Maximilian puts up $5,000 bounty for anyone who can solve Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3's biggest modding problem
The modding community for Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 has made some amazing steps forward over just the past year, but that doesn't mean everything is solved and figured out in the fan-favorite fighting game now.
Maximilian Dood recently put out an open bounty of $5,000 for anyone / any team who can clear one of UMVC3's last big hurdles to breaking the modding possibilities wide open.
"If somebody was able to do the character slot thing in Marvel, I'd like to put a bounty on that," said Maximilian when first announcing the idea. "So we can hopefully make this thing a possibility, and I know that this takes up a lot of time and is very rough."
What Max is specifically talking about is the ability to add new, full character slots into Ultimate Marvel 3 to allow mods to physically build out the roster.
Currently, modding in a new character requires replacing an existing costume slot for a standard fighter, which creates several issues.
The biggest of those being the lack of choice between original and modded characters on the same team if they share the same slot, and though there's a lot of colors and costumes, we do only have access to a limited number of them — so we're either going to eventually run out or have potential overlaps.
Adding new character slots would bypass all of that completely and allow players with mods to build out their teams without limitations or side effects.
The idea has presumably been looked into in the past with all of the advancements in the modding scene, but no one has figured out a solution.
Max says that he feels strongly about supporting this potential project not just for his and the community's enjoyment of the game, but also because of the current state of MvC as a series after Marvel vs. Capcom: infinite was dropped mere months following release plus more licensing issues in the past.
"One of the reasons I want to that is because I feel like one of the only ways we're going to get support from Marvel vs. Capcom moving forward is through fan mods," said Max. "I think fan mods [are] essentially the future of MvC. I would like to support if not enable things like that can hopefully happen in the near future."
Up until almost exactly a year ago, the largest issue facing modders was the inability to inject custom models into UMvC3, so fan-made characters would need to be made using the existing cast and assets, which obviously severely limited what could be done.
After hundreds if not thousands of hours of work, a tool was developed and released to the public to add in those custom models, causing an explosion of impressive work to bring back classic MvC fighters like Captain Commando or even characters' who've never been in the series before, most recently Carnage.
But even with all of that progress made, however, breaking open the character slots has remained an elusive goal.
If that does eventually get solved, the last big wall facing Marvel 3's fan support will be to get rollback netcode running for online matches in the game.
There is currently a project being worked on now trying to hopefully do just that, but as Max suggests, the project is still in its very early days and will likely prove to be vastly more complicated than Super Smash Bros. Melee's solution through Slippi emulation.
The ultimate end goal for the community would be to turn the PC version of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 into a platform somewhat akin to MUGEN that users can go crazy customizing everything to the point of essentially creating new games.
An unbelievable amount of work still needs to be accomplished before that could be something more than a dream, however.
Even if we never end up seeing an official new Marvel vs. Capcom game again, there is an extremely talented and passionate part of the fighting game community who want to make sure that Marvel can live forever.
We recommend checking out Max's full video below for more information on the bounty as well as the current state of modding and challenges for the beloved game.
