A Word Of Caution About ‘Marvel Rivals’ Season 1 And The Game’s Future Emergency USA

Marvel Rivals has just launched season 1, the game barreling forward with a colossal amount of momentum over the past month as it has broken past the “you can’t make a successful hero shooter” narrative and has created a phenomenon.

Players have praised what is a truly massive amount of content for season 1, which includes three new maps, four new characters (the entire Fantastic Four) and a $10 battle pass with a full ten skins. This is a genre where you might get one character a season, or every other, and fewer battle pass skins than that (often less cool-looking) for the same price.

However, many players have brushed past NetEase’s own warning about how the game will function going forward, in the sense that they have purposefully stacked season 1 to be huge, and other seasons will not be this jam-packed. Substantive, sure, but not at this level.

“During our brainstorming sessions, we unanimously agreed that bringing them into Marvel Rivals in one giant-sized season was the way to go,” said the Creative Director Guangguang in a dev video. He said season 1 is a “two-in-one” that “features double the playable content of a regular season.”

So, this is double. And future seasons will be half of this. What will that look like?

• Three maps may be more like 1-2.
• It’s unclear if this also means battle pass skins, but if so, that could be cut down to five, which would be more on par with some other games (my guess would be seven, but it sure would be nice if they kept doing 10 here).
• In terms of character releases, I think it’s a safe bet that the number will be two. That is still double what most hero games do, and rival Overwatch only does one every other season.

This was also sort of evident given that leaked upcoming heroes seem to be thematically paired. We have:

• Asgardians Angela and Valkyrie
• Techno-bros Ultron and MODOK
• X-Men Jean Grey and enemy Emma Frost
• Comedic killers Deadpool and Hit-Monkey

Reportedly Blade will be a new character in season 2, given the vampiric events of this season, and he’s already been shown off in official art. I’m not sure who he’d be paired with. Some say Ultron, but there’s not really on theme here. Also floating around is Captain Marvel I can’t find a pair for. But yes, I say two per season even if they’re not perfectly linked.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this, it’s just that NetEase has quite literally said that season 1 has double the content of future seasons, so players should not be disappointed when that happens. If the battle pass changes, however, and they cut down the skins while leaving the price the same, that could prove irritating to players. We’ll see. Until then, enjoy season 1.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.