It debuts October 26 as a single-player adventure where you play as Star-Lord, and you have to learn to work together with ragtag group of Groot, Drax, Gamora, and Rocket Raccoon.
It could be hard to balance the competing expectations that fans will have about this, and so we talked with Mary DeMarle, senior narrative director at Eidos Montreal, about how the team is finding that balance.
How are we going to tackle this?” But what was great is that once you realize that the comedy from the Guardians — it comes from the characters just being who they are, being always completely true to themselves.
They’re bouncing jokes off each other all the time, to the point that — I would assign scripts to individual writers, but then we’d do a round robin.
Some of the gags are just visual gags that came through the mocap sessions, through the actors, or they came from the artists and animators working with it.
But every time we start looking at a game, the first thing we have to do is look at, what is this we’re dealing with? What do we really want to play? Knowing we were working with a team of Guardians, of course we asked ourselves if this should be multiplayer.
I want to experience what it’s like to be a part of the team.” When we knew that, we knew the best point of view would be Star-Lord.
Once we settled on that, we realized the real challenge we wanted to undertake was, how can we redefine team gameplay from a single-player perspective? Because you’re playing Star-Lord, playing him on the sticks, and you have all his cool moves, his jetboots and elemental blaster and stuff.
If you have an enemy with a lot of hit points who needs to be staggered first, you can send Drax at him before you start shooting.
Knowing that, we were able to say, “As long as I know the essence, as long as I get familiar with that and understand that Star-Lord will always be the space pirate cowboy, Drax will always have the grief and trauma of losing his wife and daughter and wanting revenge” — when you realize that you can tweak them and make your own and build your own backstories to them.
From a story perspective that means we’re writing an ensemble story, and every single one of these characters has their own journey through it.
All the work that had to be done, from the programming side, from the gameplay side, to make sure these characters stand as individuals — they can’t overwhelm or overtake your gameplay in combat, because they’re very powerful.
This game, even though it’s a linear storyline, we do infuse it with choice and consequence.
You saw in the demo, do you throw Rocket over the cliff or not? The thing is, you’re going to have to deal with the repercussions of that, because Rocket, if you choose to throw him — Rocket, of course, will be furious with you.
Okay, now the choice is, do you follow Drax, or do you wait and get a little more defensive? But it’s never a situation, I would say — I hate games where your side characters are always ruining your gameplay because they’re starting something you didn’t intend.
Not being able to tell anyone about it, giving family and friends the typical line — “If I tell you I have to kill you.” Knowing that we have Marvel on our back, who are the people who are going to come and kill us if we do that, it gets challenging in that sense.
We waited for as long as we possibly could to be sure that the game is in the state that we want it to be in so that everyone will enjoy it.
DeMarle: My favorite part of working with it — I hate coming back to the Guardians themselves, but it’s the fact that this story was different from many of the stories I’ve worked on in my career making games.
These characters are the misfits who nobody believes in, who stumble their way through everything, and who are so totally chaotic and impulsive, and yet that works for them.
Marvel Game Studio, Bill Rosemann and his team, they were with us every step of the way as we worked on ideas.
All we had to do was concentrate on creating the game that we wanted and creating the story we wanted.
The question was, is there anyone in Marvel lore who’d work?” At that time Bill Rosemann and the guys came back and said, “Hey, we have this new character who’s coming out in this series.
It wasn’t a sense of, you can’t use this, you can’t use that, you can’t do this because the MCU is doing that.
Once we, in our story, decided that Peter Quill was kidnapped in the ‘80s, a child of the ‘80s, stuck in the ‘80s, we knew we had to get the great songs of the ‘80s.
One is, in the Milano, you have moments where the story takes you to the ship and you can hang out and talk to all the Guardians.
What happens is, the Guardians all come forward like in a true American football huddle, and you have to listen to them, because it’s all based on how they were doing in combat.
If you choose wrong, Peter still thinks he did a great job, so he’s still boosted and he gets the bonus.
But to me, I’d love to see this game come out on October 26 and see both fans of Marvel and gamers — I’d love to see them grab it and start commenting among themselves about the story.
I will say, when Avengers did come out, what I liked was I thought they did an excellent job at creating an original origin story for Kamala Khan.
It was such a challenge to get the five characters correct that we just wanted to focus on getting this one done, putting everything we can into it.
Now we’re just putting all our focus and energy into debugging the game and making sure that when it comes out, it’s going to be the best experience for everyone.