From updates to the modes you know to brand-new features we can’t wait to share, 2026 has a lot in store for MARVEL Puzzle Quest. Check out the roadmap to see what’s coming next!
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Cool. Delete the earlier thread, but don’t copy the comments.
It was this week after all
Thanks @S0kun
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Clem, get our comments back.
This stuff is awesome!
Heroic PvE AND PvP??? Tons of balance work? New events? ALLIANCE VS ALLIANCE!!??!
It’s like they read all my posts for the last 10 years!
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The Heroic stuff/new events are pretty hype. I’m excited to see what the increased rewards might be, hopefully worth the increased difficulty. And the heroic restrictions will hopefully force people to get more creative with teams and it won’t be node after node of the same grind-fest
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Sorry about that! I hit archive on it, but can’t dig it up anymore.
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Awesome news. I’m excited to hear about things that aren’t bug fixes, as whilst these are very necessary, they’re not exciting in the least.
Love the sound of all of this in theory, look forward to seeing how it shakes out!
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Please tell me we are getting this Steve Irwin inspired Dev costume in game!
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Great ideas! I hope they all are executed flawlessly. Thank you IP2 team!
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Can’t say I’m excited about Alliance vs Alliance at all, but the rest sounds like a good plan!
Maybe heroic SCL10 will finally give us a shot at 6* shards?
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Why the focus on 1-4 rebalances? There are many 5s that need the love too.
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I think it’s mainly because the 1-4 range is more accessible to the community. Even those of us firmly in 5* territory regularly use characters in the other tiers. At least until we ascend them all.
I did appreciate the attempts by BCG to rebalance at the end, there are definitely a bunch of 5s that still have solid kits but have just been phased out by power creep. JJ was my first 5* champ & has a good design, she was awesome for me for a long time, but now she’s too weak across all numbers compared to modern 5s.
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This all sounds great but it seems overly ambitious since the stability of the game has only improved marginally in three months.
I appreciate the communication but color me skeptical very much of this comes to pass before the end of the year.
I hope you prove me wrong.
I think the latest update has made significant stability improvements, but agree that up until now it’s been a very mixed bag.
@Painmonger Perhaps they’re looking at 1-4 stars (including ascended versions) because that’s where a number of the busted combo pieces can be found? Re-balancing can also mean taking Hawkeye down a peg or two, particularly as they’ve said new design space is more of less non-existent whilst Winfinites exist.
I’m sure there will be buffs to many lesser used characters too, and frankly I’m looking forward to any changes they might make. Mixing up the status quo usually makes for a fun game state.
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Here’s my 2 cents
Summary
ONGOING WORK
GAME STABILITY
Even though we’re here to talk about the new stuff coming your way in 2026, we want to first address some of the old stuff. Everyone is well aware of the ongoing issues with stability and crashes that MPQ has had for some time now, and we’ve been fairly candid with you all about the difficulties up front.
We want to reassure you that in addition to new features, we are continuing work on improving the baseline performance of MPQ. This is part of why we’re starting out more modestly towards the start of the year, and getting bigger towards the end. That leaves us the space we need to keep going with that work on baseline stability.
This is good and expected. There’s always some improvement with each R version. Though there’s also hiccups that pop up from them (tiles recently) that don’t get really addressed. The major slowdown in starting up the game for one since R339 persists in R340. But you can tell they are trying.
Summary
SPRING
HEROIC MODE
Coming to PVE and PVP will be a brand new option to play Normal or Heroic. Normal will be the battles and rewards you know and love, with Heroic requiring you to play tougher battles with restrictions on your team set-up in exchange for greater rewards!
Yaaay! Return of Heroic Mode is one of the most and longest requested features to bring some excitement back to PVE. For PVP we had some events with restricted roster as well, but only as off-season events.
Some notes:
PVE
- Normal and Heroic will have separate progression and placement brackets, right? This will further fragment an already very anemic playerbase.
- The difference between Normal and Heroic will be worth the extra time spent? Going from 10 minute clears to 20-30 would be a big ask. People like their comfort, and it isn’t worth an extra token and some ISO. You need to sell people on Heroic as unskippable (like you did with Heroic Boss)
PVP
- PVP has seasons. How will Heroic work with that? You can’t have people playing Normal and Heroic in the same kind of events. Will these run next to each other, each with their own seasons and rewards? There is no way to have any kind of normal competition if these are mixed.
- And yes, also worried about the fragmentation of an already very very tiny playerbase. You need a certain amount of players to have a sustainable PVP
Summary
NEW PVE EVENTS (beginning in Spring)
Beginning in Spring, we will be releasing new PVE events. The ones we have are like family, but it’s definitely good to get some new blood in every now and again! As changes become easier with much needed infrastructure work, we’re very keen to bring more new content into the MPQ schedule.
