It’s hard to imagine how launch weekend could have possibly gone better for Marvel Rivals — the latest super-powered multiplayer sensation taking the world by storm. The free-to-play hero shooter has already wracked up 10 million players, had almost zero technical issues, and developers NetEase have made some incredibly smart design choices. Marvel Rivals has established itself as one of the most “player-friendly” hero shooters out there, and if that momentum keeps up, it could integrally change the landscape of live service games.
Perhaps the game’s biggest win so far is the flawless launch. Since Rivals released, it has had zero instances of the game going offline for maintenance, or servers at large crashing. That’s no small feat for any online game, let alone one that had ten million players over the weekend. Even in my own experience, I like played around 70 matches across the weekend, and had a single instance of a match crashing. On top of that matchmaking is seamless, almost always dropping you into a match within 5-10 seconds. It simply cannot be overstated how important these aspects are — a stellar launch combined with good word of mouth can really propel Rivals to success. It also means anyone interested in the game can literally jump in and be playing within five minutes. That’s huge, but it also ties into another thing the game does exceptionally well.
Rivals’ biggest strength is how well it plays into its heroes and villains. That’s an obvious advantage the game has over other similar shooters, but just having Marvel in the name doesn’t instantly guarantee success or quality. You only need to look at recent releases like Marvel’s Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Marvel’s Midnight Suns (still criminally underrated).
But Rivals wisely leans into the weirdness and absurdity of superheroes, both with its roster and visual design. As another case in point, the wisest move the game has made to date is making its entire 33-character roster completely free. Every single launch character is available to every single player, and that’s a brilliant move. That means that anyone picking up the game has so many options to test out and experiment, and will undoubtedly find a favorite — but also doesn’t feel slighted by some kind of premium player that has extra characters because they paid more.
This alone has already won Rivals a lot of goodwill, but you can couple that with the game not having any kind of timed battle pass. There’s a premium battle pass you can spend money on, roughly $20, and it unlocks a variety of special outfits, emotes, sprays, the usual. But any pass you buy in Rivals will last forever, it never expires. That means you don’t need to feel pressured to play dozens of hours in a particular season, you can simply play whenever you want and progress.
But that’s also where the cracks start to show. Rivals makes a tremendous first impression, but the longer you stick with the game the more frustrations start to seep in. Battle bass progression is abysmally slow, to the point it desperately needs to be fixed. Having a non-expiring pass is a great idea, and there’s a balance that needs to be struck, but currently, it’s simply too slow. Completing weekly missions can net you roughly 100 currency, but the cheapest item on a section of the pass costs 200 currency, with outfits doubling that. When you factor in all the tiers of the pass, you’ll need to play a long, long time to unlock everything. For as satisfying as the minute-to-minute gameplay of Rivals is, the sense of reward in progression and unlockable need to match that.
The second, and much larger problem, has to do with the roster itself, and a common problem many hero shooters face — no one wants to play tanks and healers. There are currently 18 Duelist (Damage-Dealing) characters in Rivals, versus 7 Vanguards (Tanks) and 7 Strategists (Healers). Players flocked to social media to complain that no one wants to play healers, and well, they’re right. It’s a problem that you could have seen coming, as Rivals has established characters that fans know and love. So many people want to jump in and play their favorites — Wolverine, Spider-Man, Punisher, etc. So many of those popular characters are Duelists, and the other two classes are getting left in the dust.
Teams without any healers or tanks will get absolutely decimated by a balanced team, that’s how the game’s designed, rightfully. With enough skill a team can still come out on top, and in Casual quickplay it’s whatever. But in Ranked Mode, a team full of Duelists can be excruciating. At one point, I played six Ranked matches in a row where I was the only healer, and my team lost every single one.
At the very least, Rivals needs some sort of feature that locks players into set roles for Ranked mode, to ensure that teams are equally balanced. You can keep casual modes the utter chaos that they currently are, that’s half the fun of it. But if anyone is looking to play Ranked seriously, there needs to be some kind of change. It also wouldn’t be a bad idea for NetEase to incentivize players to try out Vanguard and Strategist characters, with extra rewards. Ironically, Vanguard and Strategist have some of the most uniquely fun characters in the entire game, but so many people simply don’t know it because they’re too busy going ham on Wolverine.
In the grand scheme of things these are small issues, but playing Rivals for hours on end it can start to impact your enjoyment. There definitely needs to be a better sense of progression and rewards for your time. Marvel Rivals has come out of the gate swinging but if it’s going to have legs, going to really compete with a mainstay like Overwatch, it’ll entirely depend on how well NetEase can adjust to complaints, meaningfully grow the experience, and ensure that players, of all skill levels, are having fun.
