“Marvel Universe Online” – Marvel’s Gets Its Own “City of Heroes”

Remember when Marvel sued NC Soft and Cryptic Studios, because they felt that the game “City of Heroes” included characters – and also allowed and encouraged players to create more, similar characters – that infringed on Marvel’s copyrights? Sure, the lawsuit was settled out of court long ago, but now Marvel’s making lemon meringue pie out of that lemon by teaming up with Cryptic (and Microsoft Game Studios) to make “Marvel Universe Online” – An MMO game for XBox 360 and PC using (surprise!) Marvel characters. While other articles go on and on with more discussion, analysis, and questions, that’s really all that they end up saying about it.

While this is an interesting newsbit, it raises more questions than it answers. For example:

• I can only assume we won’t be restricted to currently existing characters. While Marvel boasts a library of 5,000 characters, some of them – like, say, Turner D. Century – are simply God-awful. And yet, the issue is never addressed. Maybe we’ll just see a town full of dozens of Wolverines.
• On the technical side, they keep specifically saying it will be on “Windows Vista,” rather than simply saying “PC” in the articles and interviews. Does that mean it won’t work on XP? They won’t even hint at a release date, so maybe they don’t expect to be done until more people have Vista – or maybe not. With Microsoft, it’s really hard to give the benefit of the doubt.
• Aaaaand, let’s be honest – There’s really not a lot of information to go off of, other than it will exist in the future, they’re working on it, and they’re not allowed to say much about it. Lots of question marks, not a lot of actual info.

View the teaser trailer on Xbox Live Marketplace now, or right here.