Temporarily of course while he’s in for repairs… hopefully
It’s certainly not every day where we see a developer essentially remove a character from a fighting game who’s already been made available, but here we are.
Player First Games just announced they’ve completely disabled the Iron Giant from being used in MultiVersus because he’s apparently a bit too busted to keep in rotation (for the time being at least).
“Thank you MVPs for alerting us about the current issues surrounding Iron Giant,” reads the statement from the official MultiVersus X/Twitter account. “We have decided to bring him back into the shop for maintenance. During this time, you will not be able to play with him, but we are working diligently and will update you next week on his status. In the meantime, we’ve added Garnet to the Preview Rotation for you to enjoy while he’s down.”
We recently reported that Iron Giant released with at least four different infinite / touch-of-death combos with some of them quite simple to pull off and usable off of basically any clean hit during a match.
They don’t state what exactly the behemoth is going back in the shop for here, but that’s likely most if not all of their reasoning currently.
Thank you MVPs for alerting us about the current issues surrounding Iron Giant. We have decided to bring him back into the shop for maintenance. During this time, you will not be able to play with him, but we are working diligently and will update you next week on his status. In…
— MultiVersus (@multiversus) June 3, 2024
It’s also quite interesting that they didn’t just remove him from being played in the online modes and rather from every aspect of the game entirely.
This technically isn’t the first time MultiVersus has done this either, as the developers temporarily disabled LeBron James during the beta once a game-breaking bug was discovered.
Iron Giant himself was banned from many / most tournaments upon release in the beta for being too strong on the community side, and Morty was also banned from being selected for Ranked mode for a short time in the beta too due to an exploit by the devs.
Note to our MVPs: We will be disabling LeBron momentarily due to a critical bug. He’ll be reenabled shortly upon fix. Thanks and stay tuned! #MultiVersus
— MultiVersus (@multiversus) October 31, 2022
It certainly is a unique route to take for fighting games when something broken is discovered though we’ll see how exactly this goes over with the playerbase.
There will surely be some relief that they won’t be matched up against Iron Giant during this time, but it’s odd that you can’t even view his fighter rewards or use him in Training Mode — especially if people spent real money on him.
Needing to wait a week to get an update also sounds pretty severe, and that’s not even a guarantee he’ll be back in the game by that time.
MultiVersus just launched last week after taking its beta down for almost a full year, and the reception thus far to the Warner Bros. platform fighter has been pretty mixed.
Some players have shared sentiments that this current version feels more like a beta than the one we got in 2022, and it doesn’t help that some of the nice features and options from that time aren’t in MVS currently — though the devs are working on adding them back in.
There are of course, new characters, better netcode, a fresh coat of paint in Unreal Engine 5 and a lot more content as well on the good side of things.
At least they are listening and acting upon player feedback, so hopefully they continue to work hard to update MultiVersus to where it needs to be to live up to its full potential.
And maybe there’s some good reasons why most fighting game developers don’t make characters that are over two times taller than the rest of the roster.