Yes, mods, I’m aware that we have a thread devoted to the console release of Marvel Puzzle Quest, but as I’ve largely been the only one posting my thoughts in it, that leads me to believe that either the vast majority of the forums haven’t bothered much with the game (entirely possible, in which case I apologize pre-emptively for my hubris in creating this thread), or people are assuming it merely to be an announcement thread and not much bothering to look within.
So I’m posting this, at least as much to consolidate my thoughts in one place as to encourage others who may be playing the game to chime in with their experiences and observations.
TL;DR: please don’t lock this
Moving on. Some of what I’m going to say here isn’t particularly new information, but maybe we can reveal some context through this thread. Some of it is stuff I have speculated on in the other thread, but as the red name involved with that thread doesn’t appear to have commented on that speculation, hey! Maybe they’ll see this and say ‘yup yup’ or ‘lol nope.’ And some of what I’m 'bout to say I don’t recall seeing elsewhere previously, so maybe it’s new info.
The core game (priced at $15 on PSN, probably the same on Xbox Live) contains within it the Prologue, Unstable ISO-8, The Hunt, Thick as Thieves, ISO-8 Brotherhood and Prodigal Sun hubs/stories/whatever you wanna call 'em. Progression is linear’ish. That is, you can grind any node you’ve previously completed, but just as unlocking the next node requires defeating the one before it, you can’t move on to Unstable ISO-8 until you’ve beaten the Prologue. Can’t move on to The Hunt until you’ve beaten Unstable ISO-8. Etc. These “events” (as we know them in the free-to-play version) have been chained together to represent a story.
Given that the code split happened some time ago, we already know that certain characters aren’t recruitable at this time, and that certain power rebalances didn’t make the cut. For example, having beaten the Prologue, I can tell you that Ragnarok doesn’t have a blue power, unlike the F2P game. He’s also level 50, which tracks more closely with what I remember him being a looooong time ago in F2P (instead of his current 140). However, that means the “new experience” that jettisoned the Baxter Building isn’t here, either. The “old” H.A.M.M.E.R. hub is here.
Character recruitment is essentially random. You start with a base set of heroes, with a single cover of each. Because there’s no F2P foolery (roster slots and the like), there’s also no token shop. You acquire and build heroes through progression and grinding. It appears that there are certain nodes which reward new characters, similarly to how the prologue introduced additional characters over time on F2P, but otherwise, you randomly get cover rewards for defeating nodes, new or old. I have yet to see any node I’ve repeated grant me a cover for a character I don’t have yet, so my guess is that mostly how I’ll be getting them going forward is going to be by defeating them at key moments (most of the heroes, I’d bet, will drop in Prodigal Sun, though that’s just a hunch). Once you have the character, THEN you appear to be able to get additional covers via grinding. But until you get, say, Daken, there’s no point in grinding easier nodes looking for Daken covers. As far as I can tell, nodes are endlessly grindable for covers since there are no powerups (that I’ve seen) and no ISO (so no booby prizes).
I haven’t yet been able to determine a “why,” but where my first six heroes began at level one, the last three I’ve recruited - Juggernaut, Venom, and Daken - have joined the team at level 30+. Venom joined at Juggernaut’s level, but Daken joined a few levels below either of those two, so I can’t tell if it’s an average-of-a-certain-number-of-characters thing or if the character level is just pegged to the node where they first drop. At any rate, as you earn new characters, they will join the team already moderately usable, at least in terms of match damage. Bullseye just joined the team as I wrote this (been using Remote Play to play on my Vita) and he comes in with a single cover, at level 50. That ties him with Juggernaut, whom I have leveled to 50. That, incidentally, was what happened with Daken. When he joined, he was at Juggernaut’s level. Daken has been the lone weirdo who joins at a level above most of the rest of my roster but not quite at the same level as my strongest character.
