Comic for Wednesday 6/16 (Early High Res) (Patreon)

Oof, I truly do not envy the devs tasked with making these games.

On the one hand, Disney is likely not going to let them make an actual MCU game because the MCU continuity is so tightly orchestrated, and any story set in that universe would immediately be thought of as a canon part of the whole.

But it's clear that the MCU portrayals of these characters have now become so engrained in our popular culture, they can't truly break free in a different direction because they want to play to what the audience loves.

I think it puts them in this really awkward middle situation where they're trying to do both, and convincing people of neither. It's exacerbated by the corporate lingo they keep tossing around about "doing their own spin on these character," which only draws more attention to how much inspiration they're actually drawing from the movies.

The Avengers game suffered from this to a degree, the doppleganger syndrome, but the footage of Guardians looks way more flagrant, in that the personalities of the team look lifted straight from James Gunn's pen.

Don't get me wrong here, the game looks really cool and I'm excited to play it. But I almost wonder if this "Marvel game universe" wouldn't have been better served by simply leaning into an entirely different direction, to avoid the comparisons. Perhaps something with more sylized art, a la Ultimate Alliance, or super faithful to the comics, or maybe even just super dark just for the sake of change of pace.