How Marvel Rivals Is Making Marvel Fans Happy

Marvel Rivals is not my type of game. Following the Overwatch formula, it’s a player vs player third-person shooter in which Marvel heroes fight each other. Nothing new for the Marvel universe, but I’d rather be a hero fighting villains. Narrated by Galacta, the daughter of Galactus (yes, this is an actual comic character from outside 616, Earth-610102 primarily), the basic premise is Doctor Doom making contact with this 2099 counterpart and the result spelling trouble for the multiverse. I’m not heavy into 2099 lore, but I thought their Doom was trying to make up for past Doom’s crimes and be a good person. Maybe I’m thinking of someone else.

The game is produced by the Chinese company NetEase, and being from China might be a concern for some. However, the game is a favorite among Marvel’s fanbase, including former ones that complain about the comics and distance themselves from Marvel Studios. Where the comics and movies/streaming shows are failing, it sounds like this company is succeeding. This is the country that Marvel gladly censors some of their activist additions for because the very strict Chinese government wouldn’t approve of things considered “woke” in the West. They’re also praised for letting female characters be attractive, respecting the lore of the Marvel multiverse, and then producing a game that’s just fun to play. If you like that genre, of course.

A set of articles dropped recently interviewing people involved with the Marvel Rivals project that sheds light on their creative process and how they approach decades of Marvel lore, respecting fans and the source material. If Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios did what NetEase is doing (as well as other studios working on Marvel Games projects), maybe they’d be getting the same level of fan love.

I’m not sure where PC Gamer sits in the culture war or how shill they are for Disney-owned Marvel, but these first set of articles come from that site. The first article that got my attention was Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo, discussing how the roster of heroes are put together.

“Roughly 70% [of the roster] is made up of your greatest hits, like well-known heroes: Iron Man, Cap, etc,” Danny Koo, executive producer of Marvel Games, tells PC Gamer in an interview at GDC 2025. “And then we throw in some curve balls; you might not even know who they are, to make the roster more interesting.”

Regardless of how popular a hero is, all of them undergo the same scrutiny during the development phase. “What we do is, whenever we have a character, we’ll come up with a character background, who they are, and the comic references that appear in what they do, and we’ll hand it over to the design team,” Koo says. “Then they’ll come up with some ideas, and we’ll both agree on what their baseline is. When we feel good about [the hero], we go into production.

“Then the marketing team is like, ‘Okay, how do we present this to new players that might not know whose world this is? Do we need to explain it?’ We have a comic historian come in.”

Did you catch that last part? “We have a comic historian come in.” Where Marvel Studios kicked out the committee created by the outgoing Ike Perlmutter and Avi Arad to ensure characters match up as close as possible to their comic counterpart, knowing that would draw in more fans–aka the people who actually buy the merchandise beyond and including kids toys–the adaptations began to suffer. You have producers who want comic ignorant people adapting comics, directors and showrunners who think they can make better superheroes than the people whose job IS making superheroes and altering powers and backstories for their “superior” takes, and the usual race/gender swaps. Despite being a multiverse, an often used defense by those who support the heavy alterations to characters, NetEase and Marvel Games are actively trying to get the characters right. Fans appreciate that stuff, but how do you keep fans without losing casual audiences?

Let’s leave PC Gamer for a moment and check out Bounding Into Comics collecting excerpts from the podcast The Fourth Curtain. The article includes the podcast if you’re interested. Writer Alex Irvine, who has worked on Marvel novels, discusses his approach to the writing when it comes to the two audiences being pursued as well as a plan for a “Marvel Gaming Universe” similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Amidst a conversation regarding his approach to writing Marvel Rivals‘ narrative and dialogue, Irvine noted that since the game was multiplayer and thus had no ‘proper cutscenes’ that he could use to communicate its lore, he took great care to intentionally place “little story bits everywhere”, such as in lore entries or environmental details, in order to better inform players of each character’s role in the larger Marvel Universe.

Given the sticky subject of continuity, Marroquin then pressed Irvine as to what it was like attempting to craft such a multiversal story out of Marvel’s 90-year publication history, Marvel, especially in light of the publisher’s tendency to view their media productions as “one piece to a bigger puzzle”.

In turn, the writer revealed, “That’s always an interesting working with Marvel, because, when I first started working on Marvel games, there was this idea that they were going to create, like, a ‘Marvel Gaming Universe’ that was going to exist in the same way that the MCU does. [But] It never really happened, as you also know.”

The project was ultimately going to be too much work to get all the lore right. Comics have had decades to learn how to do it, and continuity in the MCU prior to Disney was mostly “this movie happened in the same timeline as that movie”, which is how you do it. A game with branching paths based on the player’s choices clearly wouldn’t fit, but it otherwise shouldn’t be any different than any sequel to a previous game. Every game series is its own continuity with its own universe number because, as nobody told the current MCU, each project is an official Marvel universe, even the failed pilots and TV movies. The Marvel Database is using the unofficial designation “Earth-TRN1444” until Marvel gives it a proper adaptation, if the people in charge even remember to.

They also use obscure heroes as more than just cannon fodder. From Cloak and Dagger to Jeff The Land Shark, they aren’t sticking with who is popular in the MCU or going for shock deaths. Even Doom 2099 isn’t as well know as the main version. They see potential in the character as a playable or non-player character, and they’re in the game.

