November Community Video - Command Points & 5-Star Phoenix

Hi, everyone!

In this month’s Community Video, Demiurge designers, Casey Malone and Will Jennings-Hess discuss MPQ’s new Command Points feature, unveil our new 5-Star character, Phoenix, and drop hints about what’s in store for the future!



You can WATCH IT HERE.

You can read a transcript of the video below.

November Community Video Transcript:

Intro

Will: Hey everybody, welcome to the November update video for Marvel Puzzle Quest. My name is Will Jennings-Hess and I'm the lead designer on Marvel Puzzle Quest.

Casey: I'm Casey Malone and I'm a content designer here on Marvel Puzzle Quest.

Will: Cool, so let's get started!

Casey: We've got so much stuff to talk about today.

Will: Yeah.

Casey: The first thing is that we're announcing our next 5-Star! I hope you guys are excited to open some Legendary Tokens. This is a character people have been asking for forever, so I really hope you guys are excited for it. We're doing 5-Star Jean Grey (Phoenix). This is full on, green and gold, Phoenix Force Phoenix. So I'm really excited.

Phoenix

Casey: She does a lot of cool new things so I wanted to give you guys a rundown of her powers then hopefully you can see some stuff on the forums and check her out.

Casey: She's got three abilities, and the first one is something special I think. It's a Green Passive ability called From the Ashes. And in true Jean Grey form, her ability once she becomes downed, she places a Red Countdown tile that brings her back to life.

Will: How many times has she died in the comics and she's used something like that?

Casey: Yeah, she's been back and forth a few times. And she's still dead right now, but who knows post-Secret Wars.

Casey: So the Red Countdown tile brings her back with a percentage of her health and that percentage increases as you level up the power and replaces From the Ashes with a brand new power. I'm not going to spoil what that is, you guys can check it out. But, that's a really cool ability.

Casey: Her second ability is a Purple ability called Psychic Rapport. Anyone who's read any of those old Chris Clairemont comics know the sort of love triangle between her and Cyclops and Wolverine was a really important part of that storyline. I really wanted to capture that with the character.

Casey: So it's a hybrid passive and active ability. The active ability, when it fires it converts tiles to Red tiles so she works well with Cyclops, but, then as a passive, if you make a match 5 (which happens a lot when you place those Red tiles...) you convert a bunch of tiles you're going to create a match 5, she increases the strength of special tiles (friendly special tiles) and decreases the strength of enemy special tiles. Most of Wolverine's make a lot of Strikes, so she boosts those while lessening any drawbacks. So I like that ability a lot.

Casey: Her last ability, Red ability, is Psychic Flames. The Phoenix Force is kind of this wild, uncontrollable force that kind of takes over the owner, like if you guys have read Avengers Vs. X-Men, you know that when a mutant gets his hands on the Phoenix Force it doesn't always end well.

Casey: But the way Psychic Flames works is that it deals a bunch of damage and creates a bunch of friendly Strike tiles, but if there are too many [friendly] Strike tiles on the board, Jean starts placing Black enemy Attack tiles. So it starts to corrupt her a little bit, and turn on her. I really hope that is captured in the design of the character.

Casey: People have been asking for Jean forever, she's one of my favorite characters. I really hope you guys check her out. That's the first of a bunch of stuff we want to talk about. Will, you want to take it from here?

Will: Sure. Oh, so she's going to show up in Legendary Packs starting the second week of November.

Casey: Yeah, she's the release after X-23.

Will: So, one way to get her is to go after those Legendary Tokens that you've been going after. But we're introducing another way for you to get your hands on Legendary Packs and that's the next thing I want to talk about in this video.

Command Points

Will: We're introducing a brand new feature called Command Points.

Casey: Yeah!

Will: Yeah. I'm really excited about this. We've been releasing a bunch of features through this year that have to do with deepening the elder game for players that are experienced players that have been playing for a while and want more goals and more to reach for. We introduced 5-Stars a couple months ago. We're introducing Command Points and we've got some other stuff related to this goal that we've got coming up the rest of this year. But anyway, Command Points. What are they?

