Fear it or run away, but hero shooters appear the same. A structure popularized by Fortress Team 2 has dominated multiplayer competition for the past decade, Siege Down Apex Legends, EvaluationOverwatch and Valve’s most recent experimental MOBA shooter Deadlockin which 100,000 players have already taken part in the closed beta.
Marvel’s Rivals is the latest free-to-play venture to try to break into this demanding, saturated market, but the gambit it proposes is difficult to ignore. When the game releases on December 6, Marvel’s Rivals will feature at least 25 Super Heroes and Super Villains, all unlocked and playable at launch and beyond. So even if you’re not an early adopter and your friends finally convince you to play in mid-2025, you’ll have the same level of access as the rest of the player base, including any Super Heroes that are added to the game by then.
When I sat down to talk to three developers from Marvel’s Rivals team at Gamescom, it was clear the team was feeling encouraged by the response to the game’s latest testing. “The most surprising thing was that players were asking for another beta… during a beta,” laughed Marvel executive producer Danny Koo. “We were expecting a certain number, but in the closed alpha and beta we exceeded it, let’s say, a hundredfold. That gave us the confidence to look at the analytics from those, and that’s why we announced the release date.”
Game director Thaddeus Sasser chimed in, adding that Marvel’s Rivals The Discord channel has cleared 350,000 members. So, breakfast of statistics consumed, it is safe and sound to say that Marvel’s Rivals won over the public — but, aside from the stopping power of its gargantuan license, can it earn (and keep) a seat at the table with the other seasoned shooters in the competitive shooter world?
A few days before my appointment, the term “this Marvel Overwatch game” had already become formalized among my journalist colleagues — and with good reason. Marvel’s Rivals looks a lot like Blizzard’s hero shooter genre, right down to the typography and UI effects when you wipe out another player’s health bar. It plays similarly, with a ton of similar abilities and a deliberate escort-centric gameplay that makes it easier to interpret for seasoned players.
I had a surprising amount of fun learning Scarlet Witch, a glass cannon that can fly around the battlefield and fire projectiles at typically grounded opponents. Her ultimate, Reality Erasure, is more than capable of destroying a team if used carefully. It’s an area-of-effect blast similar to D.Va’s Self-Destruct, but it emanates from Scarlet Witch’s body, meaning you’ll need teammates to protect you from her devastating gank. The only issue is readability. The game can get visually crowded, especially from a third-person perspective, and the messy blurring of teamfight ability effects.
You can feel it Marvel’s Rivals trying to give the player every possible cutscene they could want from a hero shooter, but empowering individual agency in this maelstrom is no petite task. Balance will undoubtedly be an issue as NetEase throws more ambitious characters into an already complicated “anything goes” lineup. Another aspect to think about is rotating team skills, a concept unique to Marvel’s Rivalswhere specific builds unlock recent passive and energetic abilities in combat. “Each season, we have an idea of who can team up with whom, with bonuses,” Koo said.
At Gamescom, I had the opportunity to get my hands on Captain America and the Winter Soldier, the newest additions to the character pool. Combat designer Zhiyong Feng said that Cap was built around “I can do this all day design philosophy,” so his abilities revolve around high mobility and durability. Rogers is a powerful tank with a reflective shield, at his best diving into combat and smashing into enemies. On the other hand, the Winter Soldier is a gun-wielding character, much like the Punisher, but NetEase wanted to differentiate the experience between the two. “The Punisher is a one-man army with a variety of weapons, whereas with the Winter Soldier, we wanted to focus on his mechanical arm to pull enemies in,” Feng said. “We want players to switch between his arm and his gun frequently, so the gun reloads when you unleash the ability.” In addition to his grappling hook, Bucky boasts a dashing attack (the Doomfist), and his ultimate is an airstrike that can instantly recharge if he kills an enemy.
When it comes to the process of selecting a recent champion, Marvel’s RivalsKoo said NetEase and Marvel are moving toward a 70% to 75% split of “greatest hits” heroes. “Then we throw in some surprises for the rest and dig deep to bring back the ancient characters to the forefront,” Koo added. That’s why Captain America and Venom (who can crawl up walls and webbed around the map) appear alongside Luna Snow and… Jeff the Land Shark. According to Sasser, the relationship between NetEase and Marvel is highly collaborative. “It’s not a yes or no; it’s more about how it fits into the vision of the character and what the audience wants,” he said. “It’s much more of a conversation than a confrontation, like you might think.”
NetEase and Marvel have a plan for characters they plan to introduce in the future, but they also want to respond to player requests, so it could change. “The basic philosophy is that each character has their own unique playstyle, and we don’t want to repeat too much,” Koo said. “So we’re very careful about choosing interesting characters to make them stand out from the existing roster.”
With that in mind, I asked about the concept of “Echo Fighters” in Marvel’s Rivalsconsidering there are so many multiverse counterparts and incarnations of superheroes and villains in comic book history. “There are some examples like Hulk and Red Hulk, where they’re basically different people, but in terms of playstyle, they’re similar, so maybe that’s a skin… maybe?” Koo said. “But if it’s Spider-Man, like Peter Parker or Miles Morales, in the Marvel Universe, they’re really different characters, even in terms of abilities. And this is a Marvel game, so we’re trying to balance it out so that we have the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the Guardians of the Galaxy, and the X-Men. We want to make sure that we’re covering a wide range of characters, rather than having too many Spidey characters or too many Avengers, so that players can more effectively choose their lineup.”
Elsewhere, Marvel’s Rivals breaks away from the pack by adding highly ambitious, destructible environments that can break down cover and change sightlines on a given map. “Creating a destructible map is a huge challenge,” Feng said. “We have to consider and iterate on all the ruins on the ground and how they block heroes and how they collide. The second challenge is the structure of the overall level design. If everything is destructible, the map design loses its meaning, so we have to design which specific parts are destructible and communicate that to players.”
Koo emphasized that everything in Marvel’s Rivals must also function within the game’s core narrative, so the team implemented Chrono Vision, an overlay that defines the map’s destructible elements. Chrono Vision is granted to the player by Galacta, a narrator-turned-esports presenter who guides the player through the game’s tutorial. “She breaks the fourth wall by talking to the player and teaching them how to save the world,” Koo said. Similarly, there are story-sensitive reasons why certain environmental assets can be rebuilt during gameplay. On Yggsgard, stained glass windows are restored by Loki’s reverence for his castle dwellings. In Tokyo 2099, spider robots can attach themselves to the temple roof to keep it in place.
As we learned at San Diego Comic-Con, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has also made Victor von Doom its next substantial bad, but according to Koo, it’s all just a fun coincidence. “Our latest trailer is called Stars Aligned, and it pays homage to all those perfect storms,” Koo said.
Sasser also illustrated how such collaborations could potentially take shape, referring to a broader approach to cosmetics in Marvel’s Rivals“We had a ton of skins you could earn in the closed beta, and there’s going to be a lot more,” he said. “And not just color changes, but full model changes, emotes, and other cosmetic and customization items.”
At the end of the meeting, Koo reaffirmed the team’s approach to cross-platform play and cross-platform progress, Marvel’s Rivals is approaching the superhero’s landing in December. “We’re still thinking about cross-progressive, but crossplay, definitely. We had crossplay during the closed beta so that console players could play against PC in quick matches,” Koo said. “But we don’t want them to group up when there’s competition because of the different technical skill differences between controllers.”