One standout has been Sue Richards, the Invisible Woman. There was controversy over her accurate “Malice” skin, the outfit they shove Sue into whenever someone turns her evil. Fans appreciate a woman who actually appears attractive, a situation shared with Squirrel Girl, who lies somewhere between her original and current comic depictions. It’s also led players to do something the movies have failed to do: look into her comic book backstory. You could make the case the comics themselves have failed to do that. And yet…

Despite the Fantastic Four’s long history in Marvel comics alongside a handful of film appearances, albeit some better than others, the team still noticed an uptick in searches, specifically for Invisible Woman. “When we announced Fantastic Four, the Google searches for Invisible Woman went up 3,000% in that period,” Danny Koo, executive producer at Marvel Games, tells PC Gamer at GDC.

Listen, while I’m sure NetEase isn’t going to say it out loud, we do know it employs body models with specific, recognisable kiesters to, uh, flesh out the roster. We also know that the game’s models are incredibly detailed.

While I’m sure some players were genuinely interested in the comicbook history of Invisible Woman, I’d be lying if I said that was likely the only reason people were searching for her. Alongside Mister Fantastic’s The Maker skin, Invisible Woman’s first costume was the Malice skin. This take on her evil alter-ego sent the playerbase into a bit of a frenzy when it first came out, for obvious reasons, so my bet’s on some players searching up Invisible Woman after seeing that get teased by NetEase.

While there is a joint aesthetic to the look of costumes to create a uniformity between the game (not quite armored but more than just the traditional spandex), the characters look like the characters from the comics. They’re easily recognized and the powers and gear in the game reflects that history in a way that’s fun. I also imagine how Sue uses her forcefields may attract some games because how the characters play is also important to NetEase.

“So every character we balance for fun, first and foremost, as in if the character is fun or not [to play], that’s always number one,” Danny Koo, executive producer of Marvel Games, tells PC Gamer in an interview at GDC. “And then the team has data on win rates, making sure that no one character is too painful and oppressive so that everybody’s still having fun. But that’s secondary.”

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For the competitive side of the game, all that havoc can make a Marvel Rivals match overwhelming and slightly out of control, but NetEase believes this disorder is what makes the casual side of the game so much fun. “This game is built to be more acceptable for casual play,” Koo says. “People just want to have fun at the end of the day—that balance for fun is always the key number one priority of anything.”

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“[Players] want to feel like they’re playing as unique a character as possible,” Koo says. “And the team has pulled it off with every single character. I mean, the latest content with Human Torch and Storm, the flame and whirlwind combination, becomes a firestorm. That in itself is visually spectacular. But then I think the graphic team also needs to make sure that it doesn’t kill your entire graphic resources, especially if you’re in the eye of the storm.”

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“[Casual and competitive] co-exist, but the majority of the players will not play competitive anyway, that’s for sure,” Koo says. “They just want to have fun with friends and go, ‘Hey, let’s queue and do a quick play.’ But competitive is also important, right? Because [players] also want an avenue to show off their mastery.”

In other words they’re trying to give players the best experience, not telling fans what they want and they should like what they get, or putting some agenda besides fun gameplay first. I don’t know how they deal with the current microtransaction trend as I don’t play the game, but it is nice to see a game developer putting the gameplay first, especially in a game where the story is simply a reason for the fighting and not the main goal. And apparently they also listen to those fans if something is wrong. For example:

One of the most recent bugs to appear in Marvel Rivals is a small issue involving Peni Parker and her Arachno-Mines, fortunately, the devs spotted the issue and began working on a fix straight away.

Peni Parker has the ability to deploy small spider mines that can skitter towards enemy players to explode at their feet. Usually, they’re easy to kill, even if they’re a little wriggly, but one place where they’re invulnerable is inside Peni’s Cyber-Webs. This is something else that Peni can place across the map, allowing the Arachno-Mines to travel safely towards their next victim. The only problem is that recently, these webs haven’t been doing their job.

“We’ve been following the discussions in the community about Peni Parker, specifically regarding her Cyber-Web—the mines can still be attacked and destroyed during their burrowing and explosive phases, which is definitely impacting her gameplay experience,” Marvel Rivals’ community manager says on the official Discord. “We recognise this as a bug.”

Luckily, it didn’t take long for the devs to pinpoint the issue and work up a fix. After just over nine hours, an update was placed in the same Discord channel, confirming that things should be back to normal now. “We fixed the bug with Peni Parker’s Arachno-Mines,” the community manager says. “They’re back to their normal behaviour, invulnerable and undestroyable while within her Cyber-Web. Thank you for all your patience!”

And if you read the article (PC Gamer contributor Elle Gould wrote most of these and seems to really love the game) the fans responded positively. It’s odd that China, the country that spies on and keeps its people down, bullies religious groups not towing the line, insists other countries are part of China when they say otherwise, is doing a better job at creating a fun gaming experience and utilizing the Marvel comics characters better than the people whose job is to properly use the characters or other gaming studios more interested in a message or making a movie than making an interactive storytelling experience when they aren’t even telling a story. It’s just another reason for Marvel heroes to fight each other for the upteenth time, but it’s doing something I don’t hear from Marvel Comics and Marvel Studios lately…making fans of the characters happy and allowing the casual fans in on the fun and feeling wanted and allowed to be there. Somebody should be taking notes. The game is available for multiple platforms if you want to see if it’s your kind of game.