Can Marvel Rivals learn from Overwatch’s mistakes?

Marvel Rivals has had a successful launch and fan morale remains high ahead of its first season. I’ll be playing a few games with friends throughout the week, my social media feeds are full of rumors about the game, and the future looks bright. But I can’t help but glance sideways at another shooter hero that inevitably comes up when we discuss Marvel Rivals: Overwatch 2.

All that initial fun and excitement feels very familiar to me and I remember experiencing it back in the early days of the company. Overwatch. At first I waited to see Marvel Rivals will quickly burn out once the novelty wears off. Now that the game has been out for over a month and the NetEase team is adding new heroes like the Fantastic Four, it seems like the shooter has the potential to stay in the game.

Again, Marvel Rivals Developers have the luxury of watching a game like this run its course and fail over the years. Overwatch had an incredibly strong start as a hero shooter. The first video, a museum battle pitting Tracer and Winston against Reaper and Winston for the powerful Doomfist relic, was simply amazing. I personally became engrossed in the gameplay and the main character of Pharah, but I was also intrigued by the overall story that seeped through through events, short stories, and new hero releases.

I continued to study Overwatch community for many years, but over time my enthusiasm began to wane. Blizzard has been slow to release balance patches, allowing players to marinate in failed metas like the Bridget fiasco for months. When patches did come out, they often skewed the game in favor of professional play in an attempt to ensure a healthy Overwatch League ecosystem. I was just there to shoot rockets as Pharah, and that update philosophy wasn’t to my taste.

What about the original promise that Overwatch will be the vehicle for some great knowledge, an overarching story that will satisfy our curiosity and pay off so many seeds planted over the years? The Archive’s missions attempted to tell such stories, but they were often quite limited in scope and scope. In the early days of the game, I was excited when a new hero teaser came out and we saw a bunch of other characters in the picture – maybe any of these guys could be the next hero!

Now it’s just tedious. It’s so long that you can dangle threads in front of an audience and promise they’ll pay off. After many years of relatively small missions in the Archives, random notes and many teasers, I – and many others Overwatch the fans simply gave up trying to follow the breadcrumbs. The focus on the narrative ultimately ruined the hero shooter for me, as much of the story revolves around in-game banter and dialogue.

Marvel Rivalson the other hand, it doesn’t hook me and doesn’t promise an interesting and exciting story. This does not mean that there is no knowledge; there is a huge archive of comics and continuities featuring these characters, and the game helpfully points players to first appearances or major issues. If I want to know more about Jeff the Land Shark or Hawkeye, I have many options.

But Rivals itself is a silly setting where everyone comes together in the world of 2099 to fight Dracula and Doctor Doom. The setting is in a comfortable stasis, and I have no doubt that fans will find plenty of fodder for writing their own fiction or creating their own ships, but this is a much cleaner setup than trying to launch a grand overarching narrative with high stakes and big payoffs.

We’ll have to see if Marvel Rivals can stand the test of time; It’s much easier to launch a game with a live service within a month than for almost ten years. But at least NetEase has a list of mistakes Blizzard made, so maybe they can avoid the same pitfalls. At the moment I’m still having fun with Marvel Rivalsand I think its popularity will prove to be more than just hype.