LEGO Marvel Avengers - Warner Bros. on characters, game size/length

A portion of a GamesBeat interview with Arthur Parsons, head of one Warner Bros. TT Games development team...

GamesBeat: How many characters are there?

Parsons: More than 200 altogether. But that’s an ever-increasing list. We never quite know when to stop. There are about 8,000 Marvel characters in total. We can’t do that many. But when it comes to Lego games, this probably has the most of anything we’ve done.

Up in the sky we’ve got the Helicarrier. We have these quick boost pads that allow you to get up there quickly.

GamesBeat: How do you unlock the whole set of characters? Is it just time spent in the game?

Parsons: I’ll dial back here and play an actual level section. To unlock the characters, you’ll get them as you progress normally through the game. In level one you’ll unlock the characters you play there – Captain America and a few others. All the others you pick up in the free play components, whether it’s boss fights in a hub area—Say you come across Doctor Strange. He’ll ask you to do something and that’ll unlock Doctor Strange. It’s all through exploring the open world.

For the main story, we’re being as faithful as we can to Age of Ultron and the other movies. We’ve featured loads of Marvel movies, like Iron Man 3. We’re trying to be as authentic as we can while still keeping the Lego humor in there. Our story starts at the beginning of Age of Ultron, because that gives us the goal of hunting down Loki’s staff. It connects us to the start of Avengers where Loki is given the staff.

We have team-up moves for different characters. I can pair different characters together and they’ll perform special combos, like smart bombs. You charge up this power bar to do that.

GamesBeat: How much bigger is the world?

Parsons: This is definitely bigger than Lego Marvel Super Heroes. That was our first time on next-gen. We’ve had a couple of years with the platforms. The programmers have found ways to get more out of PS4 and Xbox One and WiiU. They’re always trying to get more and more, which is how we can have eight open world hubs instead of just one city. There are more particles. The lighting’s more vibrant. It’s an ongoing process, with any machine. The longer we have it, the more we can push it.

GamesBeat: How many hours of gameplay do you think you have altogether?

Parsons: I know that our testers—To do a whole 100 percent playthrough, it’s taken them 40-plus hours. For someone who doesn’t know the game, it’s going to be more than that. I don’t want to put an exact figure on it, but it’s a huge game. It’s definitely bigger than the first one. We have 15 core levels in the story, which you can then replay, and outside of that in the hub worlds there are more than 250 missions, quests, and other interactions. We also added random crimes. In the city there’s always carjackings or bag-snatchings going on. As heroes your job is to make sure those get stopped as well. We’ve got more than 200 characters and vehicles to unlock, so there’s a huge amount of stuff to play.