Margie and I actually beta’d this game. I stopped caring fairly early on. Margie stuck with it until go-live, then let it drop. And, yeah, this article pretty much sums it up.
The 6 Weirdest Choices Marvel Made In Their Online Game | Cracked.com
It’s like being in a psychiatric facility where everyone claims to be The Hulk, but no one really has any powers. And the facility keeps badgering you for cash.
[…] I picked the Hulk, because after seeing him go apeshit in The Avengers, I don’t understand why you would ever pick anyone but the Hulk. However, instead of fulfilling every superheroic daydream of my fat, lonely childhood, the game quickly devolves into a fantasy camp about being the worst Hulk that has ever existed in the history of the planet.
[…] The whole point of meta-human characters like the Avengers is that they have abilities placing them at a considerable advantage over mortal evildoers. That’s why they became crime fighters in the first place. Otherwise they’d just sit at home like the rest of us. I’d understand if the dinosaurs gave him trouble, but the Hulk should be able to immediately rip pickpockets and hubcap thieves in half. He shouldn’t have to spend five hours honing his goon-shredding skills to gain that ability. If you get bombarded with gamma rays and can’t overpower a mugger on Fifth Avenue, you don’t have superpowers. You have radiation poisoning.
And, yeah, that could be kind of a problem in, let’s say, City of Heroes — but there the curve on abilities was relatively steady and, no matter your backstory for your CoX hero/villain, you were still, by definition, only third level. And it’s one of my problems with LotRO, but that’s my personal kink about expectations vs. reality.
But if you look like the Hulk (or the Thing, or Iron Man, or …), you should be as kick-ass as them. And you shouldn’t expect everyone else to look just like you.
When you blow game design badly enough to attract Cracked’s attention … you should know you’ve done something wrong.
I beta’d it, too, and I also got bored with it almost from the beginning. I never bothered to finish beta or try the finished product.
The problems described in the article would be bad enough, but I found the general gameplay uninteresting, the crafting system opaque (but not fun), and pretty much little beyond a vague desire to see some of the color text to keep me at the keyboard.