‘We want to deliver’: Multiversus’ director on its road to redemption

In its original form, MultiVersus has to go down as a perfect opportunity squandered.

Warner Bros’ take on Smash Bros launched with a varied cast of characters, a bunch of fun special moves and, given the IP at its disposal, vast degrees of potential.

When it launched, it also quickly gained that most crucial of assets – a large player base willing to engage. After a few days it was hitting Steam concurrent peak player counts of over 150,000 players, and within a month Warner Bros claimed it had been played by 20 million people.

Then the wheels fell off. I’ve already detailed what happened in the past, but to put a long story short, a stagnant Season 2 combined with some silly monetisation (such as $20 skins) meant the player base bailed on it to a dramatic degree – within seven months it had dropped by more than 99%.

After nearly a year on the sidelines licking its wounds, developer Player First Games is now preparing to bring MultiVersus back. Before, it had the luxury of calling the previous release an Open Beta, meaning it could claim it was still just experimenting.

This time there’s no such safety net – when MultiVersus returns on May 28, it will be presented as the game’s full release, with no obvious opportunity for a third attempt.

As someone who put more than 90 hours into MultiVersus the first time around, I felt the sting when Season 2 flatlined with a single new character and a seemingly endless Battle Pass grind. Although my willingness to keep the faith meant I lasted longer than most, I was indeed one of those players who eventually bailed on it, shortly before its closure was announced.

That’s why, when given the opportunity to try out the revamped MultiVersus early and also have a chat with the game’s director Tony Huynh, I jumped at the chance to ask him what went wrong and see for myself what’s being done to make it right.

What I heard and played gives me hope.

Lessons learned

I’ve seen my fair share of spin over the years when it comes to developers trying to downplay problems, but Huynh didn’t shy away from the issues MultiVersus had the first time around when questioned.

When I asked him why Season 2 was such a disaster that the game was shut down, he provided me with a refreshingly large laundry list of reasons including the netcode, the gameplay, the lack of single-player content, the monetisation and the team’s inability to release new characters on time.

“At the end of the day, we want to deliver the game that players deserve, and so we really looked at all of our learning and developed the product that you see before you now,” he told me.

“We want to deliver a great online experience, and to do that we had to rebuild everything from the ground up for our new netcode. Now we have absolute world-class netcode, so you can play with your friends seamlessly across the country and it feels like you’re offline.

“And if you look at our game, we had to re-engineer everything because we’re not just a 1v1 game. We are a rollback with four players, essentially, as our main mode, and they could be anywhere. And we also wanted to support players that didn’t have great internet, and those players won’t ruin the experience for other players.”

Certainly, from the online matches I played in the new build, I had no connection issues and fights were perfectly fluid and responsive throughout. This is obviously one person’s experience and will be tested more fully when it launches for everyone next week, but so far the signs are good.

“We want to deliver a great online experience, and to do that we had to rebuild everything from the ground up for our new netcode. Now we have absolute world-class netcode, so you can play with your friends seamlessly across the country and it feels like you’re offline.”

Huynh also told me that he felt the game’s combat mechanics were stuck in a difficult middle ground where both fighting game fanatics and complete newcomers had issues with it.

By giving all the characters a refresh and adding new modes to help players get to grips with them better – including the single-player content that had been sorely lacking before – he hopes the team has struck a better balance this time.

“Characters are being revisited,” he said. “There’s just a lot of learnings from our combat perspective and how to make that really accessible for new players, but also have depth, and also make it easier to process for everyone as well, from a spectator experience.

“The other thing is, one of our biggest learnings was that a lot of players really just love these characters. We had built a very technical fighting game, at the end of the day, and so what we want is for every player to be able to enjoy the game.

“That’s why we introduced our PVE mode, Rifts, so that players can get that experience. The interactions between the different characters, that’s what the magic of our game is in a lot of ways, so being able to deliver something for those players.

