We talk to the team behind Marvel Contest of Champions about the arrival of a new Iron Man and how Infinity War made an impact on Kabam’s popular fighting game.
Considering the impact that Avengers: Infinity War has made at the box office and on Marvel fans around the world, it’s only natural that it should shake things up in Marvel Contest of Champions as well.
The development team behind the mobile fighting game has made sure that’s the case. Along with a wide range of events and new content that have hit Contest of Champions over the last few weeks, new playable characters straight out of Infinity War have entered the fray as well. Two of Thanos’ Black Order, Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive, were the first to arrive, followed by the bearded, double-shielded movie version of Captain America.
Today they’re joined by Iron Man, sporting his bleeding edge armor from the film and arguably the biggest new iteration of any existing character the game has seen to date. Iron Man (Infinity War) looks, moves and fights in brand new ways.
According to Gene Campbell, Lead Character Artist for Marvel Contest of Champions, it was a challenge that brought both excitement and a little bit of trepidation with it.
“When we first heard what this suit did, transforming and all that kind of stuff, from a technical standpoint, it really scared us,” Campbell said to FanSided in a recent phone interview. “We were like, ‘How are we going to do this? How are we going to get enough memory?’ So we really had to pick and choose which kinds of pieces we wanted to show up, when we wanted him flying and when we wanted his effects to trigger.”
Those kinds of considerations have paid off in the finished product. The Infinity War version of Shellhead glides as he fights instead of being bound to the ground, something that Campbell said was informed by previous flying characters like Green Goblin and Vulture. He also unleashes a whole new set of abilities, including his spectacular Special 3, the Infinity Break, which unleashes the whole arsenal of the Model 50 suit on an opponent, and his signature, Deflector Protocol, which kicks in when his health is low to provide Auto-Block, along with other nifty buffs.
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Contest of Champions players have already seen even more unique new abilities from Corvus Glaive and Proxima Midnight, who were given unique feels by their Thanos missions, which help them grow in power as they successfully carry out the Mad Titan’s whims. As you might expect for a game that’s been out for several years, it’s a delicate balancing act when dreaming up new abilities for a title that has more than 100 characters in the mix.
“It’s tricky, but fortunately we have a very capable and intelligent design team,” Senior Producer Luke Takeuchi said. “Ultimately, it comes down to how do we make this character unique. Looking at the movie itself, what is Cap doing in this film that’s different from what he’s done in different films? What about Iron Man? With the bleeding edge armor suit, what does that give us the flexibility to do that a normal Iron Man Mark suit wouldn’t be able to do? So kind of looking at it from that perspective of how can we generate new attacks and abilities, and then also being that we do have a competitive game, it’s also identifying what are elements in the meta that we want to either counter or new things that we want to introduce or players to think about, new gameplay mechanics, new ways to play characters.”
Now the only question is with the new Infinity War versions of Iron Man and Captain America available, does that mean the old ones are going to be afterthoughts? Campbell doesn’t think so, because every iteration of Marvel’s most iconic heroes is someone’s favorite.
“That’s the nice thing about Marvel,” he said. “The publications have been around for a very long time, they’ve done lots of different movies, they’ve done lots of different animations. As big as Infinity War is, there are still people out there who really remember and love Cap from the comics from when they were growing up, so the nostalgia factor plays into it there too.”
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the devs were subject to the same famously intense Marvel anti-spoiler veil of secrecy as anyone else involved with Infinity War.
“It was security like I have personally never seen in this industry,” Campbell said.
“We got some early reference to how the characters looked and some of the things they did in the movie,” Takeuchi added. “But in terms of actual plot points, they keep that stuff under lock and key.”
There’s no need to keep Iron Man (Infinity War) a secret any longer, as he’s now available in Marvel Contest of Champions, along with Captain America (Infinity War) in the new Nanite Crystal and Infinity Protocol Crystal. The game itself is a free download from either the App Store for iPhone and iPad or from Google Play for Android devices.