Can Marvel Rivals learn from Overwatch’s mistakes?

Marvel Rivals has had a successful launch and fan morale remains high as we enter season one. I’ve been playing a few games with my friends throughout the week, my social media feeds are full of rumors about the game and the future looks bright. But I can’t help but glance sideways at the other hero shooter that inevitably comes up when we discuss Marvel Rivals: Overwatch 2.

All this initial cheer and excitement feels very familiar, and I remember experiencing it in the early days of the film Overwatch. At first I waited to see if that was the case Marvel Rivals would burn out quickly 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 feels like the shooter has the potential to stick around.

Then again the Marvel Rivals developers have the luxury of watching a similar game chart its own course and falter over the years. Overwatch had an incredibly strong start as a hero shooter. The opening cinematic – a museum battle pitting Tracer and Winston against Reaper and Winston over the powerful Doomfist relic – was absolutely thrilling. I personally got hooked on the gameplay and became a protagonist of Pharah, but I was also intrigued by the general lore fueled by events, short stories, and new hero releases.

I stayed involved with the Overwatch community for years, but over that time my enthusiasm began to wane. Blizzard was slow to release balance patches, leaving players to marinate for months in unfortunate metagames like the Brigitte fiasco. When patches came, they often bent the game in favor of professional play, in an attempt to ensure that there would be a healthy ecosystem for the Overwatch League. I was just there to shoot rockets as Pharah, and this philosophy of updates wasn’t to my taste.

But what about the initial promise that Overwatch would be a vehicle for some great knowledge, an overarching story that would satisfy our curiosity and bear the fruits of so many seeds planted over the years? The Archive missions were an attempt to set up these types of stories, but they were often quite limited in scope and scale. In the early days of the game, I would be excited if there was a new hero teaser and we saw some other characters in the picture – maybe one of these guys could become the next hero!

Now it’s just tiring. There is only so long you can dangle threads in front of an audience and promise that they will bear fruit. After years of relatively small archive missions, the occasional bit of lore and lots of teasers, I – and many others Overwatch fans – simply gave up following the breadcrumbs. The focus on story ultimately soured the hero shooter for me, as much of the story is delivered through in-game banter and dialogue.

Marvel Rivalson the other hand, does not hold me or promise me a satisfying and exciting story. That does not mean that there is no knowledge; there’s a huge archive of comics and continuities featuring these characters, and the game helpfully points players to first appearances or major issues. If I want to read more about Jeff the Land Shark or Hawkeye, I have plenty of options.

But Rivals itself is a silly setting where everyone gathers in a 2099 realm to fight Dracula and Doctor Doom. The setting is in a comfortable stasis, and I have no doubt fans will find plenty of fodder to write their own fiction or invent their own ships, but it’s a much cleaner setup than trying to start a grand overarching story with high stakes and big payouts.

We’ll have to see if Marvel Rivals can stand the test of time; it’s much easier to run a live service game for a month than almost a decade. But at least NetEase has a list of mistakes that Blizzard has blundered into, so it may be able to avoid the same pitfalls. For now I’m still having fun with it Marvel Rivalsand I think its popularity will prove to be more than just hype.