MultiVersus

MultiVersus.com | Steam | PlayStation | Xbox

Before I lay out my thoughts, I wanna mention when I'm writing this, because way moreso than other games I've covered here so far, this game changes quite a bit with updates so some of the things I mention might not be the case in the future. It is late September 2024, and about a week into Season 3 as of writing (most of) this. Check on the official website to see what the current Season is if you're reading this long after it's posted.

Free, Live Service

Getting into potentially the most obvious talking point first, this game is a free to play, live service game, and that's good and/or bad depending on how you look at things. Starting off with the good, I have gotten welll over 200 hours out of this game already, I've been largely enjoying my time, and I haven't had to pay a dime.

 

Literally none of this game is locked behind a paywall. While there is the caveat that I got a headstart from playing the beta (unlocking Jake, Batman, Wonder Woman, and receiving the first battlepass for free), I've been able to unlock nearly every character, and plenty of cosmetics in my time of playing so far.

 

The devs have been pumping out content for this game WAY faster than I've ever seen from a fighting game. New characters and stages only take like a month to release, and in the meantime new cosmetics, Rifts, and balance changes are also frequently being released.

 

With that said however, the live service model does leave the game feeling like it's in a constantly rushed state. The game has quite a few bugs to look past, and every time a big update comes out, they always seem to be undercut by issues. Just recently, while the shop before would frequently crash the game on PS4, now it frequently freezes the game on seemingly all systems; Powerpuff Girls has a perk named Rainbow Dash which was temporarily removed only like 2 hours after their release due to it enabling really easy 0 to deaths (it was then nerfed and restored within 3 days); Weekly Missions didn't work for me for like a month until the recent hotfix; and Wonder Woman was mysteriously shrunk without any mention from the Patch Notes:

 

Ignore the GIF's background, I flipped the second image just to line the characters up.

 

Update: Wonder Woman's size was reverted as I was writing this.

Shout out to the time Iron Giant was removed (without prior notice) for 10 days (June 3rd - June 13th) for being loaded with infinites, which in turn messed up someone's tournament run. And and shout out to the smoke in the Batcave which seemingly doesn't work properly on player 1. And and and shout out to Taunt granting you partial control over your selected characters in the Mr. Meeseeks Golf minigame:

 

I hope this stays, this is hilarious and non-problematic to me.

And of course with any big business free to play game, there's micro-transactions, which a lot of people hate. I don't really mind them though, since as I stated before, nothing is hard-locked behind a paywall. I'll admit though, some costumes being $20 is crazy, even the one based on Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson.

 

A huge talking point on launch was the character prices, they're about $8-10 depending on how much Gleamium you're willing to spend at once, adding up to $200 for the base roster. And yeah, that's insane. It's substantially better now though with the addition of the $5 Starter Packs, which come with 2 characters, and enough Gleamium to buy a 3rd.

 

It's still worth criticizing though that there's not enough of these to buy the full roster, so if you want everybody you'll still have to pay way too much for a few characters. According to the wiki there's only 7 Starter Bundles at the moment, which allows you to buy 21 characters for $35, which at the moment would leave you with 7 characters that would cost an additional $65 (These numbers are assuming you buy Beetlejuice last, who's marked up at the moment).

As for unlocking the characters for free, it's not as bad as someone people would suggest. If you've heard calculations that estimated each character takes over 100 hours of grinding to unlock, they probably didn't factor in Events, which to be fair haven't been super feasible to predict, but they play a huge role in unlocking characters. It's hard to precisely estimate how effort much it takes to unlock each character, but to make an estimate, they've taken me roughly 11 hours to unlock each (Note: while my playtime is shown above, I subtracted 10 hours from it to account for my time spent in the beta). Since things are so dependent on Events though, I think it makes more sense to estimate time in-between character unlocks in real world days rather than hours spent in-game, and at the moment I've been able to unlock a character roughly every 5 days, which I personally don't think is that bad. Again, the Events aren't super predictable, so these estimates can definitely vary.

 

Also, in case you missed it, all characters and perks are back to being free in Local Versus and Training Mode, so if you're planning to play against friends locally, you don't need to unlock anything which I think is pretty sweet.

The Beta

To a lot of people, this game's current release is forever stuck in the shadow of the 2022 Fighting Game Of The Year, the MultiVersus beta. As to me though, eh, I enjoyed the beta, and even voted for it to be the Fighting Game Of 2022, but I wasn't really upset at the stuff changed or missing. I'm willing to cut the devs some slack since they rebuilt the game in Unreal Engine 5, but I don't really blame people for being disappointed though when stuff like Items, Arcade Mode, Ranked, and even a ton of the settings from the beta were totally missing at launch, and some of that stuff's seemingly never coming back. I could totally imagine myself having been more upset if I had simply played the beta more.

 

Regardless though, I found it funny that pros had to deal with stage hazards for a little while. And as for the initially unchangeable 30 frame input buffer, I have some heated thoughts on the topic, but I'll just let this other Void clip sum up my thoughts:

 

Link because I'm having technical difficulties embedding it.

