What Marvel Rivals and Overwatch Can Learn From Each Other

By Nico Deyo | January 27, 2025 | 3:38pm

Video Games Features marvel rivals

What Marvel Rivals and Overwatch Can Learn From Each Other

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When Chinese developer Netease dropped Marvel Rivals in December of last year, the hype around the kinetic 3rd-person team shooter featuring Marvel characters had reached a fever pitch. Despite it arriving to a somewhat cursed market, it seems to be the one title that is challenging Overwatch 2‘s particular genre niche. It is thriving by all metrics, and many believe it has beaten the formerly popular giant at its own game by combining recognizable heroes with similar kinds of team play and tactical friction.

Zealous fans forget that the two games are owned by staggeringly large companies, and both will “win” to the tune of millions of dollars in revenue each year. It is hard to say if Marvel Rivals is that much more successful, rather than taking the current moment to leapfrog off the former game’s dominance. What has dulled Overwatch 2’s cultural relevance over the years are a series of cruel management decisions, lack of dev communication, and balance concerns, rather than the game’s innate qualities. Having played the two games, they both have unique strengths and I would love to see them both take this as an opportunity to learn from each other.

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Marvel Rivals’ similarity to Overwatch 2 feels like a very calculated move to capture a part of their audience by being just familiar enough. A more cynical part of me initially thought that there are very few ways that Rivals could surpass Overwatch 2, and in a lot of ways, it doesn’t. The places where it does succeed are where Netease has springboarded off Blizzard’s work to do something unique and with their own sensibilities in mind.

For example, both games look similar if you compare the gameplay side-by-side, but the rest of the wrapping around Rivals takes off in a much different direction. Overwatch 2 came out in 2023, but it was built by a team who had been developing it since 2014. While they created the iconic framework that many copy now, much of the UI and overall visual design were updated in an uninspired way that seemed only to catch up with how other shooters looked. Netease has taken their experience from years of producing for multiple platforms and maintaining a variety of titles and applied it to creating a punchy Marvel comics fantasy for Rivals.

Marvel Rivals

Superheroes fly by in splashy animated sequences every time you load up the game, and pop from animated menus. It annoys me at times, but it becomes more endearing as you dig deeper into certain menu and customization options. You are allowed to set your favorite superhero on the fly on your main play screen, and your cosmetic choices are carried into the information pages for each one. Seasonal missions and other events feel like you are living inside the pages of a comic book. It looks and feels like a much more cohesive world to inhabit than Overwatch 2.

While Rivals has a while to catch up in terms of cosmetic skins, there is also a Hero Proficiency system that allows you to show off how many hours you’ve sunk into a hero with titles, sprays and other goodies. It is a streamlined design for showing off who you main that Overwatch sorely needs, instead of an account level and hero level that isn’t as cool sounding as “Lord.”

Scuffed and trailing behind as it may be, Overwatch 2 still carries a level of innovation and care that is unparalleled. There’s a foundational thoughtfulness that runs through both 1 and 2’s design choices; in contrast, it feels like Rivals copied Overwatch’s homework but changed some of the answers. Some of these things are the practical realities of developing a third-person shooter for the Marvel franchise, but it also reveals how much of Overwatch’s magic is tied to their development team’s unique vision.

Hero design is so fundamental to how the game works, and still remains the beating heart of why I find it so engaging. Overwatch 2 heroes all have snappy kits based around their individual weapons and various abilities. Some have movement, some have light crowd control, and they all feel fun from the moment you start pressing buttons. Despite almost every hero being restricted to five key ability buttons (with some passives thrown on top), they all feel incredibly different. They all scale in complexity at different speeds, and mastery comes in the form of what little bits of movement tech or optimization you can eke out using them. Conversely, Marvel Rivals has a lot of variance between easier heroes and more difficult heroes, many of whom then gain additional abilities from team-ups with other heroes or one ability having additional activations. (Invisible Woman, Rivals’ newest strategist, is a good example of this.)

Even if Overwatch took some inspiration from the same superheroes that Marvel owns, how they look and move is a key difference. This feels possible due to not needing to hew to existing comic book character designs, as well as the first-person POV. From the start, every hero has come out looking and feeling different from others, from silhouette to footsteps, movement and ultimate voice lines. There has been a lot of work put into Overwatch from animations, sound and a VFX perspective that lets you make a split-second decision about who is coming after you or what ultimate is being used. A lot of Rivals suffers from this lack of clarity and polish: several heroes already look or move similarly at a distance, sound design feels muddy in headphones, and some differentiation between friendly and enemy ultimate lines has made bigger team fights extremely confusing. (Not to mention that many enemy ultimates in Overwatch 2 are in different languages.)

If Rivals really wants to be taken seriously in the long run, and not just be perceived as the Overwatch homage by the company who also developed Diablo Immortal, I think taking more cues from Overwatch 2’s core design philosophy and fashioning them with their own perspective would be the way forward. I notice the palpable difference from when I log off from Rivals and log onto Overwatch, from Rivals’ lack of optimization, to the fact that Overwatch 2 team fights feel more decisive and coherent.

Given how the two games are so in conversation with each other, comparison feels like a given. Overwatch 2 really burned fans hard with the massive changes made to the game, and Rivals is a very punchy, well, rival to Blizzard’s stranglehold on the genre. Turning it into a fight by fans feels ignorant of how many game development teams see each other as peers, and this cultural moment should be seen as beneficial to both Netease and Blizzard. Rivals couldn’t exist without Overwatch, and Overwatch being given a serious competitor to its own innovation feels like a good opportunity for both development teams to blaze their own paths forward.

Nico Deyo is a freelance feminist media critic who lives with her cat in the Midwest. She has written for several gaming publications and can be found at http://applecider.bsky.social.