Dear reader, there are a few times where I need to eat some humble pie, and this is one of those instances—I was not giving Marvel Rivals a fair shake. I saw the live service box it was coming in and thought ‘there’s no possible way this’ll work’, especially not in a year of Concords and Suicide Squads and X-Defiants.
After playing around a bit, though? Marvel Rivals is a great bit of fun. The actual design of its cast can be a little hit-or-miss (I’m still not sure why Venom stabs you with tendrils as his main attack, instead of smacking foes with his big claws), but when it hits? Oh baby, does it hit. The moment a happy little shark swallowed up my entire team, and proceeded to kill us all by running off a ledge was when I knew this game had the juice.
What’s really impressed me is just how chaotic Marvel Rivals is with its character design. Spider-Man, for instance, feels like he wandered in from a 3rd person brawler, rather than anything approaching a hero shooter. While other characters require things like “good positioning” and “map knowledge”, I’m over here pressing shift and just leaving engagements whenever I please. Or diving the backline and instantly dying. My mileage does vary.
It’s a complete free-for-all out there. NetEase released the game with 33 maniacs, and while some of them are just discount Lucio or Widowmaker, others feel like they were only cooked up after a deep bong rip. As a result, goddamn nobody in a match has any clue what they’re doing. Me least of all.
It gives me the same feeling that launch-week Overwatch had, before role queues, before metas, and before even a single drop of sweat had touched the thing: The halcyon days of Meis styling on entire teams and Pharas doing clean sweeps. It’s a feast of absolute nonsense, where anything goes, and you’ll only occasionally get flamed for being trash.
But with that feeling comes the same sensation of dread. See, Marvel Rivals is a game that risks having the fun sapped from it on two fronts—the players might optimise the joy out of it, and the devs might start getting nervous about how busted everyone is in their particular niche.
There’s not a lot you can do about the former—in fact, it’s not even something I blame players for. This is a multiplayer game, and multiplayer games encourage mastery, beholden to the human urge to see your number go up. When it comes to balancing—while the end result is in the hands of its development team, it’s not so simple for them either.
As the playerbase gets more wise to what’s borked and what isn’t, demands will be made. Developers will become the target of campaigns to “just nerf” X or Y—campaigns that aren’t necessarily wrong in practice, even if they can get inexcusably heated. Everyone wants a game that’s balanced. And yet, balance and homogeneity go hand in hand.
I worry (and I want to be wrong!) that Marvel Rival’s charm, of which it has heaps, lies squarely in the middle of this kind of chaos. That it’ll only be fun for as long as it’s permitted to be by player and developer alike. We saw, after all, how those halcyon days of Overwatch didn’t exactly hit right when Overwatch Classic became a thing. I feel like I’m sitting here, playing in a sandbox, nervously waiting for a universal force greater than entropy—sweatiness—to appear with a pair of hi-tech stomping boots and tear through the pit.
I hope that I’m wrong, and that NetEase manages to tow the line between keeping its player base sane while preserving its sense of absurdist fun for the months to come. At the very least, they better not touch my boy Jeff, even if he has been committing war crimes.
