‘It’s an honour to be compared to a great game’: Marvel Rivals devs on Overwatch comparisons

“Do the Overwatch comparisons annoy you?”

That was our main question after sitting down to play a few games of Marvel Rivals, Netease’s new hero shooter that bears more than a passing resemblance to Blizzard‘s genre-definer.

“No, we welcome them!,” smiles Thaddeus Sasser, the game’s director. “Overwatch really helped establish the genre, I think they have a great game. It’s an honour to be compared to a great game. For someone to say, this is like this, but it’s also different and I like it.”

Marvel Rivals is a team-based hero shooter in which players pick from a range of Marvel favorites, all with different abilities, in an effort to come out on top. If you’re an Overwatch veteran, it will likely be literal seconds until you find a hero that plays like one of your favourites from Blizzard’s game.

But we think it’s unfair to write it off as a simple clone. Rival’s cast, which the team was keen to point out is already the same size as Overwatch’s launch cast, despite the game being in beta with more characters to come before launch, is diverse and a lot of fun to experiment with.

It runs the gamut of characters that your Gran probably knows to some that even seasoned fans may have to Google. Each time we died, we switched characters, which means while we didn’t get to experience the full cast, we weren’t far off it.

The Punisher is a no-nonsense run-and-gun, Iron Man floats above the battle raining down bullets, and Spider-Man is up close and personal. The issue with putting characters like this all together in one game is the player’s expectation of what they are able to do.

In any other game, Spider-Man should be able to infinitely web his enemies and swing till his heart is content. That’s not quite compatible with balancing a hero shooter, but NetEase has done well to thread the needle of characters feeling like they should, without being entirely broken.

“How else do we make it ours?,” says Sasser, when asked about what Marvel Rivals can do to stand out while still retaining what fans of the genre expect.

“We brought in epic destruction in the maps, you can destroy so much of our maps and it genuinely affects gameplay.” While you can’t completely bulldoze the map until it’s a chessboard, you can shoot the ground beneath your feet to find an escape route, or destroy a wall to create a new flanking opportunity.

This does make for an interesting change, especially as anyone who has spent years playing Overwatch can probably draw most of the maps, and best spots on those maps, from memory. This lends a sense of unpredictability to every game, and means that players who love to sit in a corner and annoy people will have to watch their backs. Terrible news for us.

There are also team-up powers that see certain characters combine to form deadly duos. For example, Rocket can ride on Groot’s shoulders. During this phase, Groot retains movement control, and Rocket becomes a turret.

Not only does that have obvious implications for team composition, but it also means that the cadence of matches are hugely varied. For example, in Overwatch, once you see an ultimate being used, you know you have a certain amount of time that you can be aggressive towards that player before they’re ready for another one.

But with the team-up mechanic, it’s harder to predict what’s going to happen on the battlefield, making for more exciting matches.

The game is mechanically solid, the launch roster is very strong, and it’s bringing some new ideas to the battlefield, but outside of that, the main concern for Marvel Rivals is: how quickly can the team react when the player base isn’t happy?

“We have a long timeline out in front of us,” says Paul Ella, the game’s head of production. “But we’re also listening closely to what the players are saying. Our Discord channel is up to 230,000 people. We’re listening to all that feedback and planning accordingly, and we’re able to pivot accordingly.

“If some things aren’t working, we’re sure the community will tell us,” he laughs.

Marvel Rivals is hugely promising, and welcome competition in the hero shooter space. It will probably never shake the comparisons to Overwatch from outsiders, but now that we’ve played it, it’s far from Overwatch’s alter-ego. A strong initial cast, a cohesive, readable visual style, and some unique mechanics make it much more than just Overwatch with Iron Man.