It’s unimaginable to speak about Marvel Rivals with out speaking about Overwatch; the 2 hero shooters share quite a lot of the identical DNA, and the workforce at NetEase clearly regarded on the wildly fashionable 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 number of the previous arguments that plagued Overwatch are recurring — and lots 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 typical, 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 fashionable, perhaps as a result of it’s tougher to get a cool quadra-kill with their talents.
For those who performed Overwatch again in 2016, this in all probability sounds very acquainted. Gamers from that period keep in mind watching their teammates lock in as Hanzo and Widowmaker, leaving them to reluctantly play as a tank or healer. I keep in mind enjoying Mercy for a lot of video games in a row, hoping within the subsequent recreation one in every of my teammates would acknowledge my despair and let me lastly play Pharah. They by no means did, as a result of random avid gamers on-line are not often identified for his or her charity.
Overwatch solved this drawback in 2019 with function queue; gamers would go right into a recreation figuring out every workforce needed to have a sure lineup of tanks, healers, or harm characters. For those who performed one of many much less fashionable roles, you’d even get further rewards. Blizzard additionally spent quite a lot of time tweaking Overwatch’s steadiness to suit into this construction, with characters receiving steadiness modifications and even full reworks to ensure 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 task 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 all the enemy workforce into their maw and spitting them off the sting of the map. Which means that whereas queuing up, you would run right into a workforce filled 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 function 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 additionally boring to look at.
However Marvel Rivals isn’t beholden to an expert circuit or aggressive expectations; it’s very a lot a loosey-goosey tackle the style the place most heroes are, in the fitting arms, at the very least just a little 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 current esports-heavy video games available on the market.
Nonetheless, the dialog round whether or not function queue is critical or ought to be added continues to be one of many main matters within the Marvel Rivals group, and it has been for months. The Marvel Rivals devs at NetEase instructed Dot Esports they haven’t any plans so as to add function queue presently, and so they have the possibility to interrupt aside from 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 seemingly the controversy will proceed to rage on fan boards and social media.