It’s impossible to talk about it Marvel Rivals without talking about Overwatch; both hero shooters share much of the same DNA, and the NetEase team has clearly taken a look at the hugely popular first-person shooter and written some notes. Since Marvel Rivals is a successful game in its own right, attracting a huge fan base, which is part of the senior arguments that have plagued the game Overwatch are repeated – and many players hope that things will be different this time.
Take, for example, three roles in a game. There are Duelists who deal high damage, Guardians who defend the team and supporting Strategists. A common and admittedly annoying problem is loading the game only for everyone to immediately ban Duelists. Vanguard and Strategist just aren’t as popular, maybe because it’s harder to get a nice quad kill with their skills.
If you played Overwatch in 2016, this probably sounds very familiar. Players from that era will remember their teammates taking on the roles of Hanzo and Widowmaker, leaving them reluctant to play as tank or healer. I remember playing Mercy for multiple games in a row, hoping that in the next game one of my teammates would recognize my despair and let me finally play Pharah. They never did because casual online gamers are rarely known for their charitable work.
Overwatch resolved this issue in 2019 with role queue; players entered the game knowing that each team needed to have a specific lineup of tanks, healers, or damage dealers. If you play one of the less popular roles, you will even receive additional rewards. Blizzard also spent a lot of time improving Overwatchbalance to fit this structure, and characters will receive balance changes or even full reworks to ensure they fit into the team. WITH Overwatch 2Blizzard even removed a person from each team, turning the 6v6 game into a 5v5 game.
Marvel Rivals it does not have a role queue system nor is it as rigorously balanced as Overwatch. Characters like Jeff the Land Shark, while powerful healers, are also capable of game-changing abilities such as sucking an entire enemy team into its mouth and spitting them off the edge of the map. This means that while queuing, you may encounter a team full of Strategists, or a team with a robust Vanguard frontline protecting only one or two Duelists.
Right now, Marvel Rivals it allows for such flexibility and freedom – and it used to be the case Overwatch. One of the factors that led to the addition of the role queue was the GOATS meta, named after the team that popularized the three-tank, three-healer lineup. The GOATs dominated at a high level Overwatch play for some time, including in professional games, and was criticized not only for being frustrating to play against, but also for being uninteresting to watch.
But Marvel Rivals is not related to the professional industry or competitive expectations; it’s a very loose take on the genre where most of the characters, in the right hands, are at least a little broken. This is a vast part of why some fans enjoy this game so much; if they wanted to play a high-stakes shooter, they would simply go play one of the existing esports-based games on the market.
Despite this, the debate on whether a role queue is necessary or should be added is still one of them main topics In Marvel Rivals community and that was Down months. The Marvel Rivals said NetEase developers Dot E-sports they have no plans to add a role queue at this time and have the chance to disconnect from Overwatch path and push what makes Marvel Rivals so special. Until we find a way to convince all Duelist fans to tank or heal from time to time, the debate will likely continue to rage on fan forums and social media.
