Marvel Rivals' popularity has led to that most contemporary of cottage industries: A whole bunch of dataminers and supposed leakers that descend upon any new version of the game, and get into the guts to predict what's coming next. Almost immediately after launch a large chunk of the future roster was apparently revealed via "hero tags" in the game's code, a leak that gained credence when the Fantastic Four turned out to be the big season one additions, with the likes of Blade rumoured for season two, and a whole wishlist of X-Men characters coming down the pipes.
Such information should always be taken with an entire shaker full of salt, even when official reveals seem to line-up with elements of it. And it leads to its own kind of expectations and even paranoia, with some of the dataminers involved recently speculating that developer NetEase has been intentionally planting red herrings to throw them off the scent.
Well, now there's a fairly direct answer to that. "[NetEase] experimented with a lot of play styles and heroes," says Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo in an IGN interview. "It was like there’s someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there, and someone decided to open it with no context." He scoffs at the idea there's a secret ten-year plan ("it'd be great").
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Asked whether the studio is trolling the dataminers, Koo says: "No. We’d rather spend our time developing the actual game."
Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu adds that "you can see that for each character's design actually we come through a very complicated process and we make a lot of concepts, trials, prototypes, development, et cetera. So there could be some information left in the code, and it might mean that we’ve tried those directions and they may appear or may not appear in our future plans. Whether or not they will appear in our future pipeline is highly dependent on what kind of gameplay experience our players would expect in our game."
Elsewhere the pair talk more generally about the Marvels Rivals principles, with Wu saying the team prefers to focus less on tweaking existing characters to death, and more on adding new characters that freshen everything up across the board. They're also in lockstep with the wider Marvel universe and the gazillion upcoming projects and, as with the Fantastic Four, looking to tie-in new MR characters with what the movies or TV shows are doing.
One of the better elements of Marvel Rivals has been this approach to balance, even if it's resulted in the odd misstep, such as the tornado-yeeting Storm's brief reign of terror in January. The new and upcoming characters with each season are a strong selling point for the game and, let's face it, there are few better licenses out there for a hero shooter roster than Marvel's bewilderingly enormous, varied, and well-explored cast of characters. Just don't expect to see Soft Serve in there anytime soon.
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