Players won’t be teaming up to save the universe in Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, and the game’s Senior Creative Director just explained why. After weeks of speculation, Square Enix and Eidos Montreal revealed their space-faring, 80’s rock-infused action/RPG title at this week’s E3 livestream event. During the showcase, most of the developer’s time was dedicated to showing off their latest Marvel title in an in-depth trailer and deep-dive session.
In Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy, players will step into the jet-boots of Peter “Star-Lord” Quill as he leads his ragtag team of mercenaries on a mission to save the universe and jam to Bonnie Tyler. Along the way, he’ll need to guide his fellow Guardians with dialogue choices that shape the ongoing narrative and give them commands in battle, and there will even be some stylish DLC costumes available at launch to let players rock out as classic versions of the characters they’ve come to love from James Gunn’s smash MCU movies.
However, one thing Guardians Of The Galaxy fans won’t be doing in the new game is teaming up for a round of multiplayer. In a recent interview with IGN, Eidos Montreal Senior Creative Director Jean-François Dugas explained why Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy will be single-player only.
“We started to discuss different opportunities like multiplayer or co-op. But we were really looking at what Guardians of the Galaxy is, and it’s all about those characters. It’s all about colourful personalities clashing with each other, and sometimes getting along. It’s a mix of all these things, their qualities, their flaws. And we thought ‘It would be freaking awesome if you could be one of the Guardians, and put you at the centre of that to be surrounded by those characters’. And this is how it came to be.”
Aside from not featuring multiplayer, Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy will be set in a different continuity from titles like Marvel’s Spider-Man or Marvel’s Avengers, effectively dashing some fans’ hopes of a shared Marvel gaming universe like the comics or the MCU. However, players are still excited to jump into the new Guardians title, with no less than movie director James Gunn expressing excitement for the title not too long after its reveal at E3 last Sunday.
The idea of having a team of players join forces as Rocket Raccoon or Groot sounds like it could have been a fun co-op mode, but Square Enix is clearly focusing on putting players in the role of Star-Lord and his position as leader to a dysfunctional team of rogues in a single-player storyline. Regardless, fans will be able to blast off with the quirkiest heroes in the universe when Marvel’s Guardians Of The Galaxy launches this October.
