How ‘Marvel Rivals’ Turns 85 Years of Comics into the Next ‘Overwatch’
Marvel is no stranger to games. From turn-based tactical RPGs to fast-paced card battlers for phones, Marvel’s roster of heroes and villains has been brought to life across genres. Some, like Marvel’s Spider-Man, are among the best ever of their kind. However, with Marvel Rivals (out Dec. 6), NetEase, the giant Chinese publisher behind hits like Naraka: Bladepoint (2021) and Once Human (2024), has taken on the challenge of crafting an Overwatch-style hero shooter out of these iconic characters. With a roster of 33 playable heroes at launch, including many Marvel mainstays that have never held a gun before, the new 6v6 team multiplayer game has a variety of faces from the biggest MCU movies to the most niche corners of comics.
While Hawkeye, Black Widow, and The Punisher all have more traditional weapons like a bow, sniper rifle, and assault rifle, other characters take more liberty with their powers. There’s a flexibility to deep-cut characters like Jeff the Land Shark, who can spray water at enemies, or the spunky Squirrel Girl, who shoots acorns from a makeshift slingshot — casual fans may not know what to expect from them, and it makes their abilities a surprise.
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It’s no small task taking these heroes and creating abilities out of their powers that stay true to the origins of the character but also are interesting and fun to use in a multiplayer PvP (player vs. player) environment. Some of the less popular characters here still need to be competitive and balanced when facing the likes of Iron Man, Hulk, and Thor too.
Rolling Stone recently sat down with Guangguang, Marvel Rivals’ creative director, and James Ng, the game’s community manager, to discuss the design process behind each hero, the challenges of balance, and how involved Marvel was with the character designs.
Back to the books
Despite the immense size and value of the IP, NetEase was given full freedom to plunder the Marvel Universe and history books for the game’s inspiration and direct adaptation. That includes 85 years of storytelling, around 8,000 characters, tens of thousands of comic books, and dozens of movies, animations, and TV shows. But selecting heroes for Marvel Rivals actually didn’t start off with a huge meeting or brainstorming session. Instead, each hero’s initial design process starts with one member of the team being assigned to brainstorm what that character might look like in the game before discussions with the wider team.
Although Marvel Rivals is being made under a huge publisher, Guangguang describes the early stages of development as being very small, focusing on the most fundamental details. “In the beginning, there will be one designer that is assigned to think about how to make [a] hero. How do we play them? How do they look? What are their mechanics?” Guangguang ponders. That is then followed up by an extensive trawl through the character’s history. “We dive deep into all the available materials related to them, with a particular focus on their comic lore,” he goes on to say. The goal is to form a “proposal” that they can present to a small group of three or four people on what the version of the character in Marvel Rivals should be.
That small team then rounds out the character proposal, tightening the ability suggestions and helping to realize what role the hero would fill. “We would have a lot of group discussions once the small group has a finalized vision, and then we would talk with other groups among the wider dev team,” Ng says. “Then Guangguang or our lead combat designer, Zhiyong, would give a final vision.”
That effort put into character designs from the very beginning might seem like an obvious necessity, but many other major developers have skimped on the process in recent years. Hero shooters like this year’s XDefiant and Concord have felt like they were trying to copy ideas from other, already popular games or flat out mimic Overwatch’s hero designs and class archetypes. Without their own core identities for fans to latch onto, neither game managed to find an audience.
Some heroes in Marvel Rivals do reflect popular characters from other games, like Black Widow, whose sniper rifle-based ranged plays has drawn comparisons to Widowmaker in Overwatch. But there are core traits or abilities that the team has brought in from each hero’s different interpretations that help the characters differentiate themselves, and often play in unexpected ways. Part of that is determined by which class role they’re designed to fill, of which there are three. Duelists prioritize damage, while Vanguards act as beefy tanks that can hold down objectives or push enemies back. Strategists have support abilities that can heal or buff players.
“Our goal is also to extract the characters’ most essential core concepts,” says Guangguang. “It could be anything from the source of their abilities, like Hulk’s gamma energy, to their defining traits. For example, Loki being the God of mischief. Or it could be a character, like Squirrel Girl, where we even created a new weapon, [a] slingshot that fits her goofy persona.”
Pulling from these heroes’ and villains’ moves found in comics and films gives Marvel Rivals’ characters a more rounded kit, allowing all of them to have some form of movement, as well as a long-range and close-range attack. Marvel Rivals is more interested in letting you fight effectively at all ranges and change up how you can attack to effectively swap tactics on the fly.
While Black Widow has a sniper rifle, she isn’t locked into only fighting from afar. She also has a kick melee attack and some nunchucks that push enemies back, making her an effective threat up close. Namor can throw his spear from a distance, picking people off, but also spawn little sea creatures that fire at enemies, acting as a summoner-style hero to lock down chokepoints and objectives. Wolverine is technically a damage-dealing Duelist but has a lot of area control abilities that are similar to a Vanguard’s move set, giving him flexibility of purpose. He can push enemies back and allow your team to take over a point while being able to quickly dispose of opponents.
Fans love when heroes band together for big climactic moments where all their skills are used in tandem, and Marvel Rivals incorporates that idea into the gameplay with Team-Up abilities. The variety of combinations depends on which characters are selected, and there’s tons of pairings to discover. For example, Rocket Raccoon can jump on Groot’s shoulders to fire his gun while gaining armor, improving his survivability — a move pulled straight from the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. Thor and Storm both share lightning based powers, so they can enhance each other’s attacks. These combo moves emphasize the previously untapped potential of the Marvel IP in multiplayer gaming, while at the same time feel so obvious obvious, it’s a wonder that other shooters haven’t tried it before.
