When Marvel’s Avengers first came out, I don’t think I played anything else for around a week I enjoyed it that much. I defended the game vigorously where I could, but that started to dwindle when the end game portion of the game hit, it got stale, the game was rife with bugs among many other issues.
I stopped playing for a while. The PS5 was on the horizon, and my PS4 met its end, kind of at the right time as the PS5 was only 2 days away. I knew the Kate Bishop DLC was on the horizon so I was happy enough to wait for that.
Unfortunately, I never got the time because I was in the middle of playing Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, Watch Dogs: Legion and other games.
The time came for me today to finally download the game back onto my PS5, ready with my friends to squad up. The game loads, and I’m stuck looking at a level 1 Iron Man, confused, agitated.
I found out through posts on Reddit that the saves were client side only. I decided to jump on live chat with Square Enix to clarify. In the end I got told to speak to PlayStation, and a half-assed apology with no sense of care in the world. That’s the second chat with them, and both times have been a horrendous experience.
I checked my PS5 for the cloud saves, and lo and behold, every single game is there with the exception of Avengers. For some reason, the game wasn’t saving the progress to my actual cloud storage.
However, for me, that shouldn’t be an issue. Marvel’s Avengers is largely an online game, very similar to Destiny, The Division and Anthem. More importantly, and perhaps one major difference is that all the above games are server-side saves as far as I am aware.
The same way with Call of Duty and Fortnite, you can go to a friends house, sign in to your account, load the game up and the same progress is there.
I believe as of now, most games that are mostly online are server-side saves. I understand any single player game such as Last of Us 2 would obviously be client-side, but the difference here – the majority of the time you don’t spend a ridiculous amount of hours grinding for 150 power on Last of Us like you do with the Avengers.
If a save becomes corrupt, someone’s PlayStation, Xbox or PC becomes damaged then if the save file hasn’t uploaded to the cloud through the respective gaming platform then they lose everything. Every ounce of progress.
This was the final knife in the back from them as of now, and I absolutely and honestly refuse to ever return to this game. I have no cause to stand up and defend it. I’m not a gaming developer, but this has to be one of the stupidest decisions for a game like this. A game that is MOSTLY online.
I’m disappointed, I was so close to a platinum trophy and I was ready to get it with the Kate DLC, but never have I ever been so put off by a game in my life. I can say I easily pumped around 250 hours into this game in total, maybe more. Most likely more.
Whilst understandably in a sense, it’s in their terms and that’s fair, but I just can’t honestly wrap my head around the fact a game like this is just purely client-based saves, and not server-side. Especially for a game of this calibre.
There is likely many people out there that got rid of their PS4, or Xbox and never realised. A warning in advance before the next generation consoles came out would have been a good shout, but nothing, as per usual.
The games list of issues constantly continues with many fans and critics alike still vastly disappointed in the product, I think now I’m on the same boat.
Goodbye Marvel’s Avengers – I guess it was fun while it lasted.
