While NetEase Games has been steadily deepening the Marvel Rivals roster by bringing in new characters from the overall Marvel Comics line-up, creative director Guangyun Chen has revealed that there might even be new, completely original characters that come to the title. In an interview with Mp1st, Chen spoke about this, revealing that the studio has permission from Marvel to introduce its own characters to the competitive shooter.
“Yes, we are allowed to introduce original characters in Marvel Rivals,” said Chen when asked about whether or not the studio was allowed to do more with the characters as it makes its way through Marvel’s expansive offerings. However, Chen didn’t provide any more details about whether original characters were in development for Marvel Rivals yet. He did, however, ask players to “stay tuned”.
Marvel Rivals recently made its latest addition to the roster in the form of Blade. The character was released as part of the mid-season update, which also brought with it a host of other content, including efforts to reduce in-game toxicity through automatic screening of voice chats, a custom filter for text chat, and increased penalties for players that leave matches in Competitive Play.
The Season 3.5 update also brought with it a completely-rebuilt shader system for the PC version of Marvel Rivals to improve the game’s performance. Chen had revealed at the time that the shaders for the game will now load when players are in the lobby, ultimately leading to reduced memory usage.
Earlier this month, Chen had also spoken about the matchmaking system in the game after accusations started coming out of Marvel Rivals making use of Engagement Oriented Matchmaking – or EOMM – rather than skill-based matchmaking – or SBMM. While he didn’t reveal too many details, Chen did say that the studio would talk about the matchmaking system in depth later in the month.
He also spoke about the studio’s balance to game balance in Marvel Rivals, especially when it comes to walking a tightrope between balance for competitive players as opposed to balance for more casual players.
“Maybe let me introduce our approach to balance adjustments,” said Chen. “When we work on balancing, we don’t just focus on casual players, nor do we only focus on competitive players. We take a holistic look at the entire game environment across different modes, including quick play, competitive play, and tournaments. We pay close attention to each hero’s pick rate, win rate, and ban rate.”
“Yes, we comprehensively analyze these data points. Our design team also has many skilled colleagues. We constantly experience the game environment ourselves. By combining all this information, we make adjustments to the game balance.”
Marvel Rivals is a free-to-play competitive shooter starring superheroes and supervillains from across Marvel Comics. The game was met with success quite quickly after release, getting more than 40 million players back in February alone. For more details about Marvel Rivals, which is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, check out our review. Also check out how there are plans to collaborate with other Marvel games in the future as well.
