Marvel's 'Marvel Rivals' Sets Pace with Entire Fantastic Four Debut in Season 1, Prolific Content Delivery
While there's been an extensive lineup of leaked potential characters set to join Marvel Rivals, one aspect that remained unknown was how many would debut per season. Recently, NetEase has disclosed an intriguing detail – Marvel Rivals will unveil the entire Fantastic Four squad when the first season commences next Monday, January 6. This translates to four distinctive characters.
The entry of Reed, Sue, Johnny, and Ben adds to the already substantial launch roster of 33 characters. What's noteworthy here is that this surpasses the usual number of heroes introduced in a season by a significant margin. For instance, Overwatch introduces a new hero every other season, while Apex Legends and most other games follow a similar pattern, launching a single hero per season. Four characters in the initial season? That's quite a stretch.
This might also hint at an accelerated content release pace for Marvel Rivals overall. While they may not maintain a full four-hero roster every season, the 13 characters that have been datamined suggest a substantial number of new additions going forward. If we break it down to three characters per season, that'd cover the entire first year of the game. I find it highly unlikely they'll stick to just one hero per season post the initial batch of four. The remaining characters on the radar are:
- Angela
- Hit-Monkey
- Deadpool
- Captain Marvel
- Emma Frost
- Phoenix/Jean Grey
- Valkyrie
- MODOK
- Blade
- Ultron
If we group these characters, Emma Frost and Phoenix hail from the X-Men, while Angela and Valkyrie have ties to Thor's universe. MODOK and Ultron can be categorized as robo-villains, and Hit-Monkey, Deadpool, and perhaps Blade make up an interesting trio. There are likely many more uncovered characters yet to be revealed. Given this, I predict we'll see two heroes per season, which even if less, still doubles the usual quota. In the case of the Fantastic Four, this schedule probably went into planning a long time ago, with the first season playing a crucial role in keeping the momentum going, and now, all anyone can talk about is…the fact that four complete heroes are set to arrive next week.
I believe the distribution for these characters will be Thing and Mr. Fantastic in the vanguard role, Human Torch as a duelist, and The Invisible Woman in the strategic role. The initial look at Sue Storm has received quite the positive response from players, appreciating her character design.
Marvel Rivals continues to draw in 400,000 players daily on Steam alone and has shown strong performance on consoles as well. It's a triumphant return to the multiplayer hero shooter genre, which seemed to have hit a dead end. Clearly, all it takes is a well-designed game to spark interest.
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Marvel Rivals' rivals in the multiplayer hero shooter genre might be intrigued by the Fantastic Four's massive debut, as four characters joining in the initial season is quite unprecedented when comparing to games like Overwatch and Apex Legends. Moreover, this unexpected surge could potentially influence the strategy of competitors, as they might be forced to adapt or accelerate their content release pace.
