“We’re racing to get everything done”: Marvel Rivals devs discuss the launch but keep tight-lipped on post-launch content

At Gamescom this year, I had the chance to play Marvel Rivals alongside game director Thaddeus Sasser and combat designer Zhiyong Feng, both from NetEase Games. Afterwards, we had a conversation about the game and what it’s going to look like in the future. At the start of my preview, Sasser thankfully pointed out the on-screen instructions to me. “I should really read what’s on screen. You’d think a journalist would know better,” I joked. “No comment,” Sasser said.

I’d picked Venom, the ultimate character from Marvel’s pantheon. In Marvel Rivals, the symbiote is a massive hulk (no affiliation) who can quickly get in and out of combat, though his range makes him better for close quarters. Venom’s symbiotic weaponry makes wet and pulpy sounds but that didn’t stop Sasser from making ‘pew pew’ sounds at times. Throughout the tutorial, I had a little play with Venom’s swinging mechanics, learned how to manoeuvre efficiently with the hero, and got to grips with how the shooting mechanics work. After that, I loaded into a game against bots.

We were playing on the Convoy game mode, similar to Payload in Team Fortress 2. At first, I was keeping my distance from combat. I explained to Sasser that my natural instincts in shooters are to keep distance, but that all gets thrown out of the water in hero shooters with dynamic playstyles.

“The team worked really hard to make the characters feel true to their origins and what you expect from them as a player,” he said. I questioned Sasser on this: was it difficult making sacrifices on a character’s full range of abilities to keep them balanced for a shooter?

“Sure, there’s always a trade-off with that kind of stuff. We don’t want a single character dominating the battlefield. At the same time, these are all superheroes and they should all feel overpowered in some ways. The key thing is that we made sure to keep the game fun over perfectly balanced. As long as the players are having a good time and not getting frustrated, we’re kind of hitting that groove. And with the closed beta test, we saw such positive feedback that we’re in a good spot.”

At some point, we spoke about how devastatingly hot it was in Cologne where Gamescom was being held. For some reason, I told Sasser about how British houses can often be over-insulated and turn into melting pots during the summer. More importantly, we spoke then about the betas; I wanted to know if they have started implementing feedback already.

“Some feedback is easy to deal with. If it’s something like changing a number, that’s easy to do with a test. If it’s something like implementing a new feature – that’s much more complex. Especially now as you can imagine, we’ve just announced the ship date: December 6th. We’re racing to get everything done, so some of the feedback may take longer to implement. But we love the feedback, we take it all in.”

Throughout my conversation with NetEase’s developers, I could sense the passion oozing out of them. It was clear that they had come to love Marvel Rivals, as they should, really. It must be hard, though. Building games is full of tough decisions, and cutting features and characters from the game can be difficult at times, and I wondered how that process went for the developers.

“Sometimes a map doesn’t work out, maybe a hero doesn’t fit into the game balance or narrative and we’ve had to cut them. In game development, there’s always going to be some element of ‘this isn’t working out. We can cut it.’ And that’s actually a good thing to do. We call this iteration.”

At this point I had realised that while chatting to the game’s charismatic game director, I’d let Venom sit idle at spawn. My bot teammates were carrying the game for me.

“So if you lose, it’s my fault,” Sasser said. Having none of that, I used Venom’s swing to ‘thwack’ back into action. 

He explained Venom’s character to me. “So obviously you can see he has a lot of health. He’s a Vanguard class, more survivable. But he’s also a good damage dealer, he tends to be more of a dive tank, where he can get in behind the enemy and target their healers, their weak and squishy characters. Then he can swing out of there.” It was a sprawling team fight in close-quarters centred around the payload. Despite the flashes of psionic energy, Rocket’s constant flurry of explosives and machine guns and the dynamic explosivity that’s tied to hero shooters’ DNA, Marvel Rivals does well in keeping the focus on yourself. The UI is rarely obtuse nor are there big flashing blocks of text popping up whenever something major happens on the map. For the developers, it seemed like an exercise in restraint. I got my first kill after this, then a little later, I died.

The bots I was facing were not an easy enemy to overcome. “I’m not judging,” Sasser said. “I keep telling people they have a little more strategy than you think. I’m actually really impressed with the work the engineering team has done on the bots,” he continued.

Combat in Marvel Rivals took me right back to those TF2 days. I think there’s definitely an element of chaos that plays a hand in this. Perhaps it has something to do with Sasser’s line that each of the heroes should ‘feel overpowered.’ This is by no means a slight on the game. Behind the chaos of Scarlet Witch’s energy blasts trading blows with Venom’s symbiote gloop, Marvel Rivals is just really fun.