“And then allowing [Rifts] to be co-operative as well, but with our new netcode so that everyone just plays together seamlessly online, and experiences the game together, and also being able to deliver all these cool mini-games and really fun experiences, and all the events.”

Of all the new features in the revamped MultiVersus, Rifts are by far the largest addition. Each Rift has you taking on a series of single-player matches and challenges, and most of these have five tasks – winning the fight, winning with a certain character, performing certain moves during the fight and so on – to encourage the player to replay each one. Some of them also reactivate over time, allowing you to take them on again and gain extra rewards.

I was able to check out the first couple of Rifts (there were more greyed out in the menu), and they’re pretty extensive, with a lot of rewards to gain.

This is another thing Huynh told me was important for the team, and it’s something I could relate to – the first time around, players weren’t getting new content frequently enough. This was particularly problematic in the second season, where the lengthy Battle Pass grind made it feel like the team had secretly downed tools and left players to it.

“We had to really look at our content pipelines,” he told me. “We were a really small team, and when we look at it now we’re really set up to be able to deliver a lot of characters reliably, content reliably, and have a really precise and great experience from a content delivery perspective, with a ton of new events coming in and being able to give away a lot of cool stuff.

“And then, there were a lot of things we had to do to allow for players just being able to earn anything in the game. Now players can just earn Gleamium, which is our premium paid currency in the game, so nothing’s off-limits to players at this point.

“Now players can just earn Gleamium, which is our premium paid currency in the game, so nothing’s off-limits to players at this point.”

“We’re now able to make this the type of content and the game, honestly, that the players deserve, and that was the biggest learning: ‘We need to do this in order to deliver the game that players deserve, so how do we deliver the original vision of what we had?’.”

The ability to earn Gleamium, the game’s premium currency, is one of the biggest hopes I had for the new MultiVersus – and one that theoretically solves the issue of some skins being exclusively available through real cash purchases – but it’s not the only change to the game’s currency system.

Gone is the catch-all Gold currency, and it’s been replaced by three separate currencies which are used to obtain different things.

Fighter currency is used to unlock new fighters, Perk currency unlocks abilities to apply to your fighter, and Prestige currency – which is earned by collecting new cosmetic skins and items – can be spent on other unique cosmetics which can only be acquired with Prestige.

On paper it may read like it’s complicating things for no real reason, but in reality the different currencies – combined with the numerous events which each have their own set of daily and weekly tasks – just make the game feel more busy, in a good way.

The first time around players had a single Battle Pass with a handful of daily and weekly challenges, but this time they have different sets of challenges, each giving different awards, allowing players to decide which ones to focus on (of course, they can take them all on if they have the spare time). It just feels like there’s a lot more going on this time, the complete opposite of how it felt in its dying few months the last time.

Fighting Fit

All the new features are certainly welcome, but let’s face it – the fighters are always the most important factor in an ensemble fighting game, and it’s a steady stream of new faces that will keep players interested. Indeed, the fact that the previous Season 2 introduced a single character (Marvin the Martian) is one of the main reasons interest collapsed.

Each character in the game has a wildly different range of special moves, and last time around those who took their fighting games seriously would complain about how each new character unbalanced things. This would then be followed by a series of balancing patches.

My theory back then was that by constantly balancing each new character the development team was building a work backlog, which eventually ended up with new characters being delayed. I asked Huynh if my hunch was correct, and while he suggested there was some truth to it, he also said the team had put measures in place to make it less of an issue this time.

“I think in general new characters will affect balance, clearly,” he said. “That’s true of our game as well as other games. But I think that we were very early on in that process as well, and were trying to learn how the game should be balanced.

“I think in general new characters will affect balance, clearly. That’s true of our game as well as other games. But I think that we were very early on in that process as well, and were trying to learn how the game should be balanced.”

“At the end of the day, I think what we tried to really focus on was having the game be fun for you to play as, but also for players that play against you to have fun as well. And so with our new mechanics and the foundational layer that we built up in the combat systems now, I think that’s true.