Test, Test, Test
Once the team has completed the proposal stage and they have finalized the hero’s overall concept, then it’s time to test their design. “After all the brainstorming, we would finalize all the concepts into a prototype model,” Guangguang says, “and we would run countless play tests within our dev team.” Each playtest is a deep dive into the character within the context of the game’s mechanics and world, feeling out whether their initial design gels with the reality of they’ve built.
“Every hero’s mechanics and also their core stats are constantly being balanced and updated,” Guangguang says. Surprisingly, the hardest hero for the team to actually get right was one of Marvel’s most iconic: Spider-Man. His design is built around diving into combat and getting out fast, and although other games have managed to make it work, it’s never been done within the the context of a chaotic multiplayer setting.
Spider-Man was the “most challenging to balance from every perspective,” Guangguang says. “[Spider-Man] has a very versatile kit that allows him to be mobile with all his webs, with web-swinging mechanics. It’s very hard to conceptualize and land the concept of combining his web-swinging with our real-time combat.” Spider-Man’s core abilities have nothing to do with fighting. He is a character built around movement, and the timed one-on-one reaction-based combat in PlayStation’s Spider-Man games simply can’t translate to a live multiplayer experience where you can be attacked by several enemies at once.
Finding out how to create an effective fighting style for Spider-Man, where his ranged and close-quarters options mesh with his web-swinging took the longest to get right. The team eventually settled on a guerilla-style dive-in and dive-out approach, where Spider-Man is comparatively weaker than others, but can quickly jump into a battle, deal damage, and swing back out to heal or plan the next move.
These considerations were part of every character’s design process and class assignments. While Spider-Man was the toughest to put together, each one had their own hurdles to overcome during development, although most of the team’s ideas managed to make it into the game. Each one found its slot within the launch roster as it moved between prototype stages and onto the art team to design.
In fact, one of the most complex characters from a gameplay perspective was the first one the development team actually made. Bruce Banner is a scrawny scientist with a pistol and not much else, but he can transform into the Hulk mid-life, which amps up his survivability and allows him to push objectives. He is effectively two characters in one and the only member of the launch roster with this trait besides the support duo, Cloak and Dagger.
Ng explains that “he [Hulk] is the first hero that we reached an agreement with the Marvel team [on]. He really resembles a milestone in our design history.” Guangguang says that Hulk remained a key touchstone for the team that allowed them to put together their design process for heroes and set the tone for all decisions made thereafter.
Running Like Clockwork
Once they passed that threshold with Hulk, the entire hero-design process for Marvel Rivals’ 33-character launch day roster began to fall into place. Figuring out abilities, moves, and what role a hero should fill started was easier with an established pipeline in place. But there were still challenges, namely in how to differentiate specific characters whose skills seemed too obvious or overlapped with others. One such character was Rocket Racoon, who’s typically seen wielding a giant machine gun. But how does that make him unique from, say, the Punisher?
“We decided to focus on his genius engineering side and therefore design him as a strategist,” Guanguang says. This can be seen in his beacon that he can place on the battlefield to revive allies or the hand-crafted armor packs that can be thrown out to support his team. These aren’t abilities Rocket Racoon generally has in most stories, but are ideas born from the character’s core traits and interests within the universe.
But the design process hasn’t been free from criticism. With the full launch roster now revealed, the game has double the amount of Duelists compared to the Vanguards and Strategists combined. This is a problem Overwatch has run into where the damage-dealing characters far outnumber the support and tanks heroes, and has drawn the ire of many fans.
To a degree, it makes sense that many of the abilities from the comics translate better to these damage-centric roles, but this is an issue the genre has consistently faced. Despite that criticism, Guangguang and Ng explain that they believe Marvel Rivals “provides a solid array of tactical options and gameplay variety” for the Vanguard and Strategist players at launch.
From the options available right now, each hero is bringing something new to the table in their respective categories, with many Duelists having skills that overlap with other classes and serve the function and gameplay styles people might traditionally attribute to support or tanks. Either way, the team isn’t ignoring this criticism. “We truly appreciate the community’s feedback,” Ng says, “and we would take that [feedback on Duelists] into account as we introduce new Vanguards and Strategists in future seasons.”
With waves of ongoing updates guaranteed, both pools of heroes will likely evolve drastically in 2025 and beyond and may not even resemble their current iterations as time goes on.
Season one begins on Jan. 10, 2025, and will consist of several heroes and maps, although neither Guangguang nor Ng will say exactly how many. They do emphasize the plural, however. As part of the base free-to-play experience, new heroes will be added without cost. However, there will be some version of a battle pass with new cosmetics, character skins and outfits, and accessories to unlock, all of which will also be purchasable.
After multiple successful closed and public tests, anticipation for the game is at an all-time high, even by hero shooter standards. Based on what we’ve seen and played thus far, Marvel Rivals looks to be one of the few modern takes on the genre that even has a chance to break through the noise — in part due to its globally famous IP, but also from some wise design choices by its creators that have fans of games like Overwatch excited for something familiar, yet new.
But as launch day approaches, the team shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, they’re just ramping up. In the words of Guangguang and Ng, “We’re cooking.”
Marvel Rivals releases free-to-play on Dec. 6 for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.
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