Level cap is 300. We saw screenshots previously that confirmed that, but I also confirmed it by going into multiplayer (which is as barren as the Gobi, at least for me) and noticing that all of my unlocked characters were 5/5/5 and level 300. Because I haven’t been able to find a multiplayer fight yet, I have no idea if covers drop in multiplayer the way they do in single player. I hope to find out, someday! I suppose I could try a local multiplayer fight and just use both of my PS4 controllers, but not sure that would be a fair test as to whether or not covers drop in MP. I mean, if I earn one in local, sure, there ya go. But an absence of cover drops in local doesn’t mean online won’t have them, either.
XP is only partly tied to the level of the fight. There is mission XP, but you can also earn XP by generating combos, match-4’s, match-5’s, criticals, and using powers. Longer fights, then, will tend to give you more XP no matter what the ‘mission’ XP bonus is. The final fight in H.A.M.M.E.R. yielded 180 XP, 100 of which was (in that fight) mission XP. The third mission in “Unstable ISO-8” yielded 1000 base XP, but I got an additional 316 XP via the aforementioned bonuses. Everybody earns XP, whether they survive the fight or not, but characters who are knocked out earn less XP than those who survive. I haven’t been able to pin it down exactly, but the eyeball test seems to be half XP for those knocked out, full XP for everybody else. Doesn’t look like it’s being applied based on who did the most things; if everybody lives, everybody gets full XP for the fight.
Leveling happens through play, so grinding serves two purposes: get your heroes powered up so they can tackle the (progressively harder) fights as you move through the story, but also to backfill covers for characters who aren’t yet 5/5/5. Since there’s no F2P foolery, there’s no 20 ISO madness, either. You just do the fight, earn XP accordingly, and periodically get a cover drop. Sometimes you’ll get team-ups of the enemies you’re facing, also, but I have yet to see any power-ups.
Addendum: when I say there’s no F2P foolery, that means none. No alliances, no roster spots, no multiple forms of currency, etc. You have to use the character to strengthen them. If you ride your three best characters through every fight, you’ll clear the story but your heroes and villains who aren’t in your top 3 won’t ever improve, other than gaining cover drops. Alternatively, means no cooldown on hero use if they get hurt, so why in the heck do healing powers still have the ‘temporary’ healing art (the yellow bar appended to the red one)? They’re at full health as soon as the fight ends, so that kind of seems about as useless as mammaries on a male bovine.
The 5/5/5 build on all characters means that you get the best, and worst, of everybody. Eventually. You can’t structure your Hulk build (if you buy the DLC which includes him) to stave off his team damage at Anger5, for example. But neither do you have to make an agonizing decision between IM35’s yellow or blue.
Surprisingly, there’s no in-game notice of available DLC. No ‘locked’ symbols over character slots belonging to DLC characters, no ‘check the Store’ button, no in-game announcements of available DLC, nothing. If you’re not an MPQ vet and you pick this game up on PSN/Xbox Live because, hey, Marvel? Decent chance you’ll miss out on the extra stuff, especially if the characters released in the last ~12 months do ultimately find their way into the game through additional DLC packs.
I’m working my way through Unstable ISO-8 at the moment, but it looks like how this is working is that there’s no master event/sub-event mechanic here. you just play through nodes, and the additional nodes become available as you beat the previous ones. Not entirely sure what to make of that. I have five fights on the map for Unstable ISO-8, with two having just unlocked after I beat #3. I don’t remember how many total “overworld” fights there are in that event, partly because I don’t remember if it was a shorter or longer event in F2P. Maybe someone else can chime in there. Do the subevents in F2P ever have dialogue for the “story”? If so, I wonder if that’s getting shoehorned in to the other nodes on the console version, or if the composition of those “overworld” fights has been altered to ensure that the characters who spark dialogue are in those fights.
That’s about all I’ve got right now, although I continue to play. Hopefully there are others playing the game who can fill in anything I’ve missed so far, or who are ahead of me and perhaps have insights I haven’t reached yet.
UPDATE 1: Just beat Unstable ISO-8. Some of the text…maybe it’s been a while since I’ve really read the story panels in the F2P version, and I’d bet that is in fact what it is, but the story feels slightly different. I’ll make sure to pay attention the next time Unstable ISO-8 rolls around.
