Marvel Rivals dataminers suppose the builders are trolling them with lists of potential future characters hidden within the sport’s code. But NetEase and Marvel say they’ve higher issues to do…like truly make the sport.
Last month, dataminers started sharing names of potential future heroes hidden within the code of Marvel Rivals, just a few of whom gave the impression to be confirmed fairly shortly as actual when the Fantastic Four have been formally introduced. However, because the listing of datamined heroes grew, a special rumor started to flow into in the neighborhood: among the names have been faux, planted there by builders to mislead dataminers.
Even now, there’s disagreement in the neighborhood as to which, if any of the datamined characters are actually being severely thought of for the sport.
We lately had the chance to straight ask Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu and Marvel Games government producer Danny Koo in the event that they’re secretly performing an elaborate troll. And whereas it feels like there aren’t any pranks being pulled right here, we should always nonetheless take all of the names being discovered within the code with a grain of salt. Here’s what Wu needed to say:
“So firstly we wish to say that we do not advocate anyone to make changes to the recordsdata [of the game],” he started. “Also, you may see that for every character’s design truly we come by means of a really difficult course of and we make quite a lot of ideas, trials, prototypes, growth, et cetera. So there may very well be some data left within the code, and it’d imply that we have now tried these instructions they usually might seem or might not seem in our future plans. And whether or not or not they’ll seem in our future pipeline is very relying on what sort of gameplay expertise our gamers would count on in our sport.”
Koo added, “If I might have a ten-year plan, it might be nice. But the crew experimented with quite a lot of play types, heroes. It was like there’s somebody doing scratch paperwork after which simply left a pocket book there, and somebody [a dataminer] determined to open it with no context.”
I pushed somewhat, asking them point-blank in the event that they have been intentionally trolling individuals. Koo replied, “No. We would moderately spend our time creating the precise sport.”
In the identical dialog, we additionally mentioned how a personality will get chosen to be added into Marvel Rivals within the first place. The two informed me that the crew plans updates roughly a yr upfront, and is dedicated to maintaining its present tempo of including new characters each month and a half. For every replace, NetEase first seems to be at what kind of character and skillset is required to steadiness out the remainder of the sport and add selection to the roster, and provide you with an inventory of a number of totally different doable additions. Wu informed me that a part of NetEase’s technique for attaining sport steadiness is to focus much less on aggressively tweaking present characters to be completely fine-tuned, and extra on including new characters and experiences to maintain issues contemporary, fill gaps, help characters which can be a bit weak with new crew skills, or counter characters that may be somewhat too robust.
Once they’ve an inventory of prospects, NetEase then takes these options to Marvel Games, and start engaged on preliminary designs. From there, they take a look at what the neighborhood is at present enthusiastic about, in addition to what’s deliberate a yr upfront in different Marvel divisions, corresponding to if a giant movie or comedian arc is coming that they will tie a personality in with. That helps them come to a closing determination on who’s stepping into. All this explains why there may be quite a lot of totally different heroes listed within the code – NetEase simply has quite a lot of concepts it is tossing round on a regular basis.
Marvel Rivals was nice at launch, and every new character solely appears to make it extra highly effective, with the Human Torch and The Thing set to be the most recent heroes becoming a member of the sport on February 21. We additionally spoke to Wu and Koo about the opportunity of a Nintendo Switch 2 launch for Marvel Rivals, which you’ll be able to examine right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can discover her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a narrative tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
