One Year In, Marvel Rivals Has Made X-cellent Progress

For its first few months, I had a love/hate relationship with Marvel Rivals. I loved that it was a (ahem) rival to Overwatch, which I had played since its launch in 2016, chock full of recognizable characters whose move sets and character design matched up exactly with what I expected from the Marvel Universe.

What I disliked about it was … pretty much everything else. Back to Overwatch I went, only occasionally dipping my toe into Rivals when I felt like Punisher-ing myself.

Now, one year after the game’s release, I find myself preferring NetEase’s title to Blizzard’s. Some of that is due to the stagnation of Overwatch – I have so many skins in that game that getting another one is more ho-hum than ever – but it’s also due to real changes to the game that have made it a better game. Here are three of the major reasons why I find myself playing Marvel Rivals more than ever these days.

 

Smooth as Xavier's dome

It’s hard to play a game when you can’t, you know, play the game. When I first started playing Marvel Rivals, the lag upon entering a new map was so significant that I’d still be stuttering around the spawn room when Galacta was counting down “5 … 4 … 3” and the door would open at “3.”

It usually got better about 10 to 20 seconds into the match, once everything, and everyone, had loaded, but those first few seconds were rough, and there were still occasional glitches during the larger match itself. That’s hard to deal with in any game, but is even more of an issue in a fast-paced PvP shooter. I thought it was just that my computer was a little outdated and not up to spec for running a newer title, but plenty of other people agreed with me that the performance was severely lacking.

To that end, NetEase deployed a fix a few months after launch to help with shader compilation, which was occurring before every match and was apparently the source of the worst problems. Once that went live, I didn’t experience nearly the same level of difficulty in the seemingly simple act of playing the game.

Admittedly, I also got a new computer a couple months ago, and it’s ticked up my framerate and overall performance a few notches as well. But launch Marvel Rivals was virtually unplayable for me, and several others, at launch. If that was your reason for staying away, give it another shot now.

 

Bots: Exterminated

Being actually playable is one issue that can have multiple causes, not all of them a conscious and willing choice by the developers. The main problem I had with Marvel Rivals that was 100% a design choice was the inclusion of bots in Quick Matches.

There is/was a lot of chatter and confusion about bots in Rivals over its first few months, with some claiming that they didn’t exist at all. Which, sorry to break your bubble, guy who had 27 kills with one death, you’re not that good. You just weren’t playing against humans.

Bots were easily identifiable by a few telltale signs. A “bot match” pitted four human players and two bots against a team of six bots. The bots always tried to play a balanced team: two each vanguard, duelist, and strategist. The opposing team would always have this configuration, and if your humans chose, say, two duelists and two strategists, the bots on your team will always both pick vanguard. They didn’t lock those picks in until the character select screen timed out and would do their best to rebalance the team if someone swapped roles.

Other clear signs were that bots never did anything more tactical than run right at you – no flanking maneuvers – and, after the match, you could only view profiles of human players. Bots would come up as “Private” and have a very low overall player level.

Bot matches were usually triggered after you lost a match or two, though I did hear of people getting them after a win. The idea was that players would quit playing if they lost too much, so bots were inserted every few matches to give people an easy win and keep them in the game. They exist in some of NetEase’s other titles, but it’s one thing to fill out a lobby of 100 in a battle royale with bots and another to do the same in a match that only requires 12 players.

Bot matches bothered me more than any other part of Marvel Rivals because, if I wanted to play against AI, I’d queue for that. Quick Match doesn’t specifically say “Play against other people,” so NetEase wasn’t technically lying to you if it fed you into a bot match, but it still felt like a scam.

Last season, I didn’t notice any of bot matches, even after losing a few matches in a row (and after winning some that felt too easy). This season, it’s been the same, so I can confidently say that bot matches are gone from the game, hopefully for good. That’s got me wanting to play more, not less, now that I know I’m not getting cheap wins to artificially inflate my ego.

 

Beastly rewards

My first two points were instances where Marvel Rivals was behind Overwatch and had to scramble to catch up. My final point is an example of how Rivals outpaces Overwatch, and has right from the start.

As I write this, Marvel Rivals has a Twitch Drop campaign that offers a spray, nameplate, emote, and costume for Phoenix. The final item, the costume, requires four hours watched and you have two weeks to obtain it.

Overwatch’s Drops campaigns are typically stingier. They require much longer watch time to get all rewards – typically 10 or 12 hours – in a shorter time frame, and some require Twitch subscription purchases. I love that I can get all rewards for Marvel Rivals by watching an afternoon’s worth of streaming, or sometimes streaming it myself.

This has always been an issue with Overwatch Twitch Drops, which seemed to require excessively long watch times even before Marvel Rivals came on the scene. Hey, those viewer counts that find their way into press releases aren’t going to inflate themselves!

Though it’s harder to precisely compare the two games’ battle passes and other gameplay-related rewards, I also feel like, for nearly equal time spent in both games over a season, I have a much easier time completing Marvel Rivals’ tasks than I do Overwatch’s. The bonus events, offering various rewards apart from the battle pass, also seem more tilted toward players in Rivals and have fun themes.

 

Marvel Rivals isn’t perfect yet, at least in my opinion. A role queue system is tops on my priority list because nobody wants to play vanguard/tank. That’s a problem facing every role-based game, shooter or MMORPG, and not something that NetEase can fix, only legislate.

The game has also been accused of using engagement-based matchmaking, which doesn’t take player skill into account, rather than skill-based matchmaking, as games like Overwatch do. The idea is that you get the occasional stomp against players far below your level that makes you want to keep playing, similar to bot matches. Skill gaps in Rivals are more noticeable, at least in my view, than they are in Overwatch, leading to slightly more unbalanced matches, but I don’t know that there’s a massive difference between the two.

Marvel Rivals has improved considerably since launch, addressing many of its stickiest issues. With the one-year anniversary event going on right now, it’s a great time to jump back in and decide if the changes it’s made can get you playing again.