 

He's nicer in full context.

 

As for the decreased speed, I don't really mind that either, and I find the criticisms of it particularly overblown. I'd say the game's maybe a little faster than Smash 4, not slower than Smash Bros Brawl.

 

As for a controversial change I actually quite like, characters are bigger now than in the beta, which just makes it easier to actually hit your opponents, and I'll get into this later but for better or for worse the game is way more explosive now, and I think that's in part due to the characters being bigger.

 

Another change I really appreciate is the rework to Attack Decay. Attack Decay and Cooldowns were by far my least favorite parts of the beta, and I felt Attack Decay was the more overbearing and unnecessary of the 2, so to see it gutted so hard in the proper release makes me happy. There's a misconception that Attack Decay was removed, but it's still very provably there:

 

Gameplay

This is easily one of my favorite platform fighters control wise, because it streamlines a lot of stuff. For example, there aren't tilt and smash inputs, Down + Attack simply gives you a Down Attack, there's no distinction on how fast you pressed Attack after Down. Another big thing is the lack of a distinction between walking and running, every character just kinda power-walks, or jogs everywhere. Design choices like that make this game very comfortable to control which I really appreciate.

 

One of my favorite mechanics in this game is Dodges. Dodges aren't just for dodging, they're also useful for ground dashing, 8-way air-dashing, grounded air-dashing, and super jumping (both on the ground or in the air). I'd say air movement is particularly versatile in MultiVersus, in a way that particularly reminds me of Melty Blood which I quite like. The way the Dodge Meter itself is balanced is also really fun to me. When you run out, you enter a state called Dodge Fatigue in which the speed of your Dodges is gutted, and the invulnerability removed, leaving you extremely vulnerable. It's kinda like Burnout in Street Fighter 6 (it's also just straight up called Burnout by a lot of people), although in comparison, I'd say Dodge Fatigue is more potentially lethal, but is also easier to get out of which I think is cool.

As for the other main recourse, Move Cooldowns are definitely not a favorite of mine. They're reasonable way to allow characters to have insane moves without completely breaking the game, but I'm not a huge fan of those insane moves in the first place. Some moves like Bugs's rockets just feel like they aren't built with any universal counterplay in mind, you just gotta hope your character has something equally game warping to deal with it. On the bright side, the Bugs players probably love their crazy tools, and hey I, a Black Adam main, love his incredibly polarizing stuff. Something kinda cool with Move Cooldowns though is that characters may still be left with something after they've spent a move, potentially completely different moves. It varries wildly on a case to case basis though. For examples, here are Steven's Up, Side, and Neutral Specials:

Something else important to note is that while the devs seemingly try to design the game around 1v1's and 2v2's, things definitely seem prioritized toward 2v2's. A lot of moves seemingly just don't have their full functionality in 1v1's. For example, Agent Smith's Down Special is this slow but rewarding command grab projectile:

and in 2v2's, he can apply it to his teammate which allows them to throw it out by attacking, or allows Smith to teleport to his teammate, both of which vastly increase this move's utility.

 

One thing I think is on the cusp of being really cool is the Perks system. I think a lot of pre-select mechanics in fighting games are really neat, and I think for the most part MultiVersus's Perks are pretty good at not feeling that bad to miss out on, but unfortunately they don't feel very well balanced. I can't say with certainty that they aren't balanced, but feel-wise the passive stat Perks just feel better than most of the others, because most of the others are just hard to utilize, and/or have really niche utility. I doubt I'm alone on this since most people in Gold Rank and above tend to gravitate towards the same few Perks. Also, some characters' Signature Perks are totally just way better than others. I'm not entertaining the idea that Comin' Through Doc and Stay Limber, Dude are of equal strength. The Signature Perks don't actually bother me as much though.

Characters themselves are pretty fun, and have some really creative movesets. It can be kinda hard to learn some of them though when so many moves have so many weird, specific properties. For example, Gizmo's car can normally be driven it into people, do wheelies, do flips while in the air, be jumped out of it, and re-entered with the Item Pick-Up button. After jumping out of it though, if he does Up Special nearby the car, then he homes in on it (which can be interrupted by hitting an opponent, or by latching onto your teammate for Gizmo's Backpack stance), re-enters it, and triggers it to launch and explode. Also, when he's not in it, his opponents can attack it directly to destroy it. Also also for some reason the popcorn from Up Attack homes in on the car when nearby, which also also also in turn lets the notes from his Neutral Special indirectly follow the car since they orbit the popcorn. I could go into even more detail, but I think you can get the idea already. It's cool, but also kind of confusing, but also kinda simple in practice. You can just Side Special > Jump > Up Special and the car will go 💥BOOM💥

 

This is somewhat minor but, it doesn't help that some of the movelists are straight up incorrect. Jason only gains Armor from the Gray Health from his Neutral Special, not every source of Gray Health as the movelist would suggest.

