Marvel Rivals combines two very popular formulas: the Marvel brand with tactical hero shooter gameplay. It’s a formula for success, which is also evidenced by the immediate community that has cropped up around Marvel Rivals‘ upcoming closed Beta (and prior closed Alpha), around each reveal, and everything seen so far heading into release. Of course, it’s not wise to count eggs before they hatch, but it seems Marvel Rivals taps into something special.
Achieving that, however, was no simple task. Whether it’s embracing the core idea that the “Rivals” moniker idea carries or translating superheroes and their powers into shooter gameplay, the various teams behind Marvel Rivals have been hard at work for a long time. Game Rant recently spoke with Danny Koo, Marvel Games executive producer; Paul Ella, head of production for NetEase; and Thad Sasser, game director at Summer Game Fest about all the heart their teams poured into the game.
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Q: Could you all introduce yourselves?
Koo: I’m Danny Koo, executive producer from Marvel Games.
Ella: I’m Paul Ella. I’m the head of production for NetEase.
Sasser: Thad Sasser, game director of Marvel Rivals for NetEase.
The New Player Experience in Marvel Rivals
Q: One thing that caught my eye immediately is the difficulty markers for each character. How is that difficulty determined and why?
Sasser: You’re probably familiar with the concept of skill floor and skill ceiling, right? Skill floor is the minimum set of skills you need to be successful, and skill ceiling is the theoretical maximum of how good you can be. Some characters are much harder to learn and thus have a much higher skill floor, so they’re harder to get into because their skills require more coordination, strategy, planning, or understanding of the shape of the battle. Those are characters like Spider-Man, for example. Spider-Man is really hard to play until you learn him. Once you learn how to maneuver, how to get yourself out of a sticky spot, run the map, pick up health packs, come back, land your combo successfully, and get out again, he’s a great striker, but he’s really hard to pick up.
Once you start to get this, he’s got a long way he can go. The best Spider-Man players are unstoppable, right? That’s the kind of thing we look for in characters, a wide range of diversity, types of experiences, and skill levels. In contrast is somebody like Punisher. It’s like, “He is a gun character. I’ve played plenty of gun characters in other games. I get how this guy works, right?” Or maybe Rocket, Paul’s favorite character.
Ella: I am not a competitive gamer by any stretch of the imagination, but Rocket allows me to jump in, feel like I’m helping my team get to the win, and be part of the whole strategy without having, you know, big sniper-level skills.
Sasser: That’s very intentional. We have characters that are easy to get into, and you’ll notice that Rocket and Punisher actually have a team-up that’s really powerful. Rocket can deploy that ammo dispenser, and Punisher’s turret becomes absolutely devastating. We’ve even thought about how different team-ups might be affected by skill levels and the types of players that are likely to see this experience. Overall, it’s a pretty good approach to difficulty, but we’re always looking for more player feedback.
Q: Other hero shooters can be somewhat difficult to get into. Is this part of like a real focus on the new player experience, now and going forward?
Sasser: Accessibility is a big point for us. We have a shooting range like a tutorial area where you can learn the characters and their powers. You can start to play them in a safe environment. You can create a custom match with your friends just to get a sense of how two characters might fight against each other or even how three characters might be in that same boat. There are a lot of ways for players to learn and share their knowledge. A lot of our fans have already started to share info like ‘Here’s where this character comes in, here’s their backstory, and here’s how some of their gameplay might work as well. Here’s how you use Magneto. Here’s Scarlet Witch plus Magnet.’
Koo: There’s a video out there for every single character in Alpha, how to play videos. We’re not the ones making them. Our community has been very excellent in creating all this content.
Designing Marvel Rivals Heroes and Game Modes
Q: How do you translate a character’s abilities into the game? I won’t lie, Rocket having a healing ability surprises me.
Koo: For every character that we implement in the game, we look at them and say, for example, “what are the three most important features about Rocket?” From there, we build skills around those three identifying features, and then we’ll assign a role for them based on the skills we have. Rocket’s kit happens to deal damage and also provide healing, reviving, or buffs for other people. These are the core features of Rocket. If you look at the three roles, Vanguard, Duelist, and Strategist, Rocket is a strategist because he’s always up to something.
You never know what is in his back pocket, it’s all about surprise, right? The fact that he can deploy a revival and attack is that surprise. You don’t know where he planted it unless you did that. Then maybe you just defeated someone and that person came back, like oh, what? How? Who did that? Rocket? This kind of fun stuff about Rocket is why he’s a strategist.
Q: Are there any rules for heroes when it comes to like different versions of the same hero? The game has Peni and Peter Parker, for example, but is like She-Hulk and Hulk off the table?
Koo: Our stance is we do not gender swap, so we’re not going to do a She-Hulk skin for Hulk.
