Marvel Rivals is blissful chaos, which makes me worry that—like Overwatch—it'll have all the fun drained out of it once the balancing wars begin

GamesThird Person ShooterMarvel RivalsMarvel Rivals is blissful chaos, which makes me worry that—like Overwatch—it’ll have all the fun drained out of it once the balancing wars beginWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: NetEase)

Squirrel Girl in Marvel Rivals pulls back on her slingshot to destroy some fool with an acorn.

Dear reader, there are a few times where I need to eat some humble pie, and this is one of those instances—I was not giving Marvel Rivals a fair shake. I saw the live service box it was coming in and thought ‘there’s no possible way this’ll work’, especially not in a year of Concords and Suicide Squads and X-Defiants.

What’s really impressed me is just howchaoticMarvel Rivals is with its character design. Spider-Man, for instance, feels like he wandered in from a 3rd person brawler, rather than anything approaching a hero shooter. While other characters require things like “good positioning” and “map knowledge”, I’m over here pressing shift and just leaving engagements whenever I please. Or diving the backline and instantly dying. My mileage does vary.

It’s a complete free-for-all out there. NetEase released the game with 33 maniacs, and while some of them are just discount Lucio or Widowmaker, others feel like they were only cooked up after a deep bong rip. As a result, goddamn nobody in a match has any clue what they’re doing. Me least of all.

It gives me the same feeling that launch-week Overwatch had, before role queues, before metas, and before even a single drop of sweat had touched the thing: The halcyon days of Meis styling on entire teams and Pharas doing clean sweeps. It’s a feast of absolute nonsense, where anything goes, and you’ll onlyoccasionallyget flamed for being trash.

But with that feeling comes the same sensation of dread. See, Marvel Rivals is a game that risks having the fun sapped from it on two fronts—the players might optimise the joy out of it, and the devs might start getting nervous about how busted everyone is in their particular niche.

There’s not a lot you can do about the former—in fact, it’s not even something I blame players for. This is a multiplayer game, and multiplayer games encourage mastery, beholden to the human urge to see your number go up. When it comes to balancing—while the end result is in the hands of its development team, it’s not so simple for them either.

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As the playerbase gets more wise to what’s borked and what isn’t, demands will be made. Developers will become the target of campaigns to “just nerf” X or Y—campaigns that aren’t necessarily wrong in practice, even if they can getinexcusably heated. Everyone wants a game that’s balanced. And yet, balance and homogeneity go hand in hand.

I hope that I’m wrong, and that NetEase manages to tow the line between keeping its player base sane while preserving its sense of absurdist fun for the months to come. At the very least, theybetter not touch my boy Jeff, even if he has been committing war crimes.

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