The co-op potential is really there, too. At one point, Rocket deployed his Ultimate, meaning that I no longer had to reload (I was quite surprised Venom had to do this to begin with), allowing me to go on a symbiotic splatter spree. I watched the opponents do the same thing; Spider-Man and Scarlet Witch teaming up harmoniously, while the enemy Iron Man fires rockets from afar. Marvel Rivals is full of these cohesive systems that make the game feel like how a hero shooter should.

One of the issues that I’ve noticed with hero shooters these days is that repeated slews of new content often jumble up the DNA of the game. I asked Sasser how they plan to marry new narratives with new characters, while still keeping things organic. 

“Well, the gameplay and narrative are closely intertwined. As we continue to tell the story of Marvel Rivals, we’ll see changes to the characters, new team-ups, old team-ups, maybe existing ones will change? So, the narrative will help shape things. You can already see parts of the narrative in some of the gamemodes. You’re escorting Spider Zero to combat the Master Weaver, for example. So there’s already elements of this woven into game modes and locations, and the idea is that with more time, we’ll tell more about this story and you’ll understand the characters and world.”

In terms of adding new characters, I wanted to know if we should expect to see these come from the ‘blockbuster’ characters, or the B-List ones, and how often we’re going to see new content added.

“So the general strategy with this is that we like two thirds or three quarters as fan favourites, the ones that everyone is excited and wants to see. Then, we’ll throw you some curveballs like Jeff the Land Shark – one of our personal favourites, he’s so cool. And then there will be some deep cuts, like Luna Snow, maybe you’ve never heard of her. She’s a little bit more of an obscure character, but this is a chance to learn about her. Or even Magik, for example … There will be new content on a fairly regular schedule. We’ll have a roadmap in the future, but we’re still keeping it close vested for now.”

After this, I spoke to Zhiyong Feng, Combat Designer on Marvel Rivals. I wanted an early scoop on who NetEase thinks the best character is to start out with. Is there a particular character that you think is top tier, the most powerful, the best? I asked.

“Our top priority for that, is to make the hero ‘the’ Hero. After the beta, we’ll then start balancing the heroes. We want to make each hero unique, but simultaneously there is no ‘rank’ and we wanted to make each hero balanced. After the closed beta test, the results showed us that some heroes were a little bit powerful, others were too weak. We’re going to do balancing according to that … As the combat designer, I want to make every character fun to play. But, of course, everyone loves Jeff.

We then spoke about anti-cheat. For many players, this is one of the most important features in creating an enjoyable gaming environment, though often developers will overlook it, or for financial reasons, it’s outsourced cheaply.

“So talking about anti-cheat, of course it’s very important for a fair gaming environment for all players. So at NetEase, we have a very good operation team to work on this. We have a report system from the player side, we go ahead and verify it, and if it’s true, those players are swiftly banned. During the closed beta test, there were players cheating. We banned them immediately. There are multiple programs, all going at the moment. As we get further into the development cycle, we’ll choose one.”

Having played only against bots, and not having any cheat codes to input while the devs weren’t looking, I couldn’t exactly test this out in my preview. What I could do was think about how this game can compete with Overwatch still very much being on the menu. We’ve recently seen Concord’s failure, and one of the causes I attributed to it was the decline in trust in hero shooters. Marvel Rivals peaked at roughly 50,000 players during its playtest, with a gradual decline over the next two weeks. Clearly there’s an interest in the game, but can it maintain it? If it wants to take on Overwatch, can it avoid some of the similar mistakes? High pricing for seasonal passes, saturation of seasonal passes too, for specifics.

“We’re in the same genre, is the way I’d see it. Overwatch has been a huge inspiration for us, what a great game. They created the Hero shooter genre. You could argue that TF2 was there first, but Overwatch mastered the form. We’ve really learned a lot from that. We’ve tried to create a unique version of the Hero shooter,” Sasser said.

Feng then picked up where Sasser left off. “We are very open to the players, we’d like to hear more from them. Two days ago, we had a Discord live stream directly connected to players. We received a lot of feedback, and figured out what they wanted. Then, we created a future plan to implement that … Talking about the heroes specifically, fun to play is our main priority. We want to make sure that these heroes are really interesting and bring the players to full immersion. But, we want to emphasise that players have fun first.”

It only took fifteen minutes of playing Marvel Rivals for me to be excited for its eventual release. Perhaps hearing the charismatic Sasser and Feng’s passion for the game indoctrinated me a bit. The flurry of action, shooting mechanics that feel very organic for a character I love, a hero shooter emphasising fun over anything else – Marvel Rivals is promising.