Who would’ve thought it, but it turns out in Marvel Rivals, the upcoming 6v6 Hero Shooter from NetEase Games and Marvel Games, the superheroes are considered quite important.
So, even with a varied roster of 25 heroes already revealed, the first question most people ask about Marvel Rivals is which character is next around the corner. However, while some considerations are made towards presenting a slew of different kinds of characters, apparently just about anyone from the Marvel pantheon could eventually turn up.
“No character is off limits, we have to pick the ones who are fun to look at, different, fun to play, whatever reason that is, they have to bring something good to the overall roster,” Danny Koo, executive producer on Marvel Rivals, told VG247 at Gamescom 2024.
“The narrative designers on the team are avid Marvel fans and they’ll bring suggestions out of the blue. Our discussion is about how this character is similar to these other characters and we talk about each one and pick the strongest one together.”
Marvel Rivals is also evidently unafraid to call on more obscure players in the Marvel universe – as proven already by the inclusion of X-Men’s Magik, Jeff the Land Shark, and Spider-Verse mech pilot Peni Parker – alongside the likes of Loki and Magneto.
“When we come up with the roster, it’s like 70-75% of your greatest hits and the well-known characters,” Koo explained. “But with the rest we tried to throw in some curveballs and deep cuts – characters you don’t know exist if you don’t read the comics.
“The core of the character is always the question: ‘Is this character uniquely distinct from the rest of the cast’ and ‘how can this character work with the rest of the cast’?
“We had over 9000 characters to pick from, which is a good thing to have, but with a lot of considerations to make about who should be part of the roster and who fit both in terms of who they are, how they fit into this world and the lore around Marvel Rivals.”
But none of that matters if the character’s implementation doesn’t accurately reflect their powers and persona in the comics. You could have as many deep cut characters as you wanted, but they wouldn’t do much for Marvel Rivals’ credit with long-time Marvel fans if they were just identikit models of Hero Shooter tropes.
To avoid this, Marvel Rivals says it’s trying to weave a Hero’s personality into their combat mechanics as well.
“We have a design philosophy for our characters where we have this central concept for each character and expand it out from there”, Zhiyong Feng, combat designer on Marvel Rivals said.
“For example, our newly released Heroes are Captain America and the Winter Soldier. For Captain America, we gave him high mobility to be able to dash into the battlefield and back out to resupply. By doing this, we show you the concept of “I can do this all day” [his catchphrase from the MCU].
“The design for the shield is also very iconic. The shield can be held to reflect projectiles and Iron Man’s beams to enable collaboration between heroes. Also we can see his leadership through his ultimate, where he leads the whole team to charge.
“With the second character, the Winter Soldier, as we all know he’s a gun-based character – but we want to make a difference between the Winter Soldier and the Punisher. So the Punisher has a variety of different types of guns, but for the Winter Soldier he has the mechanical arm to trap enemies and tentacles as a unique expression of the Winter Soldier.”
Marvel Rivals is due out on December 6th 2024, and will be free-to-play on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC. Impressions so far have been mixed with some players lauding its 6v6 combat as a return to the best days of Overwatch, while others felt this showed a lack of originality.