Will: All over the game in lots of different places. Mission rewards, Event rewards, in your Daily rewards you're going to get these Command Points a couple at a time. And eventually when you get enough of them, when you've got 25 of them, you can turn them in for a Legendary Pack. Also if you collect a whole bunch of them, that's the way we're going to let you upgrade a specific 5-Star ability that you want to go after. So similarly to how you might upgrade a particular 2 or 3-Star or 4-Star with Hero Points, you get enough Command Points to get it. It's going to take a lot.

<Casey laughs>

Will: You can get a particular 5-Star ability if you want.

Casey: This has been really exciting for me because we play. We're players, and as someone who is making the transition from high 3-Star land to low 4-Star land this is a great way to open Legendary Packs. I'm personally very excited for this.

Will: Yeah yeah. If you're having a hard time getting that highest progression reward in Versus or if you have a hard time getting your hand on Legendary Tokens, this is a way that you can slowly and surely work your way toward Legendary Tokens one at a time. So I'm really excited about that and what that will do for the game for people's ability to continue to make progress even after they've maxed out all their 3-Stars.

Command Point Roll Out

Will: So when this comes out, we're really excited about it and we want you to be really excited about it too so we're going to do something special when it comes out. We're going to give away a bunch of bonus Command Points the first weekend that they come out.

Casey: All over the place. Deadpool's Daily...

Will: Yep, there's going to be one a day in the Deadpool Daily. Just everyone who shows up, that has played the game in the two weeks leading up to when we release it... I'm not sure exactly when this video is going to come out, but I think pretty soon after this video comes out, we're aiming for the 4th of November.

Will: If you've played between October 26th and when Command Points come out we're going to give you 5 of them. If you play Deadpool Daily and you beat all the missions we're going to give you 1 a day there.

Casey: I'm going to have to recruit a 1-Star character, I sold all mine! Now I have to get one, so I can get Command Points.

Will: Yeah, I've done that just to get the Iso-8.

Will: And there's going to be a Versus event running that weekend, and if you end it with a score of over 300 we'll give you a few more. On that Monday, November 9th, if you've connected your game to Facebook to backup your game or share prizes with your friends by Monday November 9th we'll give you a couple more.

Will: And if you've ever supported Marvel Puzzle Quest ever by buying anything in the game of any size we're going to give you some Command Points for that. So lots of different ways to give you Command Points for a head start towards that Legendary Pack.

Casey: That's great. I love opening Legendary Tokens. <laughs> I don't get to do it that often but, I like doing it.

Upcoming Teasers

Casey: And we wanted to give you a bit of a teaser for what's coming up in this year. On top of Jean Grey, the Phoenix version specifically, who is one of our most requested characters, we have a couple more highly requested characters coming up.

Will: Yeah, I'm super excited for some of those.

Casey: Yeah. In the case of those characters we're also going to be doing some story events to support them. I know you guys have wanted story events for a long time. We've really wanted to do some but with Galactus and Ultron's [events] we haven't been able to, so now we're doing a couple before the end of the year. We hope it makes the rollout of these characters that you've really really wanted something special so I'm excited for it all.

Will: Cool. And a couple of other things that are coming this year are that we've been working hard on some changes to the way story events work... The way difficulty works in story events... There's sometimes issues in story events where it can feel like it's not better to level up your characters so we're fixing that so it will always be better to progress in the game.

Casey: That way, if you open one of these Legendary Tokens and you get a Silver Surfer it won't mess up your roster. We know some people on Reddit are real nervous with what to do with their Silver Surfers so this will really help.

Will: And there's another big feature coming related to the elder game stuff that we've been talking about, and I'm really excited to reveal that when it comes.

Casey: Oh, yeah, you've been working really hard on that.

<both laugh>

Casey: We work hard on everything.

Closing

Will: But there's big changes coming to Marvel Puzzle Quest through the rest of the year. You've got a lot to look forward to and we're looking forward to it.

Casey: Yeah, me too. Thanks so much for playing!