E3 2019: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order Interview

E3 is a wonderous time of the year if you are a gamer — there’s just so much going on. But it was during the hectic week that I found myself sitting down with Yousuke Hayashi, Producer for Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3: The Black Order and asked some burning questions.

Q:  With this being called ‘Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3’ does this continue on the stories of the previous game, or is this more of its own thing?

A: So, this is a totally new story, taking place in the Marvel Universe, so people who played the past games in the series will have a brand-new experience playing this game.

Q: With the number of characters included in the title, how did you come about choosing who would be there? Were the popular ones selected first, or was it personal choice first?

A: When we were developing this game, we definitely did think that there were particular characters where we could bring a lot of interesting action to them with the gameplay, and there are definitely some characters that Marvel Games suggested, but one thing that we did decide on was to create the biggest roster of characters that the series had ever seen.

Of course, there are some characters that have not been announced yet, but we have had a lot of discussion with Marvel on what characters we wanted to include, so we think that there are some that have some great unique character traits, that anybody will be able to enjoy.

Q: With most of the Marvel characters having many costumes over the years, will there be an option to change costumes and if so, will they do anything, or will they just be cosmetic?

A: So, we definitely did include a lot of RPG elements to the game and that means that there are skins that players can change for their characters, but we can’t say exactly what kind of functions they’ll have. But we can say that they will increase post launch.

Q: During the Treehouse Live at E3 2019 presentation, we got to see dedicated gameplay for the first time, is there anything for players that have colour blindness or such, so they can see what is happening on screen?

A: We did want to make feel-good, action gameplay, but we very conscious of players being able to see what is going on, with the various characters on-screen. So we feel that people will be able to enjoy the gameplay as much in that situation when they are sharing Joy-Con and playing together.

Q: Marvel has a lot of fans around the world, so how was the development team when they started working on this? Were they nervous or excited?

A: When we first started discussing this game with Marvel, we found that there were a few developers within Team Ninja that were big fans of Marvel, and they were just incredibly excited and couldn’t believe it when they heard we might be working on this game.

Q: With such a large character roster, are there any real deep cuts of Marvel characters joining the roster that people might not expect?

A: So we did mention how with this game we wanted to create the biggest roster of playable characters ever in the series and we really just wanted to please Marvel fans as best we could with this roster. But of course, we can’t put everyone into the game and we had a lot of very intense discussions with Marvel about it, to decide exactly which characters should go in the game.

But we have confidence that with the package game, we have the best roster that we can put together and of course, we are going to offer a season pass, where we can provide even more characters.

Q. Does the game feature any motion controls?

A. We really don’t have motion controls in this game, its more sharing the Joy-Con with players around you and using the buttons on them to play.

Q. Marvel stories are known to be quite epic; how long would you imagine it takes a player to get through the story mode?

A. So with the story mode, we think its about the same length as the previous two games and with the number of locations we visit locations that are really important to the Marvel universe, so we consider it a game where you can take a tour of the Marvel Universe.

Q. The final question that I have, if you could pick one Marvel character to make a game about, who would you pick and why?

A. So with action games in the past I have really liked characters that have claws, so I think if I had to choose one character, it would be Wolverine.