Happy Late Anniversary Marvel Heroes!

June marked the 4th anniversary of Marvel Heroes 2016, or as it's now know, Marvel Heroes Omega. So a little information and history for those who may not know what a Marvel Heroes Omega is. MH is an isometric action-rpg just like Path of Exile, Diablo or Titan Quest.

MH was developed by Secret Identity Studios which is owned by a company called Gazillion Entertainment. MH started out as Marvel Universe Online which was being developed by Cryptic Studios for Microsoft. When Microsoft cancelled the project, Cryptic took what they had and turned it into what is now Champions Online. In 2009 Gazillion hired a guy by the name of David Brevik who just happens to have been apart of two games you might have heard of, Diablo and Diablo II, and created Marvel Heroes.

Now I haven't played Marvel Heroes much since the summer of 2015, or just after the second anniversary event. In July 2015 I was honored to be on the MMO Show to discuss the game, and at some point in the podcast the time played topic was brought up. I realized at that point that I had invested nearly 600 hours of my life to the game. I didn't play much of MH when it launched in 2013, it wasn't until the 1st anniversary event in 2014 that I was really sucked into the game. Needless to say, not long after the podcast I decided that it was time for a break.

In January 2017, Marvel Heroes had it's Biggest Update Ever. The fundamental gameplay remained the same, however, most everything else was changed in this update. I won't go into any details in this post, you can read the changes here. I hadn't played MH in almost a year so it was quite overwhelming logging back in and trying to relearn a game that I spent so much time playing in the past.

This years anniversary, just like last year, is a month long with different events and sales that change every 7 days. This year's event wasn't bad, comparing it to last year's event it doesn't seem to be as good, but overall I still had quite a bit of fun.

I took full advantage of the server side XP boost by finishing leveling Warmachine and Wolverine whom I was in the process leveling for a third time. After that I decided to level all the characters I owned that I haven't played. Then, thanks to the large amount of eternity splinters I earned and owned, I purchased and leveled the remaining characters in the game. But that wasn't all; I then decided to prestige many of the heroes because it had been so long since I last played and I wanted to see just how the BUE changes effected their gameplay.

I ended up playing about 120 hours in that 25 day period. So yes, I did enjoy myself. For the most part. The BUE had a positive impact on characters that I thought were lackluster previously, adversely there were some characters I thought were made worse. Warmachine and Taskmaster are two characters that weren't great before, and oddly enough they still are not great now. Not sure how that happened.

I would say that overall I had fun during the month long event and I was reminded why I enjoyed the game for so many hours. At some point I want to do a post that talks about what I like and dislike about the BUE, but my impressions after a month of play is somewhere in the middle. Some changes are good, some are not, and I feel that some of the uniqueness of the characters was taken away due to the update.