Long promised and basically 100% of the reason WHY we even have Unity at all.
Hopefully these will be fun events and not akin to the most recently added PVEs which were annoying slogs filled with Mindless Ones, Carnage, etc..
Summary
SUMMER
CROSSPLAY & ACCOUNT RECOVERY
If you’ve ever had to recover an account in the past, you know it hasn’t always been a simple process. That’s why we’re moving toward a new account recovery system built around email, similar to what we use in our other games. This will give us much more control over both account security and the flexibility of how accounts are managed.
Having a Scopely-like e-mail login system would be quite nice.
Summary
1-4 STAR CHARACTER REBALANCES
Similar to how we did batches of updates for characters for our Champions 2.0 feature, rebalances are coming back, only this time we’ll be focusing on batches of 1-4 Star characters that have had a challenging time integrating into the broad metagame.
One of the core challenges in MPQ has long been how early-rarity characters fit into the broader game. As the game has grown and evolved, certain winfinite combos and playstyles have emerged, creating a very limited design space. Adding any new content or characters to the game is difficult, if not near-impossible, unless it is strictly aligned to perfect “meta” play. While meta play is important, we want this game to be fun.
These rebalancing efforts intend to lift older characters that rarely get played anymore, and overall bring all characters more in line and balance with each other. By doing so, we want to make the early game more enticing to new players, while giving existing players who already have these characters rostered and not thought about interest and another chance at getting used.
We would love to expand more on our thinking and aims in a future post so we can get into the nitty gritty!
Looking forward to 5star becoming more relevant again and worth chasing for players over just broken 1as5s that get boosted too frequently. Not holding my breath for this one though.
Summary
FALL
ALLIANCE VS ALLIANCE
Alliance vs Alliance is our biggest planned feature for 2026, and we are very excited. In AvA, Alliances will face off in a series of offensives to control strategic objectives to find out which one is the toughest and smartest. Your Alliance will need to think offensively as well as defensively to take your opponent’s objectives and ensure they don’t take your own.
We’re keen to share more detail about the system in a future post, but this is a little teaser of what’s to come!
This would have been cool a few years ago, but coming off one of the worst ever boss event participations, with a dead recruitment channel, all the previous things would need to SERIOUSLY revitalize the community.
And I hope it’s better planned out than running a Heroic Boss event. Because trying to coordinate 20 people from all kinds of timezones to play at the same time is brutal and a deeply unfun experience.
Summary
LOOKING AHEAD
The first few months of 2026 were certainly a challenge as the IP2 team took on such a large and intricate game, but with more stable ground under their feet now, they’re ready to start building.
As these features get closer we’ll share more detail in blogs and patch notes, but this gives you a good idea of where we’re going this year with a balance of adding new things, refreshing old ones, and improving the everyday experience.
Good luck. Would have liked to see more info about abandoned current features or dead-in-the-water major points.
Can we get any info on supports? Season rewards? 6star acquisition? Removal of feeders? etc..
Will there be a future Q&A? Perchance after your next week off?
Thank you
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A major reason they didn’t do 5 rebalances before and look to continue not doing them is because you can’t get people to spend or use resources chasing old 5s. Other than fave-ing them and slowly building them it’s impossible unless they start putting up special stores more often, which they haven’t done - OR you screw up the game balance by making it a lot easier to use HP in pursuit of 5s.
If they rebalance 1-4s and make them good enough to use/chase, it’s a fairly low ask to get players to start burning HP on swaps and pulls, and the cash offers can possibly offer enough value to make players feel like it’s worth dropping a little to push a newly viable character up.
AND 5s are actually a much easier thing to max out than any lower tier you ascend. So making more lower tier characters better and hence more chase-worthy is a better ROI for time spent than 5s.
Also……you can’t make 5s too good because 6s need to seem like the thing you really want. I predict that Nova will continue to be the Ultimate 5 as far as power level etc….therefore, no point in trying to make people want to chase anyone else who will necessarily be worse than Nova.
If they nerf Nova, maybe then other 5s can be rebalanced.
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I could not have less interest in Alliance vs. Alliance mode. How many alliances are even that active, anymore?
Everything else looks good, though. Curious to see how they balance the winfinites.
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100% concur. That might have been interesting about a decade ago but really zero interest in it now. Wish they would focus time/efforts on other items that we have been requesting for a while.
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Same. My casual alliance is only about 50% active in any given week.
For this new mode to have any real viability it means most of the current alliances are going to have to be abandoned and players will be forced into new ones with 19 other active players they don’t know. That will lead to ruthless booting of players who aren’t ‘working hard enough’ and that’s going to cause a lot of resentment.
KGB
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