Can Marvel Rivals learn from Overwatch’s mistakes?

Marvel Rivals has been enjoying a successful launch, and fan morale remains high as we head into season one. I’ll play a few games with my friends throughout the week, my social media feeds are full of buzz about the game, and the future looks bright. But I can’t help but look sidelong at the other hero shooter that inevitably comes up when we discuss Marvel Rivals: Overwatch 2.

All of this initial cheer and excitement feels really familiar, and I remember experiencing it back in the early days of Overwatch. At first, I waited to see whether Marvel Rivals would burn out quickly once the novelty wore off. Now that the game has been out for over a month and the NetEase team is adding new heroes like the Fantastic Four, it feels like the shooter has the potential to stick around.

Then again, the Marvel Rivals developers have the luxury of watching a similar game strike its own course and falter over the years. Overwatch had an incredibly strong start as a hero shooter. The opening cinematic — a museum fight where Tracer and Winston faced off against Reaper and Winston over the powerful Doomfist relic — was absolutely electrifying. I personally got hooked on the gameplay and became a Pharah main, but I was also intrigued by the overall lore that was drip-fed through events, short stories, and new hero releases.

I stayed engaged in the Overwatch community for years, but over that time, my enthusiasm began to dim. Blizzard was slow to release balance patches, letting players marinate in unfortunate meta games like the Brigitte fiasco for months. When patches did come through, they often bent the game in favor of professional play, trying to ensure that there would be a healthy ecosystem for the Overwatch League. I was just there to shoot rockets as Pharah, and this philosophy of updates wasn’t to my taste.

But what about the initial promise that Overwatch would be a vehicle for some grand lore, an overarching story that would satisfy our curiosity and pay off on so many seeds planted over the years? The Archive missions were an attempt to set these kinds of stories up, but they were often quite limited in scope and scale. In the early days of the game, I would be excited when there was a new hero teaser and we saw a bunch of other characters in frame — perhaps any one of these guys could become the next hero!

Now, it’s just exhausting. There is only so long you can dangle threads in front of an audience and promise they’ll pay off. After years of relatively small Archives missions, occasional blurbs of lore, and plenty of teasers, I – and many other Overwatch fans – simply gave up on trying to follow the bread crumbs. The focus on narrative ended up souring the hero shooter for me, since so much of the story is threaded through in-game banter and dialogue.

Marvel Rivals, on the other hand, isn’t hooking me along and promising me a fulfilling and thrilling story. That’s not to say there’s no lore; there’s a massive archive of comics and continuities with these characters, and the game helpfully points players towards first appearances or major issues. If I want to read more about Jeff the Land Shark or Hawkeye, I have plenty of options.

But Rivals itself is a silly setting in which everyone’s thrown together in a 2099 realm to fight Dracula and Doctor Doom. The setting is in a comfortable stasis, and I have no doubt that fans find plenty of fodder for writing their own fiction or coming up with their own ships, but it’s a much cleaner set-up than trying to kick off a grand overarching narrative with high stakes and big payoffs.

We’ll have to see whether Marvel Rivals can stand the test of time; it’s much easier to run a live-service game for a month than for nearly a decade. But at least NetEase has a list of mistakes that Blizzard blundered into, so it may be able to avoid the same pitfalls. For now, I’m still having fun with Marvel Rivals, and I think its popularity is going to turn out to be more than just hype.