Square Enix, the makers of Final Fantasy, is taking its talents to the Marvel Universe with an interconnected series of games, the first of which is known only as The Avengers Project announced back in 2017. Now, a new rumor hints that The Avengers Project is, in fact, a major reboot to one of the best Marvel video games of all time: Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.
On Monday, IGN Germany reported on a rumor originating from 4chan’s video game board, /v/, that detailed Square Enix’s plans for its first Avengers game. Because of the source, it’s advisable to manage expectations, but 4chan users have leaked accurate information in the past.
The anonymous source claims that Square Enix’s The Avengers Project will be titled Avengers: Ultimate Alliance, a reboot to the 2006 console RPG Marvel: Ultimate Alliance published by Activision. Set from the perspectives of Captain America, Iron Man, and Scarlet Witch, the game reportedly follows the Avengers “after a cataclysmic incident broke the team apart.” The user adds that the aforementioned three will not be the only playable characters in the game.
Furthermore, they add that the game isn’t a Civil War-inspired story (like 2009’s Ultimate Alliance 2), but a riff on Avengers Disassembled. Published in 2004, Avengers Disassembled was the beginning of Brian Michael Bendis’s run on Marvel’s Avengers comics, which led to the formation of the “New Avengers.”
The user further claims the reboot is “like the new God of War,” in that it bears a similar name, but a “totally new gameplay/story structure.” “That’s the reason why the tagline of the first teaser was ‘Reassemble,’” the user writers, “to hint at it being a reboot. This is also why the previous Ultimate Alliance games got uprezed recently for current-gen.”
“Gameplay wise think a mix between Uncharted and Infamous,” the user claims.
To top this rumor train off, the 4chan user claims that Avengers: Ultimate Alliance will take place in a “universe” of other Marvel games, including Insomniac’s Spider-Man for the PlayStation 4 and Eidos Montréal’s Guardians of the Galaxy. (It appears Telltale’s recent take on the Guardians of the Galaxy won’t have anything to do with this budding universe.)
That the name “Ultimate Alliance” is getting any kind of resurrection should be exciting to Marvel fans. While far from being the best video games ever, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance was the ultimate Marvel fantasy as it gave players the chance to make their own dream teams out of hundreds of superheroes in a mission-based dungeon crawler that took place all across the Marvel Universe, from S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters to Castle Doom.
They were also fun to play, which made up for the series’ bigger shortcomings like its mediocre graphics. Should these rumors pan out, fingers crossed that the new developers know how to harness the full power of today’s consoles.
In 2017, Activision published “remastered” versions of both Ultimate Alliance games for the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, but these versions were criticized for leaving out extra content and charging full price.
