Marvel Rivals’ tech lead reveals Doctor Strange’s portals were an “unprecedented” technical hurdle that caused massive performance issues

One of the absolute best parts of Marvel Rivals is the game’s ability to make every hero feel like an accurate representation of their comic book counterpart. With new heroes coming every month and a half, developer NetEase is working hard to make sure the game properly reflects what players want those heroes to do. 

However, as revealed in an interview with Epic Games, it’s not always easy, and the team has struggled to keep core features in the game during development. The biggest issue by far? Doctor Strange’s portals. 

Doctor Strange was a challenge for Marvel Rivals 

Marvel Rivals Technical Lead Designer Ruan Weikang explained that creating Doctor Strange’s portal technology was a massive hurdle for the team. With the game’s focus on 60fps gameplay and environmental destruction, the portals led to “unprecedented performance demands” during development. 

As a staple release for Unreal Engine 5, NetEase wanted to make sure that unique features of the cutting-edge engine could be used. Alongside the game’s destruction tech, Rivals’ Lumen lighting system could prove taxing. All of that combined with Doctor Strange’s portals resulted in shocking performance early in development. 

“Doctor Strange’s spatial portals… proved particularly challenging from a technical perspective,” Weikang explained. “Creating portals that enable real-time spatial connections and bi-directional combat interactions not only presented complex gameplay implementation challenges but also introduced unprecedented performance demands when combined with advanced graphics features like Lumen.”

Originally, the team implemented a “scene capture system” which introduced massive performance drops, especially when two portals were active at the same time. Combined with more complex battles, the game would slow to a crawl. 

However, after months of work, the team created a new method of creating portals in Marvel Rivals, switching to a “modified ViewPort split-screen implementation” that was rendered directly instead of relying on capturing a scene and projecting it into a portal. While this method has its own challenges, it proved vastly more performant for the game. 

“While balancing portal functionality with performance requirements presented significant challenges, the end result successfully captures the essence of Doctor Strange’s iconic abilities while adding meaningful tactical depth to gameplay, ultimately justifying the technical investment,” the developer explains. 

With all this work for one character’s ability, it shows that NetEase is extremely dedicated in their attempts to properly replicate heroes’ superpowers. Alongside Strange’s portals, the team has created Spider-Man web-slinging, Sue Storm invisibility and even The Hulk’s transformation. It’s awesome. 

For more Rivals coverage, read about the game’s shockingly low map variety or check out a list of all the in-game slang those youngsters keep using. What did they just call me?