‘Marvel Rivals’ Should Terrify ‘Overwatch’ At This Point

Last night saw the release of Marvel Rivals, NetEase’s new hero shooter in a landscape that seems poised to kill all new entrants.

Well, it may be the case that it ends up killing an old hero shooter instead, or at least significantly damaging it. That would of course be Overwatch, Blizzard’s long-time multiplayer shooter that has “upgraded” itself with the number 2 and some big changes and new characters, but few really accepted that as a true sequel.

After the full launch of Marvel Rivals yesterday, Overwatch should indeed be terrified of Marvel Rivals, as it’s more than just hype now, it’s here.

The game’s launch could not have gone better. Rivals peaked at 444,000 players at launch on PC alone, to say nothing of consoles. And, miraculously, release was incredibly smooth. At least my experience was no login queues, no wait times for matches, no lag, no disconnections. Zero. That is…essentially unheard of for the launch of really any new online game, but NetEase has pulled it off somehow.

The game is simply excellent. Even as someone who has not played Overwatch for several years at this point, it does feel like when I logged into that game for the first time all those years ago, experimenting with heroes, only this time, I’m playing around with 33 Marvel heroes and villains that all have decades of history.

I was somewhat skeptical of the idea to make the game third person, as it seemed like something of a ploy to sell store skins, but in practice, it plays great and it’s easy to see how characters like Black Panther or Wolverine or Hulk would not have been nearly as fun in first person mode. It really helps, it’s not just a microtransaction ploy.

It is legitimately hard to see how Marvel Rivals does not carve out a significant chunk of Overwatch’s playerbase, one that is already struggling to retain players after all these years and botched both the launch of a sequel and long-promised PvE content that was erased after years of work. It’s not great news for Blizzard when Overwatch is a huge part of their IP roster these days, and while sure, competition can make everyone better, Rivals is so good that the term “Overwatch killer” does not seem like that much of an exaggeration, compared to how it’s normally used with other games in other situations.

Marvel Rivals has momentum but also what you may call “the juice.” Everything from the art direction to gameplay to the menus is stellar, and in a landscape of dead multiplayer shooters, this feels like this is really going to make a mark. And make that mark directly on top of Overwatch in many ways.

Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram.

Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.