A hot new bombshell entered the videogame villa recently showing other recent videogames how it’s done. This game is Marvel Rivals and it has taken the team shooter genre of video games by storm. Attracting 20 million new players within the first two months of being released. So let’s start from the beginning and provide some context as to how and why this video game shook up the whole industry.
Marvel Rivals is a third person shooter in which players can team up in teams of six to face off against another team of 6. It contains 35 playable Marvel Superheroes and Villains such as the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, Fantastic Four and many others. There are various game modes and maps that have different objectives; Domination, Convoy, Convergence, Doom Match and Conquest. In Domination two teams contest and capture an objective. To capture an objective one team member must be standing on the objective. If both teams stand on the objective it will be contested and not give either team capture progress. It is best out of 3 rounds so after a team wins two rounds the game is over. The game mode Convoy is where one team must escort a payload to the other end of the map. The defending team has 30 seconds to prepare their defenses before the enemy team comes out of spawn. In addition, the defending team can escort the payload back as long as the attacking team is not standing on/near the payload. There are two or three checkpoints a map for where the attacking team’s capture progress is saved and cannot move back past the checkpoint. The next game mode is Convergence, which is extremely similar to Convoy. The main difference is that the team attempting to move the payload must first capture an objective. It has the same rules regarding how to capture the objective as Domination, however the defending team does not gain capture progress. Instead, the attacking team can lose capture progress if a sustained period of time passes without one teammate standing on the objective after gaining capture progress. The Doom Match game mode has connections to the actual lore regarding the in game characters. Doom Match is a 12 player free for all where getting kills will gain you points and dying will decrease them. The round ends after only one player is standing or the amount of time in the round runs out. Doom Match is an arcade game mode Conquest is also an arcade mode. It is a 6v6 team deathmatch in which the objective is largely the same as Doom Match. Get kills for points to avoid dying to give the enemy team points. The main difference is that after killing an enemy they drop a coin that becomes more and more valuable as the round continues. The team first to 50 points wins or the team with the most points after the time runs out.
Now let’s get into the interesting aspect of Marvel Rivals, the amount of playable characters and the developers plan to drop one new character a month. 35 Marvel heroes and villains is really more than you could ever need. There are three roles that these characters play, Vanguard, Duelist, and Strategist. There are 8 Vanguard characters that include Magneto, Hulk, Thor, Groot, Venom, Dr. Strange, Captain America and Peni Parker. The main role of the Vanguard is to be blocking damage for other team members to survive, and essentially control the team fight as they have the most health and once they die a team fight is over. There are 19 duelists ranging from Spiderman to Scarlet Witch and even Mr. Fantastic. The main role of duelists are to deal damage, flank the enemy team, distract enemy healers and use their abilities to get quick eliminations that could tip the scales in the entire team fight. Since they mostly have pretty low health they have very high mobility abilities such as Iron Man’s flight and Iron Fist’s double jump and wall run. The last role that contains 8 characters is strategist. The characters are less popular names(unless you’re into comics) here are the 8 heroes Jeff the Land Shark, Adam Warlock, Invisible Women, Mantis, Rocket Raccoon, Luna Snow, Cloak and Dagger, and Loki. The main role of these characters is to provide healing and buffs to their teammates while avoiding any duelists that might get in the way of that. For some characters like Mantis or Invisible Women they can give their teammates a damage boost or make them invisible. For other characters like Jeff the Land Shark you’re main focus is to spray your allies with a healing water that comes from his mouth(it’s a lot cuter than you think).
Now let’s get into some of the criticisms and doubts I have for Marvel Rivals and its future. Marvel Rivals mimicked to a very close degree another team shooter game called Overwatch. As someone who has played Overwatch, Marvel definitely looked to them to get some inspiration for game modes, character abilities and overall gameplay. When Overwatch first released it was a 6v6 much like Marvel and also had certain characters that were pretty overpowered. When a character is imbalanced in a team shooter game it can lead to whole games being wasted time and frustration. This also leads to mass hashtags about certain characters and to nerf them. If you ever played Overwatch you would probably remember the mass “Nerf Genji” hashtag that basically attacked the Blizzard headquarters. This could happen in Marvel Rivals however Netcase Games came up with a very smart strategy to avoid this. In very high level ranked games teams are able to ban characters. Each team gets to vote on two characters to vote. This means if the character you wanted to play gets banned in that match you are forced to play another character. This still is not a foolproof way of getting players to not use the masses on social media and the power of a hashtag to nerf a character. Another worry concerning Marvel Rivals is the problem surrounding the Bots. In Marvel Rivals if you que up for a quick match you will join a game with all real players. If you lose that game and immediately que up again for quick play you will be placed into a game with only 4 other real people. 5 real people on one team with one bot versus 6 bots. This is a problem because it leads to quick play gameplay being much less engaging and fun. The real question regarding this question is that Netcase understands this is an issue yet refuses to do anything about it. When will the hashtag and harassment about the bots be enough for Netcase to address this. Lastly to finish this article I wanted to raise the concerns about free speech within the game. Since Netcase is a chinese company they have banned terms like “winnie the pooh”, “free Taiwan” “free Hongkong” and messages with similar wording. When players attempt to type these messages into game chat they are not allowed to send the message and get a warning saying this speech is not appropriate for the game.