Q: What about separate characters?
Koo: For each character, we want them to have as much differentiation as possible in their roles. You don’t have to play a duplicate character that have similar skills or power presentation. It’s the same reason we don’t have 1000 Spider-Men.
Spider-Man Rivals [Laughs]
Yeah, because it would then be Spider-Man Rivals.
This game is more about characters from the whole Marvel universe. We have over 9000 characters to choose from in the Marvel universe, and I get it right, certain characters have a close proximity to each other. There is the possibility down the line, but when we introduce this to the world, we want it to be as differentiated as possible, so that players can get to enjoy different playstyles. We cater to different players that come from different games. Our Alpha players come from shooter games, from MOBAs, even from card games – they like strategy is their reason. So diverse character playstyles is what we’ll emphasize.
Q: What’s it like designing these objective-based hero shooter game modes with these Marvel twists, like with Spider-Zero?
Sasser: Working with Marvel, Danny and his team, has been an amazing experience. We’ll come up with some wacky off-the-wall idea, and Danny will be like, “Hey, that’s pretty cool, but have you thought about doing this?” Like, we hadn’t, but that’s even better. Let’s take that back to the lab, we’ll cook for a while, and then we’ll bring it back and say, “Hey, we did this. We loved your idea. We did it, it worked great. Here’s another idea on top of that.” Danny and the team will be like, “Oh, that’s cool. Maybe do it blue instead of red,” and I’m like “that’s even better.”
It’s been a very great collaboration in the sense of creativity and being able to push each other to make a better and more fun experience. It’s really one of our biggest goals: how fun we can make this game.
I believe that creativity, it’s ironic, but I think creativity thrives inside boundaries. When you’re a designer and you’re put in a box, the first thing you do is try to get out of the box, right? Working with these guys to try to get out of that box has been phenomenal. It’s been a great relationship.
Koo: We’ve been telling them, ‘just go crazy.’ Maybe we’ll tell you to dial it back if it was overly crazy, but there’s no boundaries in creativity in our philosophy. We even asked them to, like one of the core designs of Spider-Man, outside of swinging, web-slinging, and web-shooting is Spidey Sense. It was like, however you get crazy with it, we have to have Spidey Sense in this game. They did it. When you have enemies close, his Spidey Sense tingles.
Fitting Marvel Heroes Into the Hero Shooter Box
Q: I know we discussed creating powers, but on the gameplay side, what was it like getting their abilities to fit into a hero shooter?
Sasser: It was extremely difficult, believe it or not. It always seems easy when you see something like, ‘Of course, that’s so obvious. Why? Why didn’t you do that earlier?’ But it usually takes a lot of iteration, a lot of changes to get to that point. You may start off with a really cool idea for a power. You try and try and try, but the feedback is just, it’s not fun.
Then it’s like, ‘all right, we’ll cut that one. What about this power?’
‘Oh this power is instantly fun.’
‘Oh, great. Let’s follow that direction.’
The heroes undergo iteration all the time. I’ve seen the growth of this roster shift subtly over time, and we’ve seen different characters come into different strengths and weaknesses against other character over time. The more we change and get user feedback, player feedback, the better the game gets, the smoother the experience gets.
Q: And how do you go about factoring counter-play into that?
Sasser: We have some amazing players. We have some really talented professional players who can get in here and break the game in ways we didn’t even realize you could. It’s like thank you, we have to fix this.
Ella: As a producer, I love that.
Your timelines might be reduced, but it’s important. It’s important that we put it through its paces. We want to make sure, primarily, that the game is fun, and that’s what our main aim is. We’re not here to, you know, mathematically theorycraft the game until it’s perfectly balanced and everything’s mathematically equal. It’s got to be fun, and that’s really what the testing goes through. We’re trying it from all different levels. We have some super hardcore, very high level competitive players who test the game all the way down to people like me who can barely hold the controller the right way up. We have all levels of testing because we want to make this game accessible for everybody and fun for everybody.
Marvel Rivals – The Term ‘Rivals’ is Important
Q: In general terms, what are you hoping that anyone who checks out Marvel Rivals – as a fan of Marvel or not a fan of Marvel – ultimately experiences?
Koo: So, Marvel Rivals. The term “Rivals” is very important. Rivals can be on the same side or on the opposite side. At Marvel, we have been wanting to do a team-based superhero game like this. We’ve seen all our single-player titles, but this is our first foray into team-based multiplayer. We want players to come together, make new friends, cross boundaries, have fun together, and share that same passion for the Marvel brand.
Ella: The game will be cross-platform and cross-region, which is important for bringing the whole world together.
Just so we can get some more rivals, right?
Ella: That’s right. Rivals on top of rivals within rivals.