The makers of Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game want their game to be accessible to everyone — including fighting game newbies.
At Summer Game Fest Play Days in Los Angeles on June 7, GamesBeat played a demo of Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game and spoke to a representative of the team behind its development at Gameplay Group International, who provided a sneak preview of additional content to come. Notably, the upcoming title will include a dedicated game mode designed to show players that Avatar Legends and other fighting games are intuitive, rather than difficult.
“We put a lot of thought into how we can basically show that fighting games aren’t difficult, and we’ve seen other games that weren’t able to communicate that,” said Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game marketing director Kim-Hahn Hoang in an interview with GamesBeat. “We have ways to communicate that, and that’s going to be revealed very soon.”
Although Hoang declined to share more specific details about Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game’s new game mode, he made it clear that it was separate from the standard training mode accessible on the game’s main menu during the demo experience. He said his team at Gameplay Group International is still figuring out what to call the new mode, but that it goes beyond simple training to provide a deeper introduction to fighting game mechanics.
Although Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is relatively simple on the surface — its controls involve only four buttons and a joystick — the game features plenty of depth. For example, each playable character comes with a selection of support characters that fundamentally change the mechanics of their moves and movement, effectively widening the game’s pool of playable characters.
“It’s kind of like you have three different characters [in one],” Hoang said.
Hoang’s credentials reflect the fighting-game-infused pedigree of the development team behind Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game. He’s a veteran of the fighting game scene who was a top player during the Street Fighter 4 days and a top player in the nascent Avatar Legends competitive scene.
Beyond its fast-paced gameplay, Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game is chock-full of lore and references to the Avatar universe; the game was clearly made by people who love and appreciate its core IP. It will feature a canon story mode, with an animation style that is evocative of the original animated series.
“We’re working with Paramount and Avatar Studios to get the story right,” Hoang said.
Originally slated for a July 2 release, Avatar Legends: The Fighting Game will officially come out on July 23 and is already available for pre-purchase on Steam, with players who pre-purchase the game gaining access to a beta release period that will run between July 2 and July 5. At launch, the game will feature 12 playable characters from both the Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra animated series, as well as a range of in-universe locations and support characters, all with the goal of being both accessible to newcomers and highly replayable for fighting game community veterans.
“We see how fighting games have done it correctly, and how they have struggled in some ways with getting past the intimidation barrier of fighting games,” Hoang said. “So we want to make a game that is not just dumbed down — that satisfies the competitiveness — but also has a very good entry point for people that are hesitant to give fighting games a chance.”