MultiVersus went away for a year, came back different, and fans aren’t sure about it

polygon.com:

The strange tale of MultiVersuscontinues. The game was odd enough to begin with: a free-to-play Smash Bros.-inspired fighter featuring the multifarious intellectual property of the Warner Bros. Discovery corporation, in which Looney Tunes icons can battle DC heroes and characters from the likes of Adventure Time and Game of Thrones — there’s even LeBron James.

A successful open beta launched in 2022, but in June 2023 it was taken offline for almost a full year for a complete revamp — an unprecedented step for a live service game that seemed out of proportion to the work it needed. Now it’s back, and fans are puzzled, to say the least, about how much it’s changed.

Some changes are a matter of taste. Many players on the MultiVersus subreddit and elsewhere say the game has been slowed down dramatically — which is Polygon’s impression too, from a quick playtest — and while this change is unpopular with many, not everyone agrees.

But what has really alarmed the game’s fanbase is that this new “launch” version of MultiVersus has returned missing features and settings that were present in the open beta — and that radical changes to progression and the way characters are unlocked have been made.

So far, developer Player First Games has only responded to feedback about the missing features. Game director Tony Huynh posted on X to reassure fans that features like team colors, end-of-game stats, adjustable input buffer settings, and the option to swap side and neutral attacks are “incoming.” Huynh explained that the extensive rebuild required the team to move the game from Unreal Engine 4 to Unreal Engine 5, leaving the developers without the time to implement every feature before the relaunch date.

Many of these features are currently implemented and are in testing and we had planned, but were left out due to time as we had to rebuild every screen and feature again to support our new netcode and Unreal Engine 5 switch. Thanks again! I hope some of this context is helpful.

“Ma