“It’s a much easier job for us to actually tune against that now. And, again, not every character is going to be perfect at launch. But I think that we’ve learned a lot in the way that we build characters as well as the pipelines that we have.

“But also our base combat system now, I think, is more fun to play from a foundational level. And a lot of that is just simple learnings, but also execution of that as well. And that took time for us to build up that knowledge base and the team to do that.”

For games like this, character reveals are a great way to renew hype – just ask Nintendo with its Super Smash Bros Ultimate trailers. One big issue preventing these moments for MultiVersus last time was the way in which practically every new character was revealed by dataminers before they were officially announced.

The nature of a live service game means that data is regularly placed in the backend to prepare for future updates, which is why live service titles often tend to be the victims of datamining. I asked Huynh if anything had been put in place to avoid it happening this time.

“A lot of things,” he replied. “It is an arms race, so it’ll be constant protections against new and creative ways to datamine. At the end of the day, we’ve done a lot, we’ve learned a lot, but again, it is an arms race.

“I can’t promise that there won’t ever be leaks or anything like that. But on our end, we’ve done, I think, above and beyond what industry standards and protections there are.

“That being said, everyone’s very creative and they’re… they’re just very, very smart. We’re reacting, and we put a lot of stuff in place, but I’m just continuously impressed by their level of ability to get through things.”

“Impressed and depressed, I’d imagine,” I replied.

“That’s right,” he smiled. “I mean, yeah, I think it’s a disservice to the players, honestly, that these things are ruined, and it’s deflating for the team as well.

“I think it’s a disservice to the players, honestly, that these things are ruined, and it’s deflating for the team as well.”

“But more importantly, it’s – I wouldn’t use the word ‘depressing’ – it’s just unfortunate for the players. They don’t get the grand reveal that we have planned, and a lot of the air is sucked out of the room.

“But these things happen, so we’re trying to prevent them from occurring in the future.”

One of the big surprises this time was the addition of Jason Voorhees, the slasher villain from the Friday the 13th series of horror movies.

Jason is unlocked as soon as players activate the Season 1 Premium Battle Pass, and players returning from the Open Beta will get the Premium Battle Pass, including Jason, for free as a thank-you.

Of the four characters already announced for the game’s return, three of them – Jason, Banana Guard and the Joker – will be available on day one (the fourth, Agent Smith from The Matrix, will follow later on in Season 1). I had a chance to play as all three, and Jason and the Banana Guard in particular are a joy to play as.

Jason is an especially delightful treat, his enormous figure dwarfed only by the Iron Giant. Fans of his movies will spot plenty of references in his moveset, including a nod to a fan-favourite kill in which he puts his opponent in a sleeping bag, slams them on the floor then chucks them away.

“We want to surprise and delight players, at the end of the day, and I think that Jason was one of those things that we felt would do that,” Huynh told me.

“Every character on the cast that we announce has to have some sort of angle. We’re not satisfied with just adding another character to the cast, we want to have a diverse cast that supports a lot of different types of players, who gravitate towards different characters.

“We thought that Jason, being our first horror entrant – and also, the theming around the first Season really is villains, because in the past we really went more hero-focused, and so this time we were trying to get more villain representation into the game – that, with the horror aspect of it, we thought we could have a cool twist on that.

“Also, one of our favourite movies on the team is Jason X, so the team just got super excited about it. And then any time you can get the sleeping bag scene and reference that, that’s a huge win for the team as well as for players.”

Incidentally, a Jason X skin happens to be the final reward for getting to the end of the Battle Pass, a genuine delight for Friday the 13th fans.

“One of our favourite movies on the team is Jason X, so the team just got super excited about it. And then any time you can get the sleeping bag scene and reference that, that’s a huge win for the team as well as for players.”

