We got a chance to speak with Capcom’s Wes Phillips about the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3 for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Wes was on his way to the airport, but managed to squeeze us in to answer our questions about the new game.
It’s been over 10 years since the last Marvel vs. Capcom game. Why so long?
There’s so many properties involved and so many different license-holders. Half of the problem was wrangling all of those things together and half of an ending-game renaissance to get the sting back on track. It took a bit of time to get everything together, but we finally did it, and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is an awesome game.
I don’t want to ruin it too much because the background is part of the story, but it obviously takes something significant to get these two worlds to come together. Let’s just say it might have something to do with an interdimensional portal (or one of those types of devices).
Secret is used a little lightly. Akuma and Hsein-Ko from Darkstalkers, and Taskmaster and Sentinel from the Marvel Universe.
What environments or levels can the player fight in? Are there elements in each environment that players can use to their advantage?
The environments don’t necessarily interact with the characters directly, but they are cool. There are all sorts of iterations from the Marvel and Capcom universes. We have X-men stages, and a Metro City stage from Final Fight. We have a really cool Resident Evil lab setting where if you smash something then things will escape from their cages and start crawling around the stage. We even have a throwback to our old Ghosts and Goblins game with Arthur. There’s all sorts of crazy backgrounds from both universes. A lot is going on, but they don’t necessarily affect the gameplay experience.
There are two button layouts in MvC3. There’s a “normal” control scheme and “simple mode”. What simple mode does is essentially assign some of the harder combos to particular buttons. A more experienced player might say “Oh, that’s not fair!” to pull off a combo so easily, but only a few of the combos are available in this mode. For instance, Dante has a few dozen moves he can pull off, but if you play in Simple Mode then you’re limited to four of five of them. Simple mode makes the game a little more accessible, but you’ll have to learn the combos to unleash the full power of each character. As a game developer it’s about opening up the game to a larger audience because we want more people playing, which is part of the rationale for implementing this basic control scheme.
How does the design team choose which of the characters’ powers to include in the game and keep gameplay fair?
2 comments
Since you already know everything about this game, then perhaps you should have conducted the interview. What questions would you like answered?
What a wasteful article. Not a single bit of new information and a Hell of a lot of really stupid questions all of which are already known to anyone interested in the game.
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