Opened up The Hunt, and as someone pointed out in the official thread, The Hunt does have sub-events. How that works in the context of the console version is, you click “The Hunt” on the overworld mission screen, and it takes you to a screen that shows the three sub-events - Alaska, Florida, and Savage. They’re linear. Can’t do Florida until Alaska is complete, can’t do Savage until Florida is complete.
I continue to earn new characters; Ms. Marvel, Moonstone and Hawkeye (Modern) have all joined my usable roster. Hawkeye, with a single red cover, is level 70 - putting him ahead of the rest of my roster. This has been the pattern, with one exception. I think the rationale there is probably to enable the character to keep pace with the rest of the roster even though it’ll still need covers to be usable. That way, you aren’t waiting to get another 4-5 covers and THEN having to go level that cat from 1 to wherever the rest of the team is at.
UPDATE 2: So what I said above about no DLC announcements and such is true. However, the roster screen has five blank slots for characters. There’s no info when you hover over them. No “hey you go buy this character pack in the Store” or “keep playing to unlock” or any of that jazz. They’re just mysteriously blank. That said? Pretty sure I know exactly who those five characters are:
Hulk and Punisher from the first DLC; Deadpool and Doc Ock from the second; and Iron Patriot. I have no idea, as yet, how you recruit Iron Patriot. I stlil think it’s got to be a reward in Prodigal Sun, since that’s the last included story node (beat the game, get Iron Patriot? or something) but that’s just speculation. Anyway, TL;DR: the roster screen DOES give you a hint that there are other characters to be gotten. It just doesn’t tell you that four of the five are DLC. You gotta figure that out on your own.
UPDATE 3: I’m starting to get to the point where I can (kind of) compare power abilities between F2P and console. Thing is, the level max is achievable regardless of the number of covers you have. There is no level cap based on covers earned. You could start the game with a single red cover for IM35, somehow never pull another, and still get him to level 300 if you put the time into him. I have So it can be difficult to do a straight-across comparison, but some things I’ve seen so far:
IM35
2700 health at level 50 both on console and on Steam. Console is 3/5/0 at the moment, while Steam is 5/3/5, so I can’t do a direct power comparison. However, Repulsor Blast at 3 covers on console is doing 770 damage at level 52. The wiki says 743 for 3 covers at level 50. That looks pretty close. Armored Assault at 5 covers on console is doing 336 damage at level 52, compared with the 324 damage wiki says is the cap for level 50 at 3, 4, or 5 covers on F2P. Again, close.
Ares
5880 health at level 94 for both console and Steam. Onslaught4 is doing 189/green consumed on console, compared with the 230 Onslaught4 does on F2P. Definite pullback, there. Console doesn’t say anything about a damage increase at Onslaught5, so I don’t know if a 5th cover there would get me to 230 @ 94.
So I know there was some talk about rebalancing because of the higher level caps, and maybe this is a sign of it - one of the more powerful abilities for lower-tier characters has been nerfed a little bit for console.
Juggernaut
Power costs, as discussed in a few places, have been tweaked - they still reduce as you gain covers, but now the cost floor is where the ceiling is on F2P. Health at level 40 on F2P is 3520. Health on console at level 88 is 7360. Damage on Headbutt at level 40/F2P is 1100 enemy/550 self. Headbutt at 88/console is doing 2300 enemy/1150 self.
Incidentally you can maybe see why Juggernaut is my highest-leveled character at 88/300 with those numbers. Especially since health packs aren’t a thing.
Juggernaut and Ares both are more useful on console, actually, once the F2P mechanics go away. I mean, not that they’re not useful in F2P, but their utility increases. Partly because you can get a 5/5/5 build on Ares, partly because what keeps you from spamming Sunder or Headbutt with abandon is knowing that you’ll either have to wait for health regeneration or spend a health pack after the fight to undo that damage. Remove that mechanic, and the only possible drawback for using Sunder or Headbutt (or Sentry’s Sacrifice, once you unlock him) is that if he dies in combat, he only gets somewhere between 40-50% of the XP for the fight that surviving teammates get. He’s immediately full health and ready to go for the next fight after that.