“So that was the impetus behind Jason, it was one of the things where we saw the team get excited about something, and that’s really why I’m in game development – those types of moments where the team just goes ‘we want to do something really off-the-wall and unexpected’.

“I mean, we just announced a Banana Guard and that would not have been expected in a lot of players’ eyes, but it’s one of those characters who we think is adorable and loveable and, at the same time, will expand what’s on offer. Ultimately it explains that no matter what character you really, really like, there’s a chance it can get into MultiVersus.

“So we want to keep that. That’s the original vision. We want to be able to support these fanbases and players that really love these characters and show that nothing is off the table.”

Is nothing truly off the table, however? I pointed out to Huynh that every character in the game so far is from a Warner Bros IP, whereas previous Warner Bros titles like Lego Dimensions and the last few Mortal Kombat games have brought in guest characters from outside of Warner Bros, such as Marty McFly or The Terminator.

I asked him if this would ever happen in MultiVersus, or if the game’s main purpose is to celebrate (and, ultimately, promote) Warner Bros brands. According to Huynh, non-WB characters could happen in the future if he gets his way.

“You know, when going outside of the Warner Bros library, things become a little more difficult,” he explained. “The third-party licensing and legal stuff is well above my ability to comprehend.

“That being said, it’s the dream, and so I’m going to do everything I can to make that happen for players, because I think that’s what players really want in my mind, right? So again, there are difficulties here that I don’t think players would believe, but I will say that logistics and building an IP relationship is also one of those things.

“I’ve been on both sides of it, on the IP holder side of it and now with MultiVersus using the IP. And your IP and your characters are your babies, so we want to make sure that everybody’s comfortable with that, and with us taking that on. That requires a special kind of relationship and that takes time to build up, on top of the logistical side of things.

“So I will say, I’m going to work hard to make that happen. But at the end of the day, there’s no promises there. It is a difficult process. But yeah, know that I’m personally working hard on it to make that a reality.”

For now, what I’ve seen of the new MultiVersus is enough to reassure me – for now, at least – that Player First Games has listened to the community, identified what went wrong the first time and made changes in an attempt to entice the fanbase back again.

“For now, what I’ve seen of the new MultiVersus is enough to reassure me – for now, at least – that Player First Games has listened to the community, identified what went wrong the first time and made changes in an attempt to entice the fanbase back again.”

Personally, as someone who put so much into the game the first time around but grew impatient with the lack of updates and walked away from it, what I’ve played has me excited for its return again and I’ll be back on day one.

Of course, as is always the case with free-to-play games, there’s still going to be a degree of wariness for the first few months. Similar releases have talked a good game and appeared to offer generous free-to-play terms at launch, before slowly adding progressively more intrusive and exploitative monetisation with each new season.

There’s just no way of knowing at this stage how MultiVersus is going to evolve over the coming months (and potentially years), but its offerings are at least reasonable at launch, and the team has the added benefit – if you can call it that – of having already experienced failure with the game, meaning they know what befalls them if the players’ trust is lost again.

Ending our chat, I asked Tony what the plan is for the game if it manages to turn things around this time and deliver a game that remains successful for months and years to come. I asked if there’ll ever be a point where it’s decided that there are enough characters and it’s time to draw a line underneath it.

“And we’re gonna try to really realise and put the love into these characters so that each one plays the way that you think they should play as a fan of that character.

“That’s a huge part of what we’re trying to do, and hopefully that comes across. And we’ll keep doing that. I think that there’s just a lot of space that’s unexplored and I’m really excited about the future.

“I think there’s a lot of cool stuff on the horizon that I think will continue to surprise players if, knock on wood, we’re able to avoid leaks and stuff like that. But yeah, I think it’s going to be super exciting.”

Exciting is certainly the word I’d use for now. MultiVersus failed to live up to its potential the first time around, but this re-release gives it a rare second attempt to get it right, something very few live service games get.

There’s no guarantee it will succeed this time, but the measures put in place will certainly give it a fighting chance.