Marvel Rivals enjoys a successful launch and fan morale remains high in the first season. I’ll be playing a few games with friends this week, my social media feeds are full of buzz about this game, and the future looks radiant. However, I can’t assist but look sideways at another hero shooter that inevitably comes up when we discuss Marvel Rivals: : Overwatch 2.
All that initial joy and excitement is really familiar and I remember experiencing it at the beginning Overwatch. At first I waited to see if Marvel Rivals it will quickly burn out once the novelty wears off. Now that the game has been out for over a month and the NetEase team is adding fresh heroes like the Fantastic Four, it seems like the shooter has the potential to stay relevant.
Then again Marvel Rivals developers have the luxury of watching a similar game take its course and fade away over the years. Overwatch had an incredibly powerful start as a hero shooter. The opening cinematic – the museum fight pitting Tracer and Winston against Reaper and Winston for the powerful Doomfist relic – was absolutely electrifying. Personally, I got into the gameplay and became the main character of Pharah, but I was also intrigued by the overall plot, which was fed by drops of events, stories and the release of fresh characters.
I stayed involved in Overwatch community for years, but over time my enthusiasm began to wane. Blizzard has been leisurely to release balancing patches, allowing players to immerse themselves in unfortunate metagames like the Brigitte fiasco for months. When patches came out, they often skewed the game in favor of professional play in an attempt to provide a robust ecosystem for the Overwatch League. I was just there to shoot missiles as Pharah, but I didn’t like this update philosophy.
But what about the initial promise that Overwatch would it be a carrier of some great knowledge, an overarching story that would satisfy our curiosity and pay off so many seeds planted over the years? Archive missions attempted to create this type of story, but were often quite circumscribed in scope and scale. Early in the game, I was excited when the trailer for the fresh hero came out and we saw a few other characters in the shot – maybe one of these guys could become the next hero!
Now it’s just tiring. There’s only so long you can dangle plot lines in front of the audience and promise it will pay off. After years of relatively diminutive missions in the Archives, sporadic mentions of the plot, and tons of trailers, I – and many others Overwatch fans – have simply given up on following the breadcrumbs. The focus on narrative ultimately spoiled the hero shooter for me, as most of the story relies on in-game banter and dialogue.
Marvel Rivalson the other hand, it doesn’t draw me in and doesn’t promise a satisfying and thrilling story. This does not mean that there is no knowledge; there is a huge archive of comics and sequels with these characters, and the game guides players towards first appearances or main issues. If I want to read more about Jeff Land Shark or Hawkeye, I have plenty of options.
Image: NetEase Games/Marvel Games
But Rivals itself is a silly setting where everyone has gathered in the land of 2099 to fight Dracula and Doctor Doom. The plot is at a comfortable lull, and I have no doubt that fans will find plenty of material to write their own novels or invent their own ships, but it’s a much cleaner setup than trying to launch a grand, overarching narrative with high stakes and huge payoffs.
We need to see if Marvel Rivals can stand the test of time; it’s much easier to play live for a month than for almost a decade. But at least NetEase has a list of the bugs that Blizzard got into, so maybe it can avoid the same pitfalls. I’m still having fun with it for now Marvel Rivalsand I think its popularity will prove to be more than just hype.
