Season 1 for Marvel Rivals has just launched, and developers NetEase expect to drop four total heroes over three months with the complete roster of the Fantastic Four.
Fans know that other heroes, like Ultron and Blade, await release. While no official schedule has been made for their release, game director Guangyun Chen has confirmed that the devs will release a new hero every six weeks.
A New Marvel Rivals Hero Every 1.5 Months?
In a recent interview with Metro, Chen confirmed that NetEase plans to have a steady release of heroes every one-and-a-half season. He says:
“Every season we’ll be rolling out fresh seasonal stories, new maps, and new heroes. We’ll actually be breaking down each season into two halves. The length of one season is three months. And for each half of the season, we will introduce a new hero. We just eventually want to continue to enhance the experience, and, you know, keep everyone excited in our community.”
At the start of Season 1, NetEase had released together Reed Richards (Mr. Fantastic) and Sue Storm (Invisible Woman), and in 1.5 months, fans are expecting to see Johnny Storm (Human Torch) and Ben Grimm (The Thing) join the roster.
And while they haven’t been officially announced, leaked heroes in the roster have included Blade, Deadpool, Captain Marvel, MODOK, Hit-Monkey, and Angela (Thor’s sister). There has also been news of more incoming playable X-Men like Emma Frost, Phoenix/Jean Grey, Cyclops, and Professor X.
Is This Release Model Possible?
Compared with Overwatch, Blizzard’s hero shooter usually releases one hero every other season, with their recent pace dropping 3 heroes yearly. Should Marvel Rivals promise a hero drop every 1.5 months (even after the Fantastic Four team-up season with 2 heroes per drop), they would have to come up with 8 heroes yearly.
Luckily for NetEase, it does look like they have a healthy backlog of heroes in development already, and they can just take their time working on them as they release them one by one. With their penchant for also using some very obscure heroes from the Marvel canon, they will likely have a couple of years just coming up with heroes based on the most obscure characters. Trying to fill up all the X-Men alone could lead to a few years of content, not to mention other street-level characters like Luke Cage, Daredevil, and Gwenpool have yet to be hinted at as coming to the game.
There's also the issue of available villains. The devs could probably spend an entire year adding playable Spider-Man villains to the roster, and even then, they would still have too many great villains left over.
With their ever-expanding roster, some are wondering just how sustainable this release model is going to be, but looking at games like League of Legends—which now has 169 playable champions (and still adding)—Marvel Rivals looks to be set up to have a very long a steady lifespan when it comes to content.
Marvel Rivals is currently available for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S.
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