Marvel Rivals players know that Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm are coming to the game next, but there’s been a list of other incoming characters that may or may not be dropping anytime soon.
While the Fantastic Four seems like a logical drop for this year since the new movie is coming out in a few months, the devs at NetEase have revealed their actual process for how the next heroes for the game are picked—and it doesn’t have anything to do with trolling data miners.
No Trolling Here
There has been a recent rumor that Marvel Rivals devs have put fake character names in the files to keep data miners off their scent. In a recent interview with IGN, producer Danny Koo confirmed, "No. We would rather spend our time developing the actual game."
As it turns out, the supposed fake ‘leaks’ that some data miners have found were supposed to be leftovers from some tests that the devs would do. Producer Weicong Wu likens it to the data miners opening up a notebook full of scratch drawings. Wu says, “The team experimented with a lot of play styles, heroes. It was like there's someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there, and someone [a dataminer] decided to open it with no context."
So, How Does it Work?
When the devs decide which characters to introduce, the first step is to determine “what type of character and skillset is needed to balance out the rest of the game and add variety to the roster.”
From that point, the process goes:
- Come up with a list of possible characters
- Take suggestions from Marvel Games on who they could bring in
- Work on initial designs for said characters
- Look out for any incoming Marvel content like movies and comics and gauge how interested the audience is
- Finally, decide which characters to add
According to Wu, the dev strategy for designing heroes is not to constantly change existing heroes but to create new characters that could address any existing issues. For example, a new character could counter one that’s too overpowered or create a new team-up for strategists who are a little too weak.
Admittedly, the tactic does seem to explain why so many characters are rumored to be incoming in just the first year of Marvel Rivals. However, it could probably result in poor balancing for several heroes over time, which has been a constant complaint with Rivals compared to their Overwatch counterpart, which just loves to tweak character kits if it upsets the balance of the entire roster.
Some Overwatch heroes are even downright unrecognizable gameplay-wise compared to when they launched in 2016. It’s too early to say if Marvel Rivals would share the same fate, but for now, it seems NetEase is solid in its stance to set itself apart from Overwatch.
The next big Marvel Rivals drop is the Human Torch and the Thing, and they’re expected to come to the game on Feb. 21. Marvel Rivals is now available for Xbox Series X|S, PC, and PS5.