Earlier this week, Marvel Rivals received a patch that made Hulk less bulky and allowed the first season to begin. It also did something else: it disabled mods that players were using to add custom skins to the game.
As he noticed IGNplayers are reporting that the latest update adds asset hash checking, effectively blocking the employ of edited files in-game.
This move may not come as a surprise. Marvel Rivals is a free-to-play hero shooter that makes money by selling premium skins to players. Allowing mods allows players to create their own versions of these skins for free. It has been proven that there are many such skins popular on Nexus Mods since the launch of Rivals last year, including replacing Iron Man with Vegeta and the Winter Soldier with CJ from GTA: San Andreas.
I can’t think of any live game (of this type) that allows this type of modding, and the game’s terms of service prohibit modding from the start. NetEase publishers have also publicly stated that players could face bans for modifying any game files.
Inevitable or not, I’m forced to re-write my little spiel: that games are better because of mod support, and that first-person games once thrived in part because of mods, and all of that was once fields. I sincerely doubt that the existence of some stupid, free, user-created skins will impact the results of Marvel Rivals, and I’m sure there are technical workarounds that will allow practice without compromising the integrity of online matches. Counter-Strike 2, for example, has thousands of mods.
Arguably, there’s another problem here: License holder Disney wouldn’t be too joyful if the Marvel characters it based on NetEase were covered in evident nipples. Cowards.
