Gaming Journalists Don’t Understand Marvel Rivals

It has been one month since Marvel Rival’s launch and this game is still thriving.

While most similar games would have had a decrease in their player base, they have managed to keep a consistently high number of players that doesn’t seem to die down.

This is a clear indication that players are loving this game.

Not only are they sticking around, but the players that do leave are getting replaced almost immediately.

Overall excellent news.

However, apparently, there are some gaming journalists who don’t understand Marvel Rivals and are trying to point out “flaws” while failing to comprehend that they are their greatest strengths.

A clear example of this is this article by The Gamer:

The article starts by mentioning that even though Marvel Rivals had one hell of an impact when it launched, some of its “flaws” are evident once “the dust clears”.

Marvel Rivals arrived with one hell of an impact, but as the dust clears, some of its obvious flaws are now plain to see. The lack of a role queue is one major omission, and is already making effective team play an impossibility when playing with strangers. Unless you want to switch to a Vanguard or Strategist of your own accord to salvage an ailing match, you’ll end up losing.

This is a problem in Overwatch 2, but role queue has made it much easier to form teams you know have a decent chance of winning if you work together. No Limits asks you to throw this aside for some chaotic fun where emerging victorious doesn’t matter. But in Marvel Rivals, that is the only way to play, so it’s impossible not to criticise. Right now, I spend games playing support out of obligation, preventing me from trying out other heroes.

The first mentioned “flaw” is the same thing that we have been hearing over and over again from some Overwatch 2 players and that is the lack of role queue.

This is by no means a “flaw”, if anything it is one of its biggest strengths because it gives the players the freedom and opportunity to adapt instead of being forced to play a specific role.

Sure you might lose some games because of that, but that is just the nature of these kinds of games.

Also blaming not being able to try other heroes on the lack of role queue makes no sense for the simple reason that that is what Quick Play is for.

It’s quite literally the mode you go for casual gameplay and chaotic fun so you don’t have to worry about penalties for losing and you can focus on just playing the game and understanding how each character works.

Adding a role queue to Marvel Rivals is only going to drag it to Overwatch’s level and nobody wants that.

Overwatch 2 focused way too much on being an e-sports title and made its game all about competition, metas, and team buildups while Marvel Rivals is all about having fun playing as your favorite superheroes regardless of whether or not you want to be a casual or pro player.

We have to be honest here, the majority of players (myself included) have a skill that is average or below in these kinds of games, and adding features that cater to the competitive and wannabe pros sucks away the fun.

This is what always happens with most of these types of games.

They all want to be the next big e-sports title that makes millions of dollars in tournaments and competitions, but they fail to understand that most of their players are casual gamers and end up pushing them away as a result.

Marvel Rivals doesn’t do that and I hope they never do.

Next, the writer complained about the players simply enjoying playing as their favorite heroes instead of trying to understand their mechanics or the roles they fulfill.

NetEase has created a hero shooter using one of the biggest licenses in the world in a free-to-play format where people will want to jump in and play as some of their favourite heroes without restrictions. They don’t care about playing them well or trying to learn what their abilities do or the role they fulfil. The goal is to look and feel as cool as you can in the shortest amount of time possible, a power fantasy that sadly isn’t possible in a game that demands mechanical knowledge like this one.

You can pull that off in single-player experiences like Spider-Man or Batman: Arkham Asylum, but in those games there is no expectation to perform alongside a team. The only thing you’re competing for is your own gratification. Marvel Rivals is different, and it makes a game that looks this incredible and feels so good to play have a skill ceiling that ruins much of its power fantasy from the outset. Those who play it for the aesthetic only to realise what will be required of them will walk away immediately, but maybe they wouldn’t have if Rivals was somewhat more mediated in its rollout. From day one, it was absolutely stuffed with content.

This doesn’t make sense to me.

Why would enjoying a game the way you want to be a problem?

Sure, you can’t have a “power fantasy”, but that is to be expected in a multiplayer skill-based game, and players know that.

Maybe the only players who try to have a “power fantasy” are the duelists who try to solo an entire team, only to get killed, but those are the typical DPS players that we find in every competitive game.

At the end of the day, players who care enough to get good with a specific character will eventually try to learn about its mechanics and role.

I’m saying this because that’s literally what I did.

