Marvel's Avengers Is An Absolute Mess

Bugs, Crashes And Terrible Optimisation

It's a sad truth that most games these days release with quite a few bugs remaining. Marvel's Avengers is not exempt from this, and actually has had a whole range of issues that should've been ironed out before the game even released. Many of these bugs were present in the beta yet the game still shipped with them, making you wonder why the beta wasn't done earlier in development.

The game seems worse on PC, but Xbox and PlayStation players still see many issues. Before even considering how the poor optimisation effects the game, the countless bugs that were seen is honestly shocking. Players were losing their progress, items were being wiped for no reason, certain moves didn't perform as they were advertised on the skill tree, (e.g. shield breaking moves that didn't break shields at all), and you could fall out of the world and under the map itself.

Every time you boot up the game it's just a question of when you're going to encounter your first bug, and you just have to hope that it isn't too detrimental to the experience.

Then you have the issue of how the game actually performs.

While crashes are a problem, the bigger issue is the staggering frame rate and long loading times. You can only blame people's own computer set ups for so much of these problems. From my own personal experience, my PC was just under the optimal requirements for the game. Yet I have never had a session that hasn't suffered from freezing and poor frame rates. Too often the best moments of the campaign were ruined because the game just couldn't handle itself.

Thor's return is around thirty seconds long, yet it took me two minutes to get through. Not only does this ruin the actual moment itself, further degrading the experience of the story, but it also makes the game slog along. Missions that should only take fifteen minutes end up taking double than that, and there is nothing you can do but sit there and wait in frustration. In the game's defence the poor optimisation has never affected the combat for me, but that doesn't make it forgivable.

No game should be releasing in this state. There is no justification for it. I highly doubt Crystal Dynamics wanted to release the game as it was, likely pressured by higher ups who didn't want to delay the game further and rack up more development costs. But the game seriously needed longer in the oven. Even now, a month later, the game still has a long list of bugs and optimisation issues.