One area I think the game is somewhat lacking in is the stages. The competive stages are pretty good I think, especially as patches help make certain ones less polarizing, but when playing casual matches most of the stages feel really tame. The only ones I think are particularly great for casual matches are Townsville and The Court 1. Dexter's Lab 1 has the potential to be a fun casual stage also, but I think it perhaps just scrolls too slowly to really reach its full potential.

Game Flow

This game can feel relatively limiting sometimes, but I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes I think about this one video that compared Smash and MultiVersus to Marvel Vs Capcom and Street Fighter respectively, and initially I scoffed at the comparison, but the more I play MultiVersus, the more I realize the slower paced movement does give it a sort of methodical feeling, kinda like what I've felt playing Street Fighter. I still haven't bothered watching that video in full though since I still can't quite get behind the comparison. Regardless, to reiterate for clarity, I'm alright with the game's speed, and I think the movement is interesting.

 

If you've seen my social media posts for this game, you've probably seen just how explosive it is. It's definitely on a character to character basis, but Black Adam is one of the most explosive fighting game characters I've ever played by a wide margin. While modern fighting games have trended more towards high damage, this game's on a whole other level. Sequences like this where people just spontaneously die are an incredibly frequent occurrence: 

I got all of the clips in the first video in less than an hour.

I love this. I love exploding people, it's awesome.

Rifts

The Rift mode is decently fun. They were off to a rocky start with Season 1 since you had to replay Rifts over and over on multiple difficulties if you wanted to unlock everything during the Agent Smith Event. Also, the higher difficulties just got harder than I think was fun, for example I have still yet to beat this specific Megalodog fight properly, even though I maxed out all of my Horror Gems.

 

Season 2 was a much smoother experience though because you only had to play through each Rift once to complete the Events tied to them, and never got as absurdly difficult. Important thing to note, play with a friend because the Rifts are seemingly just not very well balanced around playing solo, unless you just choose to breeze through things on Easy difficulty.

Hopefully this is less and less of an issue as time goes on but, a ton of gimmicks in Rifts feel really underutilized. While it would be nice to see certain gimmicks further explored in Rifts, it would also be really nice to have a lot of them in Local Versus as wacky settings and game modes.

Training Mode

This game's Training Mode sucks. Forget save states, forget hitbox and frame data displays, forget dummy recordings, forget controlling the dummy directly with a second controller, this game has none of that. Training mode's only really good for trying out character's movesets and perks, and it's kinda okay for labbing out combos due to the Dodge After Hitstun setting. I only say "kind of" because you can't control how the dummy will DI. There's a few other things you can do I guess like practice Parries against certain attacks, but if you have 2 controllers, Local Versus arguably has more utility for labbing, and Local Versus isn't exactly a good way to lab stuff out.

Online Experience

While this game does have rollback netcode, I wouldn't actually say the netcode is that good. The main issue is that it's server based rather than peer to peer, so people are asymmetrically affected.

 

Also as you can see in the footage above, rollback isn't the only thing this game likes to do to sync up connections. It also likes to stutter and eat your inputs, or drop the framerate horribly low (and sometimes also eat your inputs). Strangely, which one it chooses to do seems to be console dependent. I've been playing on base PS4, and I mostly just get framerate drops. On the bright side, there's crossplay.

I have no idea why but you're not allowed to play Online 2v2's or Rifts with a teammate on the same device which feels really arbitrarily limiting. I guess in some Rift minigames, like in the Mr. Meeseeks Golf, players' separate screens are able to focus on different spots, but also those few minigames bug out sometimes and zoom out to show both players anyways. Also I guess you oftentimes can't see your teammates' Perks until after everyone's selected their Perks, but I'm pretty sure that's a bug, not a specifically designed feature.

 

Ranked hasn't been that great. It seems to be getting better with updates, but so far it's been quite grindy. I've been able to get myself up to Ranks with people of my skill level, but only as Black Adam. As nearly everyone else I'm decent at, I've just been slogging Bronze, Silver, and Gold, frequently getting people to forfeit against me because I body them super hard.

Something else I wanna mention about the online experience is that this game has the meanest playerbase I've ever experienced. At most, I've only ever received like 2 hate messages in a game before, but from playing MultiVersus I've received hate messages from 5 people so far. I doubt this is the worst player-base out there, and I don't blame the devs or the game in the first place, I just find it a noteworthy part of my experience. Here's a pair of messages that particularly humored me:

 

They sent the first one mid-set, and I thought "Oh, I thought we were both playing pretty defensively. Things have been going well when I go on the offensive though, so screw it, I'll play more aggressively". Here's that next game, you can decide for yourself if you thought I was playing aggressively or not:

 

Conclusion

I think MultiVersus is very fun, and pretty unique even when compared to other platform fighters, but it's compromised by a lot of the usual pitfalls of modern big businesses video games. I can totally see why it gets such a bad rap, but I can look past it's problems so I'm probably gonna continue playing it in the foreseeable future. Perhaps I'll even make more blog posts about it, I dunno. I wanna experiment more with the types of things I post here, but I'm not entirely sure how I wanna go about it.

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