Can Marvel Rivals learn from Overwatch's mistakes?

Marvel Rivals is off to a successful start and fan morale remains high as the first season begins. I'll be playing a few games with my friends throughout the week, my social media feeds are full of excitement for the game and the future looks bright. But I can't help but cast a sidelong glance at the other hero shooter that inevitably comes up when we discuss Marvel Rivals: Overwatch 2.

All that initial cheer and excitement sounds really familiar to me, and I remember experiencing it in the early days of Overwatch. First I waited to see if Marvel Rivals would quickly burn out once the novelty wore off. Now that the game has been out for over a month and the NetEase team is adding new heroes like the Fantastic Four, it seems like the shooter has the potential to stick around.

On the other hand, the Marvel Rivals Developers have the luxury of watching a similar game take its own path and falter over the years. Overwatch had an incredibly strong start as a hero shooter. The opening cinematic – a museum battle that pitted Tracer and Winston against Reaper and Winston for the powerful Doomfist relic – was absolutely electrifying. Personally, I loved the gameplay and became the protagonist of Pharah, but I was also fascinated by the overall story, which was fed through events, short stories and the release of new heroes.

I stayed committed Overwatch For years I was active in the community, but over time my enthusiasm waned. Blizzard was slow to release balance patches, leaving players to marinate for months in unfortunate metagames like the Brigitte fiasco. As patches came out, the game was often changed in favor of professional play to ensure that there would be a healthy ecosystem for the Overwatch League. I was just there to fire rockets as Pharah, and that upgrade philosophy wasn't to my taste.

But what about the initial promise? Overwatch Would it be a vehicle for a grand lore, an overarching story that would satisfy our curiosity and pay off on so many seeds planted over the years? The archive missions were an attempt to tell such stories, but they were often quite limited in scope and scope. In the early days of the game, I was excited when there was a new hero teaser and we saw a bunch of other characters in the picture – maybe any of these guys could become the next hero!

Now it's just exhausting. There's only so much time you can dangle strings to an audience and promise they'll pay off. After years of relatively small archive missions, occasional backstories, and lots of teasers, I am – 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 a large part of the story is dominated by in-game banter and dialogue.

Marvel RivalsOn the other hand, it doesn't captivate me and doesn't promise me a fulfilling and exciting story. That doesn't mean there aren't traditions; There's a huge archive of comics and continuities featuring these characters, and the game helpfully alerts players to first appearances or major problems. If I want to read more about Jeff the Land Shark or Hawkeye, I have many options.

But Rivals itself is a silly setting where everyone in a 2099 realm comes together to fight Dracula and Doctor Doom. The setting is in a nice stasis, and I have no doubt that fans will find plenty of material to write their own fiction or invent their own ships, but it's a much cleaner setup than trying to thus beginning a big, overarching narrative of high stakes and big wins.

We have to see if Marvel Rivals can stand the test of time; It's much easier to host a live service game for a month than for nearly a decade. But at least NetEase has a list of mistakes Blizzard has fallen into, so the same pitfalls may be avoided. At the moment I'm still enjoying it Marvel Rivalsand I think its popularity will be more than just hype.