Marvel Rivals, the free-to-play hero shooter from NetEase, launched late last week and is exceedingly popular. It’s currently fourth on the Steam daily most played, right between Path Of Exile 2 and the evergreen Grand Theft Auto 5. I think there are three reasons for this enthusiasm: 1) it’s free-to-play with the usual comet’s tail of microtransactables 2) it’s third-person Overwatch with Marvel characters, a straightforwardly enticing licensing sandwich, and 3) people want to have sex with a larger-than-usual proportion of the cast and especially awful tongue-monster Venom, who has a good butt in this one. No, I’m not going to share pictures. You’ll have to google that filth yourself.
But perhaps you are a sophisticated soul who has no time for such salacious nonsense. You’re more interested in hearing how they’re patching the thing. Enough with the butts already, dang it – this is a new multiplayer game so there must, of course, be patches! Fair enough: here’s what NetEase are changing or fixing in the first major update, out now.
To begin with, there are fixes for more general bugs, including crosshair deviation when playing highlights and recordings, equipped costumes disappearing when joining a match-in-progress as a replacement, and some crash and freezing issues. There are also fixes for collision problems on certain maps, including Hydra Charteris Base: Hell’s Heaven and Klyntar: Symbiotic Surface, that would cause people to get stuck or clip through the scenery.
There are fixes for a few individual characters, like Winter Soldier’s ultimate ability not dealing damage, and Hela and Storm being able to see through fog when using theirs. And there are some tech fixes for PC specifically, such as blurry models due to a memory leak when using FSR 3 to modify the resolution.
As Kotaku points out, the headline tweak is for Doctor Strange. He has the ability to summon portals, whether to provide allies with a shortcut or trick unwary adversaries into walking off the edge of the map. Slap a portal on the enemy’s safehouse door, pop another on the cliffside, and hey presto, instant teamwipe. Hitherto, pulling off these terrain KOs has also helped Doctor Strange players charge their ultimates faster, making the game’s Cumberbatchian conjurer something of a monster. No longer.
“When Doctor Strange’s portals triggered terrain KOs, they would mistakenly restore Doctor Strange’s Ultimate energy,” explain the full Steam patch notes. “For now, we have disabled the portals’ terrain KO attribution to temporarily fix this issue (i.e., terrain KOs will not count toward Doctor Strange’s own KOs). Rest assured, this bug will be resolved in a future update, at which time we will restore the portals’ KO attribution.”
I’ve seen a fair few excitable clips of Strange portal mischief on the socials. Funny stuff, though it certainly underlines the Overwatch influence: Symmetra was doing this kind of thing in 2016. Portal was doing it in 2007. Honestly, kids these days need to read more and mind their elders. Have you had a chance to play Rivals, and do you think the love for this latest live service shooter will last? I suspect the Marvel brand will save it from the fate of Concord.