It’s hard to stop making Overwatch comparisons to Marvel Rivals, given how familiar the latter’s upcoming Chinese New Year event looks. Those of us who’ve been playing Blizzard’s hero shooter for the past eight years have seen this all before.
The Spring Festival, which starts on Jan. 23, introduces a new limited-time mode that is basically Rocket League without the cars. It’s called Clash of Dancing Lions, and it takes place in a big arena with goals on either end. Teams pass a ball around and try to score goals using Black Widow, Iron Fist, and Star-Lord — in dancing lion skins, of course. If you replaced those heroes with Lúcio from Overwatch, you would just have Lúcioball, a mode that has existed in that game since its first Summer Games event in 2016.
It also looks like the Marvel Rivals heroes are getting dancing lion MVP animations just like their Overwatch counterparts. Obviously, neither game invented Chinese New Year celebrations or the traditional dance associated with it, but the similarities between the events are hard to ignore.
Overwatch is going bigger with its Lunar New Year celebration this year in part because it’s coming back to China on Feb. 19, via publisher NetEase, no less. In a post last week on Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote), game director Aaron Keller announced a bunch of returning cosmetics and a whole set of Chinese mythology-themed skins coming in its next season.
But until then, it’ll be Marvel Rivals’ turn to celebrate. And even if the new mode plays nothing like Lúcioball, you can bet people are going to point out how blatantly it’s borrowing from Overwatch. That doesn’t make it inherently bad, but it does make you wonder how much of the game is going to be aimed directly at Overwatch fans in the future.