I came to this game as a noob to hero shooters and with the sole intention of playing as the Avengers because that is the superhero group I was the most familiar with.

As I played, I slowly started to understand how some of the characters worked and played more Quick Matches to practice.

I have only played Ranked once to see what the competitive side of hero shooters is like then realized I didn’t like it and I decided to stick to playing Quick Matches because I have more fun there.

I advise you to do the same.

Just focus on playing and having fun, you don’t need to be another sweaty gamer, we already have enough of those.

However, it is the following section makes it clear to me that the writer doesn’t seem to understand Marvel Rivals, the Marvel IP, or Marvel fans because she says that the number of heroes will damage Marvel Rivals in the long term.

Even during its beta period, the roster was stacked with a staggering number of playable heroes and villains to choose from. In the lead-up to its full launch, more additions were confirmed for the roster, making it hard to determine who I’d main and if I would even have enough time to learn all of their ins and outs before release. Turns out that I didn’t, and now the sheer act of playing Marvel Rivals is daunting. Once again, I find myself comparing it unfavourably to Overwatch.

Overwatch launched with 21 heroes, while Rivals stepped out of the gate with 33, just 11 shy of how many Overwatch 2 has now. As it isn’t an original universe, it has decades of media to draw from when it comes to its roster. But that also means there is less potential for future additions, and some of its biggest names can’t be capitalised on because they’ve been here the entire time. For the first few years of its existence, Overwatch turned each new hero into a legitimate event. You would follow each update and tease with fervent anticipation, waiting to find out exactly what role they might fulfil and what they would look like.

That won’t happen when Rivals adds Sentry. Every new hero was unexpected, but for Rivals, it feels like we are already having to temper our expectations after NetEase jumped the gun on its A-listers.

I could be proven wrong, but right now I’m not very excited about new heroes to come to Marvel Rivals because we are already dealing with an excessive roster. There is no moderation and a desire to give players a temporary power fantasy instead of easing them into things. This will only hurt the game in the long run, and feeling that way right now isn’t a good sign.

I’ll be honest here — I find this take absurd.

It’s true that the roster is big, but the mechanics of each hero are so easy to understand, that it allows new players to get into the game quickly and find a hero they prefer playing.

Also, saying that Marvel Rivals has “less potential for future additions” is ridiculous given that the Marvel Universe is huge and has thousands of heroes with communities around them.

Not only that, but even if some heroes aren’t mainstream, Marvel Rivals can introduce these lesser-known heroes to their players.

If they are introduced in a way that respects the source material it is very likely that players and fans will like it.

Some clear examples of this are Jeff the Land Shark, Squirrel Girl, Magik, and Cloak and Dagger.

Not many people know about them because they have only appeared in the comics and certain old series (as far as I know), so players who only care about the MCU got to see them for the first time.

In my case, I knew about Squirrel Girl thanks to some YouTube shorts where she was mentioned, but I never knew about the others so this was a nice opportunity to meet other heroes of the Marvel roster and the design, playstyle, and in-game lore makes them interesting characters.

In the case of Overwatch, they need to make an event before releasing a hero to build hype and interest because nobody knows about them outside of the game.

That is if you don’t count the content on…certain websites.

(You know which ones I’m talking about, don’t play dumb)

On the other hand, most people already know about the Marvel heroes and they want to play as them, especially when their favorite hero hasn’t made an appearance in a game yet.

Many of us have known Marvel since our childhoods, so we are already familiar with who they are and what they are supposed to do.

This familiarity with Marvel’s roster is what makes it easy to spark interest in the players since it appeals to Marvel fans and this seems to be something the writer doesn’t understand.

Not only that, but NetEase is delivering to players what they want not only from the game but also from the Marvel IP, which is something other titles have failed to give us.

Final Thoughts

The more I see articles and videos from gaming journalists criticizing Marvel Rivals the clearer it becomes to me that they don’t comprehend the players that this game appeals to.

It is the casual players who are Marvel fans and just want to play for the fun of playing as their favorite superhero in a game that respects the source material.

That’s why we don’t need some kind of event to present them to us because we already have an understanding of how they are supposed to play.

And catering to those who want to make Marvel Rivals more competitive is only going to damage it in the long term.

Fortunately, NetEase doesn’t seem to have any plans of doing what they want so we have nothing to worry about at the moment and I hope it remains that way.

Anyway, that's all for today.