Marvel Rivals is officially out! And, while the game’s massive roster of heroes, gorgeous graphics, and solid core mechanics are going to give it a wonderful honeymoon phase, it’ll eventually become clear this game will be hamstrung by many of the issues Overwatch 1 and 2 have been plagued by for years.
Considering Marvel Rivals is a hero shooter, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid comparing it to Overwatch. And, while Marvel Rivals is better in some ways, it’s much, much worse in others. Annoyingly, the biggest pitfalls in Marvel’s take on a hero shooter could have been avoided by doing some homework.
Overwatch 2 gets a lot of flak. Sometimes it’s deserved, but the game is ultimately the result of years and years worth of trial and error, intelligent solutions, and a very open and considerate set of lead devs willing to talk to the community and try new things. Their willingness to trial 6v6 again is a testament to that.
And, while Marvel Rivals is a great time now, it’s going to fall into the same set of problems that Overwatch 1 did and that Overwatch 2 is still grappling with: Everyone just wants to play DPS.
Marvel Rivals has a little too much player freedom
Overwatch 1 swapping to role queue was a decision that got mixed reactions at the time, but it may have saved the game in retrospect.
Not only is balancing the game around any 6 heroes being on a team an absolute a nightmare in comparison to setting a limit of 2 per role, it also sets Marvel Rivals up to be incredibly toxic from the get-go.
I’ve played the beta as well as an early access version of the game that was a small-scale test meant for creators and press: Even in the press version of the game where everyone was nice, welcoming, and trying to learn the game together, it was a pain to create team compositions that didn’t just have 4 or more DPS characters.
This problem is made worse by the spread of character archetypes. Out of Marvel Rivals’ 33 playable characters on launch, 18 are Duelists (aka DPS). That’s more than half the roster! Of course people are going to want to play DPS considering how many more heroes exist in that role, but being forced into other roles for the sake of your team feels horrible in a solo queue setting.
Marvel Rivals just came out, and there’s already that same push and pull of some players getting to have fun with DPS roles and others being stuck on tank or heal duty to make the team function. In a world without role queue, there’s potential for frustrated players to be stuck playing the same role they don’t like over and over again. It’s going to get old fast.
And, if they do eventually decide to implement role queue, they’re going to run into the Overwatch problem: Dividing up the roles doesn’t make support and tank any more fun, often driving up queue times.
Here’s an image taken from Overwatch 2 director Aaron Keller’s tell-all blog about why the swap to 5v5 was made in Overwatch 2:
Even after changing the entire game with the goal of better queue times, DPS queues are the longest by far. And the view from before those changes is an indicator of what would probably happen to Marvel Rivals if they went with a 2/2/2 role queue structure.
Arguably Overwatch’s biggest problem is that they’ve struggled to make tank appealing, and that problem is made even worse in Marvel Rivals. If you’ve ever tried playing as a solo Strategist in Marvel Rivals and you aren’t an insanely good Loki player, you’ll know that trying to heal a team by yourself with no frontliner against a dive comp is like a horror movie.
Getting jumped and one-shot comboed by Spider-Man 11 times in a row will have you screaming at your screen with a level of rage you’d think only J. Jonah Jameson himself would have for the not-so-friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
However, high-level play is already looking like it’ll revolve around Strategist-heavy comps a la the GOATS meta if you’re familiar with one of Overwatch 1’s darkest eras. Restricting roles may be a must from a balance perspective to keep the meta healthy, but it’d clearly cause a lot of other issues.
There are, however, parts of Marvel Rivals where you can see how they tried to incentivize a variety of roles and picks on each team.
Team-Ups definitely help with this problem, rewarding players for building teams that have synergy with each other in clearly defined ways. They have the potential to reward players with fun combos for picking heroes across different roles, and the strength of those combos could ward off degenerate metas by forcing top-tier comps to require a certain set of heroes.
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But the Team-Up system may also be Marvel Rivals’ downfall.
Teamwork makes the dream work
For those unfamiliar with Marvel Rivals, every hero has a Team-Up mechanic that rewards players for picking heroes that have synergy with each other. Sometimes it’ll offer a small buff, sometimes it’ll offer new abilities, and sometimes it’ll completely change the way you play.
For instance, Rocket Raccoon and Jeff the Shark can jump on Groot’s back to take reduced damage and get more healing out from the front lines. This, understandably, changes the way your team’s composition functions and incentivizes you to play around these combos.
In a 6-man queue, this is awesome. Seeing what teams you can build and how you can make heroes fit around each other is awesome when you’ve got friends along for the ride. Captain America and Thor having synergy is a great example, with it feeling like the devs intended for you to build a dive comp with 2 aggressive tanks at the helm.
It could be argued that the team-up system may help stave off one of Overwatch 2’s biggest issues: counter-swapping. Having so much strength in building your own team comp makes it harder to justify constantly swapping heroes to try and counter the opponent.
However, all of the possible upsides of this team-up system are outweighed by the big downside: Some people just want to play one character. This system heavily disincentivizes one-tricking or sticking to a small set of heroes you’re comfortable with.
And, knowing how hero shooters go, some people would rather spend thousands of hours honing their skills on one specific character than play anyone else, even if swapping could win their team the game. Most team-ups that provide new abilities are strong enough to justify moving certain heroes up an entire tier on the tier list.
For instance, Spider-Man without Venom’s team-up ability is arguably an entire tier lower than he is with it. That AoE knockback is extremely powerful. The same could be said of Squirrel Girl without Spidey’s web bomb, so on and so forth.
If you’re a Spider-Man one-trick, not only are you going to try and pick the character whenever you can, you’re also probably going to nag at someone else to pick Venom. There are so many layers here, and every one of them has the potential to create friction.
Team-ups are strong enough that, even if one team has players who one-trick their characters and excel at playing them, the team that’s better built has a good shot at winning even if the people piloting those heroes aren’t great at them.
Saving players from themselves
In high-level play, the flexibility to play whatever you want could be really, really cool. Seeing 3/1/2 comps, 2/1/3 comps, even 1/1/4 comps where people come up with creative counters or team-up combos to deal with certain team compositions sounds incredible. Marvel Rivals will have some high highs if every member of the team is on the same page.
But it’ll also have some low lows, lower than Overwatch ever saw. Getting players to come up with team compositions that function is going to be a huge struggle, and Marvel Rivals is set up to be a toxic wasteland from the very start.
Once players get over the honeymoon phase of getting to play as their favorite Marvel heroes, I have the feeling this game’s developers are in for a rude awakening: To make a functioning hero shooter, you have to save players from themselves.
No matter how good the game looks, no matter how great it feels to play, people won’t want to queue up if every interaction with other players has them either fighting to stay on their main or trying to convince others to swap for team-ups.
Marvel Rivals, when everything’s going right, is fantastic. But the unfortunate reality is that people won’t cooperate with each other unless you force them to, and many of the game’s core systems break down when a team isn’t working together to win.
In the weeks following Marvel Rivals’ incredibly successful release, the cracks will begin to show. I hope the developers are ready for the harsh reality that they may have to change the game not because the core design of it is flawed, but because the people who play it are.
