You’re about to experience more than a fraction of the power of Invincible’s characters. The upcoming Invincible Vs, a 3-on-3 tag-team fighting game based on Robert Kirkman’s comic series and the Amazon Prime adaptation of it, will hit PlayStation 5 on April 30. But before then, you can try the game with an open beta that’ll include 10 of its superpowered characters, running April 9 to 11.
Executive Producer Mike Willette sat down to tell us a little more about what players can expect in the beta, including its lineup of characters, and what it’s been like creating a fighting game from the Invincible source material.
PS Blog: What can players expect from the Invincible Vs beta? Will it include the story mode?
Mike Willette: Players can expect to see 10 characters. It’s going to be Invincible, Adam Eve, Omni-Man — with a special thing that they’ll find out about really, really soon that’s associated with Omni-Man — Thula, Robot, Monster Girl, Battle Beast, Rex Splosion, Bulletproof, and — very special — Allen the Alien.
Specifically, it’s going to be focused on online play, and ranked play. That’s because we know it’s going to be open to everybody, and so once you go through some placement matches, you’re going to start fighting against people that are closer to your rank. The goal is to, obviously, test things out, but also to get you grouped with people that are of like skill level.
We will have our training mode, which includes our tutorial and practice mode. And from practice mode, you can queue up into Ranked [mode]. You can either queue up there or just in our online settings. So you get to try out all the characters, you can go into practice and check everything out, and then go into ranked.
We will have our training mode, which includes our tutorial and practice mode. And from practice mode, you can queue up into Ranked [mode]. You can either queue up there or just in our online settings. So you get to try out all the characters, you can go into practice and check everything out, and then go into ranked.
Does Invincible Vs support any specific PS5 features or enhancements?
Yes, we’re working on high-resolution running on PlayStation 5. It is a goal for it being enhanced to support higher resolution while maintaining 60 frames per second.
Invincible features some really brutal battles in both the show and the comics. How did you go about treating that brutality and gore?
Something that Robert Kirkman is extremely good at is setting the table and the stakes that are involved. And you get to love these characters.
For us, it wasn’t about being a gore show, right? We don’t want to show you, like, ‘This is your spleen, and it’s attached to—.’ It wasn’t about getting into those details. It was really about showcasing the brutality of these people with powers during conflict, and this is the outcome of that conflict, and it’s brutal, and it’s damaging. It’s not just the gore that you see, but all of our costumes get torn. You get covered in blood. But when you’re super low on health, your idle changes, where you’re exhausted but still ready to fight.
So for us, it was expressing all of those things as often as we could, when it made the most sense, when it was authentic. We don’t stop the action for gore or violence. It’s part of the progression of the fight. We never want to take control away from a player whenever we can, and we want to make it part of the action, as if it was a scene in the show.
Can you talk about how you go about making Invincible Vs approachable for Invincible fans who might be new to fighting games?
You actually had the phrase there: approachable. To me, making a game approachable gets misconstrued with accessibility. We’re not trying to dumb down the game. We’re trying to make it easier for you to get into the game so you can fall in love with fighting games like we all have.
We looked at, like, what’s the fastest way to teach people combos and combo structure? And some of that was with the auto-combo [feature]. You’re not going to do as much damage, but it’s going to teach you some fundamental rules, of going from normal attacks into special attacks, and you can cancel special attacks into super moves, and from super moves, you can tag in your partner characters, and then you can rinse and repeat. And it starts building on top of itself, showing people the golden path of how combos work, and how easy it can be.
How do you make the game fun for both a newcomer audience and the rest of the fighting game community?
This is kind of like the second time we’ve taken this kind of approach. If you look back on what we did at Killer Instinct, we wanted to get rid of some of the hidden rules of combo flow.
It was really starting at something basic, a building block, and then adding building blocks on top of it, something that you can understand. So start here, then move to the next pattern, and then move to the pattern after them. So as long as you feel good doing the initial set of stuff, our theory is, and we’ve seen it happen, you’re like, ‘I was mashing buttons, but I did something really awesome. I want to learn more about awesome.’ It’s going to get you to that next thing.
So having combos that feel really good, even the auto ones, again, doesn’t have to do the most damage, but it feels good and does something flashy — it’s an important carrot to get you to do the next thing, and the next thing after that, right?
Quarter Up developed an original story for Invincible Vs, working with creator Robert Kirkman and Helen Leigh, the writer and co-executive producer of the Invincible series. What has that collaboration been like?
It’s interesting because Robert loves video games. He loves fighting games. So it’s not too hard to say, ‘Hey, within this structure, what kind of story do we want to tell?’ And it is really collaborative, because we get to say, ‘Hey, we have these ideas. How can we execute on these ideas and with these types of characters?’ And the writers will be like, ‘This is a way that we could bridge these gaps,’ or ‘These are very interesting premises.’
And for us, it was really selling the experience that you’re playing, like, a special episode of the show. It could potentially exist within the timeline, so just sit back and have fun.
