It’s inconceivable to speak about Marvel Rivals with out speaking about Overwatch; the 2 hero shooters share numerous the identical DNA, and the workforce at NetEase clearly seemed on the wildly in style FPS and cribbed just a few notes. Now that Marvel Rivals is a profitable recreation in its personal proper, attracting its personal fan base, a few of the previous arguments that plagued Overwatch are recurring — and plenty of gamers are hoping that this time, issues will end up in a different way.
Take, for example, the sport’s three roles. There are the high-damage Duelists, team-defending Vanguards, and supportive Strategists. A standard, and admittedly aggravating, difficulty is to load right into a recreation solely to have everybody instantly lock in Duelists. Vanguards and Strategists merely aren’t as in style, possibly as a result of it’s more durable to get a cool quadra-kill with their talents.
When you performed Overwatch again in 2016, this in all probability sounds very acquainted. Gamers from that period bear in mind watching their teammates lock in as Hanzo and Widowmaker, leaving them to reluctantly play as a tank or healer. I bear in mind taking part in Mercy for a lot of video games in a row, hoping within the subsequent recreation one in all my teammates would acknowledge my despair and let me lastly play Pharah. They by no means did, as a result of random players on-line are not often identified for his or her charity.
Overwatch solved this downside in 2019 with position queue; gamers would go right into a recreation realizing every workforce needed to have a sure lineup of tanks, healers, or harm characters. When you performed one of many much less in style roles, you’d even get further rewards. Blizzard additionally spent numerous time tweaking Overwatch’s stability to suit into this construction, with characters receiving stability adjustments and even full reworks to verify they match into the squad. With Overwatch 2, Blizzard even eliminated an individual from every workforce, turning the 6v6 recreation right into a 5v5 as an alternative.
Marvel Rivals doesn’t have a job queue system, neither is it as stringently balanced as Overwatch. Characters like Jeff the Land Shark, whereas they’re potent healers, are additionally capable of pull off game-changing talents like pulling the whole enemy workforce into their maw and spitting them off the sting of the map. Because of this whereas queuing up, you possibly can run right into a workforce stuffed with Strategists, or a workforce with a heavy Vanguard entrance line defending only one or two Duelists.
Proper now, Marvel Rivals permits for such flexibility and freedom — and as soon as upon a time, so did Overwatch. One of many components that led to the addition of position queue was the GOATS meta, named after the workforce that popularized the composition of three tanks, three healers. GOATS dominated high-level Overwatch play for a time, together with professional video games, and it was criticized not only for being irritating to play towards but in addition boring to look at.
However Marvel Rivals isn’t beholden to knowledgeable circuit or aggressive expectations; it’s very a lot a loosey-goosey tackle the style the place most heroes are, in the correct fingers, at the very least a little bit bit damaged. That may be a large a part of why some followers like the sport a lot; in the event that they wished to play a high-stakes aggressive shooter, they’d merely go play one of many present esports-heavy video games in the marketplace.
Nonetheless, the dialog round whether or not position queue is important or must be added continues to be one of many main subjects within the Marvel Rivals neighborhood, and it has been for months. The Marvel Rivals devs at NetEase instructed Dot Esports they don’t have any plans so as to add position queue at the moment, they usually have the possibility to interrupt other than the Overwatch path and push what makes Marvel Rivals so distinctive. Till we discover a option to persuade all of the Duelist followers on the market to sometimes flex into tanking or therapeutic, it’s possible the talk will proceed to rage on fan boards and social media.