had the chance to talk to Scott Bradford and Alberto Braga, the Senior Quest Designer and Lead Designer of Marvel: Realm of Champions respectively. I talked to them about the game’s appeal, Marvel references, and their favorite heroes. Read on to learn about a particularly unique Marvel experience.
Spencer Legacy: So tell me a little bit about Realm of Champions.
Scott Bradford: So Realm of Champions is an action-RPG real-time multiplayer game set in a new Marvel Universe that we’ve created. It focuses really heavily on character customization and real-time multiplayer versus and co=op experience. Players can expect to be able to customize their own Marvel champion, play with their teammates against other players, and duke it out for supremacy in Battleworld.
What separates Realm of Champions from other games?
Alberto Braga: One of the biggest differentiators we have is out customization system, which is the first thing that would stand out. You have all your Marvel games where you can customize the stats of your champions, and maybe switch the skin or the colors. We’re the only Marvel game where you can do all of those plus you can mix-and-match your gear like you would do in any other gear-based game. You can put on a different helmet, a different glove, and they have different stats and look different.
A lot of the customization that we do as well goes as deep as changing your character. You can change your weapon around, which basically turns your character into a different character. Like Hulk using the hammer has different abilities than Hulk using the gauntlets, which translates to different playstyles. So our customization is definitely our biggest differentiator from all the other Marvel games, as I don’t think anyone has anything kind of close to that right now.
We offer a different experience in terms of gameplays. Our game has a lot of elements of a MOBA, but it also has elements of a brawler. We give you the chance to go in and have a PvP Marvel experience in under five minutes. So we’re really targeting mobile and the mobile playstyle in a Marvel PvP game, which is something you don’t get a lot of.
Scott: We like to say “Make Marvel Yours,” and I think that’s at the heart of the game. You’re not the Hulk, it’s your Hulk. And you can make your Hulk look exactly like you want and play exactly how you want. That’s sort of what we strive for.
What led you to choose the six available characters that you can base yourself on?
Scott: I think part of it is that there’s an expectation that players have if you’re booting up a Marvel game that it’s probably clear that a lot of the characters are from the Avengers right, so players want to play a Marvel game and they want to play as Iron Man and Hulk and Spider-Man. So there’s that resonance with the brand, but there’s also gameplay reasons. These six characters fill the roles that we designed in the game, they fill the tan role, they fill the support role, they fill the damage role. I should also mention that it’s six for now, and that we have a seventh on the way. If you’ve seen our most recent cutscene that we’ve released online, there’s characters from other houses, those are the leaders of those houses, but you can imagine that there are other characters in this world that we’ve built that at some point in the future might become playable characters.
So that’s also part of being an RPG that’s focused on customization, the promise that we’re giving the players is that you can express yourself as these characters, and the more characters that we have for you to express yourself as, the more interesting things that we can build in the game. So six is just the beginning.
Alberto: Just to add a bit to that, the important thing like Scott said at the end there is that this is our initial selection of characters, the plan is to have many more, like if you follow Contest of Champions, they’ve been adding stuff to the game for six years now. Our plan is to do the same, which means we’ll be supporting this game with new gear, new weapons, and new characters. The discussion for the top 6 is what Scott mentioned, resonating with fans and creating cool gameplay dynamics.
Who is each of your personal favorite groups to play as?
Alberto: I’ll let Scott go first on that one.
Scott: Storm. I said it yesterday, I’m the biggest Pyramid X stan of all time. yesterday I was wearing a pin, but I forgot it today. I wear it whenever I get the chance. Whatever Alberto’s answer is, it’s wrong.
Alberto: Which one though? Storm is a common answer, you need to say which weapon.
Scott: Oh lightning for sure. We actually just added some new weapons into the game, and Storm has a new lightning weapon to go along with her blizzard wand.
Alberto: Mine would have to be Hulk with the gauntlets. I like the hammer, but the gauntlets I think are my favorite.
What would you say to fans who might not know about Realm of Champions? They see a Marvel game, but what is it that makes it so appealing to Marvel fans.
Alberto: They’re not wrong, it’s definitely a Marvel game. But for people who are Marvel fans, we tried to go really deep into the Marvel story and lore. Scott can speak better about that than I can. We have, not only a lot of references and some really obscure references from Marvel, but we also have inspiration coming not just from the movies by making it all about that, or not just the comics by making it all about that. You can see the whole history of Marvel and all the alternative realities and all the different comic book issues all coming together.
We’re almost making a universe based on everything Marvel ever released, and we also have the uniqueness of not just playing as Spider-Man, but playing as your Spider-Man or your Iron Man. People playing with toys, they might like the head of this one, the arms of this one, and the pants of that one. You can actually make your own Marvel hero and make them yours, and I think that that and all the background and the story we’re using should be really appealing for Marvel fans.
Scott: Yeah, I would say, just to echo that, if you don’t know anything about the comics, that’s okay. If you don’t know anything about the movies, which if you live in the world in 2020, that’s basically impossible not to know a least a little bit [laughs,] like my mom knows who Iron Man is. There’s something for everyone. Even when we design the game, we have every type of player we can imagine playing the game. The casual Marvel fans, the hardcore competitive PvP gamers, we really try to have something in there for everyone. I think you can see that in a lot of the stuff that we’ve added, even just throughout the beta through reacting to people’s feedback.
We’ve added more story to the game, we’ve added more game modes to the game, we’ve added new customization options to the game, and new weapons. So there’s something for everyone, no matter what kind of player you are. Another part of our team mantra is “familiar but different,” so something you recognize and something you don’t. I think that’s really exciting. Our Dr. Strange isn’t the Dr. Strange you recognize, but it’s still Stephen Strange right?
I want to thank Scott and Alberto for taking the time to talk to us. If you’re interested in Marvel: Realm of Champions, you can check out the official website and pre-register on the Google Play Store.
