Marvel Rivals dev explains it was integral to make every hero feel “cool and powerful” for the game to succeed

NetEase’s new free-to-play hero shooter Marvel Rivals is available right now across PC, Xbox Series and PS5. Amidst a world of massive games, the new multiplayer title has broken expectations with millions of players on launch, but why?

In an interview with VideoGamer, game director Thaddeus Sasser explained that the team behind the title wanted to make sure that every character felt powerful. While some games focus on tweaking stats in a patch, the team behind Rivals wanted to make sure that every character’s assets were unique enough to show their personal strengths.

How Marvel Rivals makes you feel powerful

Speaking on the VideoGamer Podcast, Sasser explained that making a player feel truly powerful as Iron Man or even Jeff the Land Shark is a lot more than just pure damage output. Instead, it takes a lot of iteration in animation, visuals and more to make you feel like a superhero or supervillain.

With a history working on Call of Duty and Battlefield, Sasser’s history of making guns feel powerful and individual is the basis of Rivals’ hero design.

“It sounds kinda cheesy, but the reality of it is that you’re trying to create that immersion, that engagement, right?” Sasser explained. “I want it to sound powerful when I fire the sniper rifle, I want to hear the *SPAPOAR*, I want to see the effect of the world, I wanna see the big puff of smoke where the target gets hit. That’s gonna make it feel like a powerful gun.

“The same is true when delivering on a superhero fantasy,” he continued. “Let’s say we’re delivering on Iron-Man. Well, he better have a really cool iron suit that can fly really fast and fire repulsor blasts. That’s pretty key to his identity, and that needs to feel cool and powerful because Iron-Man is a very powerful hero.”

“As a superhero, one of my core fantasies is I wanna wreck the world.”

MARVEL RIVALS GAME DIRECTOR THADDEUS SASSER

Sasser explained that it’s important to “deliver on the key emotion” of what a hero should make you feel when playing. Magneto is an extremely powerful mutant so you need to feel powerful in the same way Venom should make you feel heavy. On the other hand, Jeff the Land Shark is a fun support character who should feel more relaxed and jolly.

Forged by destruction

The game director revealed that early in development, characters would just be “two square bullets shooting at each other”. However, as the team started to develop unique attacks and implement the game’s awesome destruction tech, everything fell together into one amazing blender of power.

“You layer in effect and effect and what it ends up making actually looks like a game,” Sasser laughed. “There’s a lot to how you represent that experience, how you create that immersion, that engagement for you players.”

When it comes to the game’s destruction tech, Sasser’s prior experience with Battlefield titles certainly played a game. While far more interactive than the destruction of Battlefield 4 and Hardline, the game’s use of environmental decimation is heavily linked to Sasser’s history of game design.

“As a superhero, one of my core fantasies is I wanna wreck the world,” the game director joked. “There used to be this old comic called Damage Control where this group would go into a city and clean up the messes superheroes made. I always thought that was interesting because as a superhero you want to feel powerful, you want to feel like you can change the world. Destruction, I think, really ties into that in a nice way.”

Marvel Rivals is available as a free-to-play game on Steam, Xbox Series and PlayStation 5 consoles right now.