Invincible VS, a new 3v3 tag-based fighting game based on Robert Kirkman’s Invincible comics and animated series, is being developed with you in mind. Whether you’re a serious player of fighting games or just someone who digs Invincible, developer Quarter Up wants to give you something you’ll love, says executive producer Mike Willette.
“First and foremost, [we’re] building a tournament-quality, brutal superhuman fighting game with a tag component in it,” Willette told me in a video call in May, before talking about the intricate depths of his team’s new fighting game. But Willette also says he “wants to make Invincible VS your first fighting game.”
“One of our mantras at Quarter Up is we want every player to look and feel like a badass,” Willette boasts, saying that players who learn the game’s combos and Invincible VS’ flexible tag system should have just as much fun as those who use computer-guided auto combos.
Willette previously worked on the 2013 revival of Killer Instinct. At Quarter Up, the first internal studio at Skybound Games, he’s joined by some of his former KI cohorts, including game director David Hall, lead combat designer John Bautista, and Brandon Meesak, who’s working on Invincible VS’ rollback netcode.
The Quarter Up team, Willette said, learned a lot of lessons during the development of Killer Instinct and over “the past 10 years dreaming about [making] our next fighter.” That includes investing in a deep and flexible combo and team-based tag system, as well as counters for both, and building an auto-combo system with simplified controls.
“One thing that we recognized is no one wants to watch a single-player game or participate in one,” Willette said, referring to endless combos in “games where you get hit once and you’re like, Oh shit, now I’m just watching somebody else [play].”
Invincible VS will feature a cast of familiar heroes and villains from the franchise, and an emphasis on teams of characters coming together.
“We really wanted to enforce that idea of teams,” Willette said, “As part of our Omni Tag system, where when you’re in a combo string, you can hold down one of your assists — we call it an Active Tag — they come in and continue the combo right alongside with you. You can do it in the ground, you can do it in the air. We wanted to create a really flexible system where you didn’t have to memorize how many ground bounces or wall bounces or OTGs you had in a combo.”
Willette explained that Invincible VS will have a combo meter, which he described as “like a bucket that you hold all your combos in and when it gets full, someone will drop out of your combo. There are certain things that you can do within that structure that’s super flexible that allows you to kind of cheat it a little bit or continue your combo. So when I Active Tag in a partner, I get a little bit of that combo meter back.”
But as previously noted, the devs at Quarter Up don’t want players to get stuck in endless combos and watch helplessly as their life bar depletes. “There are other ways to get out of a combo sequence,” he says. “During those Active Tag sequences, you can do a counter tag. So even if you’re down to your last character, if you see an incoming character, there’s a way for you to break and get out of it. There’s also ways to bait the break, and so then you get this interplay of mind games whenever an Active Tag occurs between the two sides. In addition to that, enforcing team [play], you can actually call in one of your assists on your team to come in and break up the combo, but you’re sacrificing resources and you’re sacrificing using them for 10 seconds. So you weigh risk/reward in all of these systems in the interplay between them.”
Willette says that Invincible VS’ systems “allow for hype moments” and lean into the brutality and violence of the Invincible franchise. Steak and sizzle, basically. Fighting arenas and the characters themselves will showcase the destruction of super-people fighting, leading to gory finishers.
Quarter Up and Skybound Games haven’t revealed the full roster for Invincible VS — Omni-Man, Invincible, Atom Eve, Thula, and Bulletproof have been confirmed — but Willette acknowledged that a big roster is important for a tag fighter, and that the game’s roster will continue to grow. Invincible VS is “more in line with a premium product” and not free to play, he says, and Quarter Up plans on supporting the game long-term with more characters and content.
Willette says that creating Invincible VS in house at publisher Skybound, rather than as part of an outside studio, gives the Quarter Up team huge advantages.
“I’m a huge fan of Invincible before I even started working on the project,” he says. “The advantages that we have here is [having access to] the creative team behind the show, Robert Kirkman, Corey [Walker], and Ryan [Ottley]. We have access to all these references from the show and from the comics that would be so hard to get if we were just a licensed product. So we get to have these conversations, like, Does Omni-Man get cut? Does he bleed? Where does he bleed from? We could go right to the source and figure these things out, which is really unique. You don’t typically get those opportunities and you don’t get a lot of the bureaucratic stuff that typically blocks you from just finding things out and kind of moving forward.”
The bigger challenge, Willette says, “is finding out how we can get people to be not just fans of Invincible, but fans of fighting games too.”
“We love the characters and we love the genre, so we want to marry those things and make you a fan,” he says, “to where you’re going to pick [Invincible VS] up, you’re going to play, and think I didn’t realize that character’s that badass. I’m going to keep playing that character. Then I want you to graduate from playing in tutorials and training to playing online and feeling comfortable. You don’t have to be the best in the world; not everyone is Justin Long. We’re not all going to be pros, but we can play and enjoy ourselves and that’s where I want everyone to feel. It’s like I can go out to the park and throw the ball. I can go online and play with people in Invincible VS and feel awesome.”
Invincible VS is slated for release sometime in 2026 for PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
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