It’s impossible to talk about Marvel Rivals without talking about Overwatch; the two hero shooters share a lot of the same DNA, and the team at NetEase clearly looked at the wildly popular FPS and cribbed a few notes. Now that Marvel Rivals is a successful game in its own right, attracting its own fan base, some of the old arguments that plagued Overwatch are recurring — and many players are hoping that this time, things will turn out differently.
Take, for instance, the game’s three roles. There are the high-damage Duelists, team-defending Vanguards, and supportive Strategists. A common, and admittedly aggravating, issue is to load into a game only to have everyone immediately lock in Duelists. Vanguards and Strategists simply aren’t as popular, maybe because it’s harder to get a cool quadra-kill with their abilities.
If you played Overwatch back in 2016, this probably sounds very familiar. Players from that era remember watching their teammates lock in as Hanzo and Widowmaker, leaving them to reluctantly play as a tank or healer. I remember playing Mercy for many games in a row, hoping in the next game one of my teammates would recognize my despair and let me finally play Pharah. They never did, because random gamers online are rarely known for their charity.
Overwatch solved this problem in 2019 with role queue; players would go into a game knowing each team had to have a certain lineup of tanks, healers, or damage characters. If you played one of the less popular roles, you’d even get extra rewards. Blizzard also spent a lot of time tweaking Overwatch’s balance to fit into this structure, with characters receiving balance changes or even full reworks to make sure they fit into the squad. With Overwatch 2, Blizzard even removed a person from each team, turning the 6v6 game into a 5v5 instead.
Marvel Rivals doesn’t have a role queue system, nor is it as stringently balanced as Overwatch. Characters like Jeff the Land Shark, while they are potent healers, are also able to pull off game-changing abilities like pulling the entire enemy team into their maw and spitting them off the edge of the map. This means that while queuing up, you could run into a team full of Strategists, or a team with a heavy Vanguard front line protecting just one or two Duelists.
Right now, Marvel Rivals allows for such flexibility and freedom — and once upon a time, so did Overwatch. One of the factors that led to the addition of role queue was the GOATS meta, named after the team that popularized the composition of three tanks, three healers. GOATS dominated high-level Overwatch play for a time, including pro games, and it was criticized not just for being frustrating to play against but also boring to watch.
But Marvel Rivals isn’t beholden to a professional circuit or competitive expectations; it’s very much a loosey-goosey take on the genre where most heroes are, in the right hands, at least a little bit broken. That is a big part of why some fans like the game so much; if they wanted to play a high-stakes competitive shooter, they would simply go play one of the existing esports-heavy games on the market.
Still, the conversation around whether role queue is necessary or should be added continues to be one of the major topics in the Marvel Rivals community, and it has been for months. The Marvel Rivals devs at NetEase told Dot Esports they have no plans to add role queue at this time, and they have the chance to break apart from the Overwatch path and push what makes Marvel Rivals so unique. Until we find a way to convince all the Duelist fans out there to occasionally flex into tanking or healing, it’s likely the debate will continue to rage on fan forums and social media.
