LEGO Marvel’s Avengers has an open world hub on 3DS
In the past, handheld versions of the LEGO games have been a bit compromised. Warner Bros. and TT Games usually deliver a different experience which doesn’t really match the console versions. With LEGO Marvel’s Avengers, however, the team has managed to include “a full free-roaming open world hub city”.
Director Steve Thornton wrote in a LEGO.com blog post:
“I’m incredibly pleased to announce that for the first time ever, we have a full free-roaming open world hub city on handheld; a full 1:1 scale rendition of the console Manhattan city hub is playable on both Nintendo 3DS and PlayStation Vita, with no breaks, cuts or loading screens. Although capturing the console scale was important to us, we knew we couldn’t sacrifice life or activity, so the handheld city is also fully populated with traffic and pedestrian systems, props and Free Play content. In fact, there are over 100 Free Play objects in the city, connected to 15 handheld exclusive ‘hub challenges’
Listening to fans, we also know that although gamers value exclusive content, they also want the console and handheld experiences to become ever closer and offer the same feel and features. On this project we’ve worked closer with the console team than ever before, to ensure that the core features that define the LEGO Marvel’s Avengers experience are fully present on handheld. Many of these are traversal mechanics for blasting, boosting and leaping your way through the open world hub, including not only the Iron Man flight system and Quicksilver super speed, but the awesome Hyper Jump and Super Climb mechanics that bigger characters like Hulk can use to charge jump through the streets and smash up the side of skyscrapers. We spent a long time tweaking and balancing these mechanics to ensure they had the right weight and responsiveness, and they feel genuinely great to use.
As well as the characters traversal mechanics, we also have a full vehicle driving system, and players will be able to grab any vehicle they see on the street (you’re on important world-saving heroic business after all) but also use the vehicle spawn anywhere button to drop a car, bike, truck or tank on the nearest street, or find helipads on nearby rooftops to spawn copters, chariots and jets. New vehicles to spawn will be unlocked by completing story levels and challenges, many of which have special weapons and abilities, such as a nitrous boost.
But the Manhattan hub isn’t only used for Free Play. During the main game, the hub is used as a way to connect the ongoing storyline of the MCU levels with exclusive hub missions. Covering the behind-the-scenes moments that didn’t make it on screen in the movies, the hub missions are designed to feel like playable deleted scenes from the MCU. For example, an early mission covers Nick Fury being called to the P.E.G.A.S.U.S. base where the Tesseract is behaving strangely, covering his rendezvous at a hidden SHIELD base in Manhattan, and a drive in his decked out SHIELD SUV from Winter Soldier. Another covers Maria Hill rallying the SHIELD agents who retired after the HYDRA scandal back to action, so that they can pilot the mothballed Helicarrier to Sokovia. But as ever, we have injected a dose of LEGO fun, with Nick Fury having to help Agent Sitwell choose a wig for a date before he can borrow the base access chair, and Maria Hill disappointed to discover that if she’s going to get the old band back together, she’ll need to shake the ex-agents out of their newly found mundane jobs.
I could go on forever about the hub content, but I don’t want to spoil all the surprises in store. As I said at the start of this post, I’m incredibly impressed by what the team has accomplished this time. The design and art teams went above and beyond, pushing for a bigger and better city for players to explore, and somehow the tech and code teams squeezed it down onto the handheld screen with no cuts, breaks, bad lag or loading screens. LEGO Marvel’s Avengers is out on both console and handheld platforms on January 26th.”.
You can find the full blog post here which outlines some of the handheld exclusive hub challenges. It’s not clear which version the screenshots are from, but they were likely taken on the PlayStation Vita given the lack of a second screen.
