Fear it or run from it, hero shooters are coming anyway. The framework made popular by Teamfort 2 has come to dominate competitive multiplayer over the past decade, from Siege Unpleasant Apex Legends, BraveOverwatch and, most recently, Valve’s experimental MOBA shooter Deadlockwhich has already allowed 100,000 concurrent players in its closed beta.
Marvel Rivals is the latest free-to-play attempt to break into this challenging, saturated market, but the gamble it represents is hard to ignore. When it releases 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 eventually convince you to play it by mid-2025, you’ll have the same level of access as the rest of the player base, including whichever superheroes have been added to the game by then.
When I sat down to talk to a trio of developers from the Marvel Rivals team at Gamescom, it was clear that the team felt reassured by the response to recent playtests. “What was most surprising is 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, like, a hundredfold. That gave us confidence in hindsight, and we looked at the analytics of that, and so we announced the release date.”
Game director Thaddeus Sasser weighed in on the discussion, adding that the Marvel Rivals Discord channel has 350,000 members. So, a breakfast of statistics consumed, it’s safe to say that Marvel Rivals has received the most votes, but can it, beyond the stopping power of its massive license, earn (and keep) a seat at the table with other stalwart hero shooters?
In the days leading up to my appointment, the acronym “that Marvel Overwatch game” had already been formalized among my fellow journalists – and for good reason. Marvel Rivals looks a lot like Blizzard’s genre-defining hero shooter, down to the typography and UI effects when you remove another player’s health bar. It plays similarly, too, with many analogous skills and escort-focused objective play that make it easy to pick up for seasoned genre players.
I had a surprising amount of fun learning Scarlet Witch, a glass-cannon dueller who can fly across the battlefield and fire projectiles at typically grounded opponents. Her ultimate, Reality Erasure, is more than capable of wiping out a team if deployed carefully. It’s an area-effect explosion similar to D.Va’s Self-Destruct, but it emanates from Scarlet Witch’s body, meaning you’ll need teammates to shield your run-in from a devastating gank. The only concern is readability. The game can get visually busy, especially with the third-person perspective and the chaotic blur of team fight ability effects.
You can feel Marvel Rivals attempt to provide every clippable moment a player could ever want from a hero shooter, but bolstering individual agency within that maelstrom is no small task. Balance will undoubtedly be an issue as NetEase throws more ambitious characters into an already complicated “anything goes” roster. Another aspect to consider here is the rotating team-up abilities, a concept unique to Marvel Rivalswhere specific character builds unlock new passive and active abilities in battle. “Every season we have this idea of who can team up with who, with bonuses,” Koo said.
During Gamescom I got hands-on with Captain America and the Winter Soldier, the newest additions to the cast of characters. Combat designer Zhiyong Feng said that Cap is built around a “I can do this all day design philosophy,” so his abilities revolve around high mobility and endurance. Rogers is a formidable tank with a ricocheting shield, at his best when he charges into battle and rains down on enemies. On the other hand, the Winter Soldier is a gun-wielding character, like the Punisher, but NetEase wanted to differentiate 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 to drag enemies in,” Feng said. “We want players to switch between the arm and the gun often, so your gun reloads when you unleash an ability.” In addition to a hook, Bucky has a dash-propelled launching attack (a Doomfist uppercut) and his ultimate is an airborne slam that can be instantly refreshed when he kills an enemy.
About the process of choosing a new hero for Marvel RivalsKoo said that NetEase and Marvel have slid to a 70% to 75% split of “greatest hits” heroes. “Then we throw in some curveballs for the rest and dig deep to bring old characters back to the forefront,” Koo added. That’s why Captain America and Venom (who can crawl on walls and web around 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 about 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 it is confrontational, like you might think.”
NetEase and Marvel have a plan for the characters they’ll introduce in the future, but they also want to respond to player demand, so it’s subject to change. “The core philosophy is that each character has their own unique playstyle, and we don’t want to repeat too much,” Koo said. “So we’re very judicious about which interesting characters we choose, so that they stand out from the existing roster.”
With that in mind, I asked about the concept of “Echo Fighters” in Marvel Rivalsgiven that there are so many multiverse counterparts and incarnations of superheroes and villains in comic book history. “There are some examples, like Hulk and Red Hulk, where they’re pretty different people, but in terms of playstyle, they’re similar, so maybe that’s a skin… maybe?” Koo said. “But if it’s Spider-Man, like Peter Parker or Miles Morales, in the Marvel universe, they’re really different characters, even in terms of abilities. And this is a Marvel universe game, so we’re trying to balance it as much as possible so that we have Avengers, Fantastic Four, Guardians of the Galaxy, and X-Men. We want to make sure that we cover a wide range of characters instead of too many Spidey characters or too many Avengers, so that players can choose their composition more effectively.”
Elsewhere, Marvel Rivals breaks away from the rest by adding highly ambitious destructible environments that can break cover and change sightlines on a given map. “Creating a destructible map is a huge challenge,” Feng said. “We have to think about and iterate on all the ruins on the ground and how they block the heroes and their collision. The second challenge is about the structure of the entire level design. If everything is destructible, the map design loses its meaning, so we have to design which specific parts are destructible and communicate that to players.”
Koo emphasized that everything in Marvel Rivals must also work within 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-esports announcer 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 regenerate because of Loki’s respect for his castle residences. In Tokyo 2099, spider robots can attach themselves to the roof of a temple to keep it in place.
And in case you were wondering, the narrative justification for all this internal conflict is existential hostility between Doctor Doom and his multiversal counterpart, Doctor Doom 2099. “They’re fighting for control of Chronovium (crystallized time energy), which is causing timestream entanglement across all universes,” Koo said. “Galacta has observed this, and she’s gathering heroes from every reality to help stop the two Dooms from causing further destruction. And, because they Marvel RivalsThere are two opposing sides, but they are solving the same problem — it’s like the Civil War. They both want the same outcome, but they have different opinions on how to solve it.”
As we discovered at San Diego Comic-Con, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has also made Victor von Doom its next big bad, but according to Koo, that’s all just a happy coincidence. “Our latest trailer is called Stars Aligned, and it’s an homage to all these kinds of perfect storms,” Koo said.
Sasser also illustrated how such collaborations could potentially take shape by sharing his thoughts on the broader approach to cosmetics in Marvel Rivals. “In the closed beta, we had a ton of skins that you could earn, and there will be a lot more,” he said. “And not just recolors, but full model changes, emotes, and other vanity and customization items.”
As we were wrapping up, Koo confirmed 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 crossplay, absolutely. We had crossplay during the closed beta so console players could play against PC in quick matches,” Koo said. “But we don’t want them to come together when it’s competitive because of the different technical skill differences between controllers.”