MARVEL Future Revolution is a blockbuster open-world MMORPG designed for mobile

Considering MARVEL Future Revolution is an open-world MMORPG set in the illustrious Marvel universe, can you outline some of your goals coming into the project?

Project Executive and Executive Producer Doohyun Cho: The first goal was to create the most realistic Marvel world possible. This, of course, includes realistic representations of superheroes with the highest-quality graphics.

Second, since it is an online game, the appearance of the hero should be freely customizable. A lot of different Captain Americas will be playing in this game, but we wanted to make sure that they all looked and played differently from one another. It was an important goal for the heroes to be unique, with different looks, features, and combat styles.

The third goal was not to be limited to the ground. Marvel's superheroes are capable of flying through the skies with great finesse. We wanted to portray the most realistic Marvel universe, which naturally includes flight and aerial combat. 

A game in which you play as your own superhero, clearly distinguished from other players, in the realistically expressed Marvel world, and fight epic fights across the ground and in the air—this is the goal we set at the beginning of the project.

Working with such an iconic IP, can you talk about your vision for recreating the Marvel universe within a framework that would work well on mobile?

Project Director and Lead Creative Director Hanjin Ju: Our goal was to represent the best and most authentic Marvel world on mobile devices. It was very important to strike the right balance between high-quality graphics and smooth game performance. There were challenges in the early stages of development to achieve this result. The more we pushed for high-quality graphics, the more we had to balance performance.

In any case, we did not give up on our goals of having both high-quality graphics and great performance. We had it developed in this direction by continuously improving game performance and stabilization. With the efforts of many programmers, the performance of the game gradually stabilized, and as a result, I think we were able to achieve something great.

MARVEL Future Revolution has some of the most impressive visuals in a mobile game to date. Can you share how the team pulled off the game's graphics?

Multimedia Executive Producer Gyubo Choi: What most people don’t realize is that the lighting that’s used in-game and the lighting used for cutscenes are all set up differently. In the cutscenes, we set each individual lighting for almost all of the cuts to maintain the cinematic visuals and to make the story more immersive. Due to the mobile environment and performance goals, we were limited to using three lights in the beginning. However, with the support of our technical artist, client team, engine team, etc., we were able to receive various technical support to raise the quality of the visuals. With this support, we were able to overcome the limitations of the mobile environment separating channels for each character, adjusting character settings for shadows, vignetting, ray, and post-process application for each cut within Sequencer. Also, in cutscenes, the face mesh is replaced with a Skeletal Mesh with additional bone structures, bypassing the limit of 75 bones, creating a richer look.

With such a diverse cast of characters that include fan favorites such as Captain America, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and more, can you talk about how you approached designing the game's combat system?

Lead Combat Developer Dongwoo Ye: As you said, there are various characters in the Marvel universe, each with a huge fan base. And fans are deeply attracted to the thrilling battles and unique aspects held by these characters. Our goal was to allow the existing fans to discover the characteristic elements of the characters they encountered through the original comics and various other media in the game as well as experience them firsthand. To this end, we designed the unique battles and movements of superheroes, as well as the characteristic gimmicks that represent the character's identity, to be experienced directly in the game.

Users can directly experience the characteristic combat techniques and movements of their favorite superheroes, as well as unique movements such as Iron Man's three-point landing and Spider-Man's web-swinging. Above all, in order to effectively express these elements in the game, we had to overcome various technical challenges and make new attempts.

While providing an MMO environment where many users can access and play at the same time, superheroes have to implement action like a single-player game for the fast and flashy abilities and movement. In addition, in order to express superhero battles without boundaries between ground, air, running, jumping, flying, and landing, we had to take on a new technological challenge called the 3D Voxel system. After numerous performance tests and optimizations, we were able to fit all of this into a small device that fits within the palm of your hand.

Thanks to all these technical challenges and achievements, we now have Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man coming to life within mobile devices. 

The bosses in MARVEL Future Revolutions can be a real challenge. Can you delve into how you approached designing the enemies in the game?

Senior Combat Designer Jaeyoung Park: We talked a lot about how to approach our players by collecting various information such as appearance, characteristics, and growth background of supervillains from the comics and movies.

For example, Thanos is very powerful but not very fast. We needed a look that felt very solid and heavy, and we needed to show slow but dignified movement. We designed and worked to reproduce the unique aura of these supervillains and applied them to the game.

Optimizations for real-time shadows were also needed to render accurate depth with finite resources. In the game, each item had an icon. This was also a huge amount, so it was necessary to minimize the effort of those working on the graphics. To do this, we laid out a chroma-keyed background, rendered each character in 3D, and took screenshots for each part. We also took a base texture and a mask texture and sent it to the icon-developing team. After the team made some adjustments to the icons, they read the color values ​​for each of the four channels of the Skeletal Mesh and similar items and applied them to the icons dynamically. If it was possible to save a lot of work and resources through this, various icons were expressed.

Why was Unreal Engine a good fit for the game?

Cho: It is the best game engine that exists that has various functions and can be controlled through optimization while showing high-quality games to users. By providing various base systems for implementing game ideas, we were able to express various performances that we wanted to show with only small changes. In addition, stability is provided by controlling the throughput of animations and particle systems through the Significance Manager under load conditions. The performance Profiler was also particularly helpful.