Modern Fans Don’t Know The X-Men According To Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite Producer

There have been many complaints about the classic X-Men characters being missing from the upcoming Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite video game, but according to producer Michael Evans, “Your modern Marvel fan, maybe they don’t even remember some of the X-Men characters, but they know some of the Guardians characters or Black Panther.”

Considering the history of the X-Men in the franchise, it does seem an odd answer and sounds like they are trying to justify the lack of X-Men and Fantastic Four characters.  It’s been known for a while that Marvel didn’t want to promote characters that they don’t have full right for such as movies or theme parks.

However this answer does seem so bizzare with movies like Deadpool featuring Colossus or Logan featuring Wolverine topping the box office this year, not being known by the general public compared to “Arthur” from a NES game.  It makes sense for Marvel to push characters more people know, but answers like this just make them look silly.

With Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite set to be updated with additional content for year to come, these popular characters could come later.

Here is the full question and answer from the interview:

Gamespot: There was recently a leak about the characters, and people picked up on the fact that a lot of classic characters aren’t there, specifically the X-Men characters like Magneto and Sentinel. How do you guys feel about people being hung up on that?

Peter Rosas: If you were to actually think about it, these characters are just functions. They’re just doing things. Magneto, case and point, is a favorite because he has eight-way dash and he’s really fast, right? So our more technical players, all they want to do is triangle jump and that kind of stuff. Well guess what, Nova can do the same thing, Captain Marvel can do the same thing. Ultron can do the same thing. Go ahead and try them out.

It’s just the function that people are associating with the character, and there’s no shortage of that. We made sure that all proper play styles can be represented with our current roster. The design team has been looking at that very closely. We wanted to make sure that if a legacy character doesn’t happen to make the roster this time, that play style would still be represented. That somebody who has associated themselves with Magneto wouldn’t be lost coming into this title.

Michael Evans: The other thing is, you mentioned returning characters right? If you look at the returning characters and you play with them, you’ll notice that they’re quite different from their previous iterations. Iron Man, he plays completely different. He has new special moves. Obviously we wanted to keep fan-favorite characters, but since you have the new system they’re gonna play differently. In addition to that, new special moves, new hypers, new level threes in some cases, these breathe new life into these characters even if they are returning. So we did definitely make an attempt to do that.

The X-Men stuff, [I] can’t talk to. But I do want to talk about the character-selection process because I think it’s important. There’s three things we’re looking at: Gameplay first and foremost of course. The Capcom R&D team and us, we get together and we talk with Marvel about what characters we want to put in. From a character-type perspective, we want our big brawler characters, our characters that can fly, our small characters or whatever. Just from a creative side, gameplay, here’s the characters we want. That plays a part.

One of the first things we did was sit down to write the story. When we were thinking about the story we wanted to tell, as fans ourselves on both sides, on the Marvel side there’s Mike Jones, an ex-Capcom guy. We’re big Marvel fans, so we’re sitting down to just like, “What crazy interactions do we want to see? What would happen if Docket, Dante, and Rocket came together? What would happen and who are these pairings that we want to see?” So from a storytelling perspective that also played into the character selection.

Then the third one is obviously the popularity of these characters. X was one we had to get in there. A lot of fans wanted to see X, so we brought him back. Then also we talked with Marvel very closely about their future roadmap, about what’s gonna be happening. Your modern Marvel fan, maybe they don’t even remember some of the X-Men characters, but they know some of the Guardians characters or Black Panther. You know what I mean? Captain Marvel may seem like a strange pick, but she’s fantastic. She fits the gameplay. She fits the story, and they’re gonna be really pushing her as a strong female lead all the way up into the movie. We’re trying to take everything into account and choose the best characters.

Do you remember the X-Men?