Fear it or run from it, but hero shooters are coming anyway. The framework developed by TeamFortress2 has dominated competitive multiplayer over the past decade, from siege To Apex Legends, AppreciationOverwatch and most recently Valve’s experimental MOBA shooter deadlockwhich has already reached 100,000 concurrent players in the closed beta.
Marvel Rivals is the latest free-to-play attempt to enter this demanding, saturated market, but the move it proposes is hard to ignore. When it launches on December 6, Marvel Rivals will feature at least 25 superheroes and 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 it in mid-2025, you’ll have the same access rights as the rest of the player base, including any superheroes added to the game between now and then.
When I was with three developers from the Marvel Rivals team at Gamescom, it became clear that the team is feeling reassured by the response to recent playtests. “The most surprising thing was that players were asking for another beta… during the beta,” laughed Marvel executive producer Danny Koo. “We were expecting a certain number, but in the closed alpha and beta we exceeded it by a hundredfold. That gave us confidence in hindsight, and we looked at the resulting analytics and therefore announced the release date.”
Game Director Thaddeus Sasser added that the Marvel Rivals The Discord channel has 350,000 members, so after a breakfast full of statistics, it is safe to say that Marvel Rivals won the majority of votes – but, beyond the clout of its gigantic license, can it get (and keep) a seat at the table with the other heavyweights of competitive hero shooter games?
In the days leading up to my appointment, the acronym “this Marvel Overwatch game” had already become formalized among my fellow journalists—and for good reason. Marvel Rivals looks a lot like Blizzard’s genre-defining hero shooter, right down to the typography and UI effects when you clear another player’s health bar. It plays similarly too, with many analogous abilities and escort-focused aim play that makes it easy for genre-savvy players to interpret.
I had a surprising amount of fun learning Scarlet Witch, a glass cannon duelist who can fly around the battlefield and fire projectiles at normally grounded enemies. Her ultimate ability, Reality Erasure, can absolutely wipe out 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 your point of attack for a devastating attack. The only problem is readability. The game can feel very visually cluttered, especially with the third-person perspective and the chaotic blur of teamfight ability effects.
You can feel Marvel Rivals Trying to provide every clip moment a player could want from a hero shooter, but empowering individual agency in that maelstrom is no easy task. Balance will undoubtedly be an issue as NetEase throws more challenging characters into an already complicated “anything goes” roster. Another aspect to think about here is the rotating team abilities, a concept unique to Marvel Rivalswhere certain character compositions unlock new passive and active abilities in battle. “Every season we have a showcase of who can team up with who, with bonuses,” Koo said.
During Gamescom, I was able to try out Captain America and the Winter Soldier, the latest additions to the character pool. Combat designer Zhiyong Feng said Cap was a “I can do this all day design philosophy,” so his abilities revolve around high mobility and stamina. Rogers is a formidable tank with a bouncing shield who shows off his best skills when he charges into battle and rains down on his enemies. The Winter Soldier, on the other hand, is a one-gun character like the Punisher, but NetEase wanted to differentiate the experience between the two. “The Punisher is a one-man army with many different weapons, while with the Winter Soldier we wanted to focus on his mechanical arm that he uses to pull enemies in,” Feng said. “We want players to switch between the arm and the weapon frequently, which is why your weapon reloads when you use an ability.” In addition to a hook, Bucky has a sprint-powered starting attack (a Doomfist uppercut), and his ultimate ability is an air punch that can instantly refresh when it kills an enemy.
Regarding the process of selecting a new hero for Marvel RivalsKoo said NetEase and Marvel have focused 70% to 75% on “greatest hits” heroes. “Then for the rest, we throw in a few surprises and dig deep to bring old characters back to the forefront,” Koo added. That’s why Captain America and Venom (who can crawl along walls and web his way through the map) appear alongside Luna Snow and … Jeff the Land Shark. According to Sasser, the relationship between NetEase and Marvel is very collaborative. “It’s not a question of yes or no; it’s more about how this aligns with the vision of the character and what the audience wants,” he said. “It’s much more of a conversation than a confrontation, as you might think.”
NetEase and Marvel have a plan for the characters they will introduce in the future, but they also want to respond to player requests, so there may be changes. “The core philosophy is that each character has their own unique play style, and we don’t want to repeat ourselves so often,” Koo said. “So we’re very careful about which interesting characters we choose so that they stand out from the existing roster.”
Against this background, I asked about the concept of the “Echo Fighters” in Marvel Rivalssince there are so many multiversal counterparts and incarnations of superheroes and villains throughout comic book history. “There are some examples, like Hulk and Red Hulk, where they’re pretty different people but they’re similar in terms of playstyle, so maybe that’s a skin… maybe?” Koo said. “But if it’s Spider-Man, like Peter Parker or Miles Morales, they’re really different characters in the Marvel Universe, even in terms of abilities. And this is a Marvel Universe game, so we’re trying to balance it as much as possible so we have Avengers, Fantastic Four, Guardians of the Galaxy, and X-Men. We want to make sure we cover a wide range of characters rather than having too many Spidey characters or too many Avengers, so players can choose their build more effectively.”
Elsewhere, Marvel Rivals stands out from the crowd by adding highly challenging destructible environments that can destroy cover points and alter lines of sight on a given map. “Creating the destructible map is a huge challenge,” said Feng. “We have to consider and iterate on all the ruins on the ground and how they block the heroes and their collision. The second challenge is the structure of the entire level design. If everything is destructible, map design becomes less important, so we have to design which specific parts can be destroyed and communicate that to the players.”
Koo emphasized that everything in Marvel Rivals must also work with the game’s underlying narrative, so the team implemented Chrono Vision, an overlay that defines destructible map elements. Chrono Vision is granted to the player by Galacta, the narrator-turned-e-sports commentator who guides you 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. Likewise, there are lore-sensitive reasons why certain environmental assets can be rebuilt during a match. On Yggsgard, stained glass paintings recover because Loki values his castle dwellings. In Tokyo 2099 Spider robots can tie themselves to a temple roof to hold it in place.
And in case you’re wondering, the narrative justification for all this internal conflict is the existential animosity between Doctor Doom and his multiversal counterpart, Doctor Doom 2099. “They’re fighting for control of Chronovium [crystallized time energy]which leads to an entanglement of the time stream in all universes,” said Koo. “Galacta has observed this and is gathering heroes from every reality to prevent the two Dooms from causing further destruction. And since they Marvel Rivalsthere are two opposing sides, but they are solving the same problem – it’s like a civil war. Both want the same result, but they don’t agree on how to solve it.”
As we learned at San Diego Comic-Con, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has also made Victor von Doom its next big villain, but according to Koo, it’s all just a fun coincidence. “Our latest trailer is called Stars Aligned and it’s a tribute to all those kinds of perfect storms,” Koo said.
Sasser also illustrated how such collaborations could potentially take shape by considering the broader approach to cosmetics Marvel Rivals“We were able to earn a ton of skins in the closed beta, and there’s going to be a lot more,” he said. “And not just recolors, but complete model changes, emotes, and other cosmetic and custom items.”
Finally, Koo reiterated the team’s approach to crossplay and cross-progression as Marvel Rivals is nearing its superhero landing in December. “We’re still thinking about cross-progression, but cross-play for sure. We had cross-play during the closed beta so console players could play against PCs in quick matches,” Koo said. “But we don’t want them to team up when it’s competitive because of the different technical skill differences between controllers.”
