With the arrival of Marvel Rivals season one came a bunch of players suddenly wondering why the mods they’d installed for the game were no longer working, and it seems this wasn’t just the usual case of a game update requiring mods to be quickly updated to match it.
Instead, developer NetEase appears to have made a tweak to game designed to make it tougher to mod, something some members of the game’s community have inevitably responded to not by just giving up on modding it, but by finding a way to get around NetEase’s changes, even if it means more risk that probably isn’t worth it just to merk some fools as a manga character with superhero powers.
Enter modder modder Prafit, who’s found an apparent workaround and uploaded a guide on how to execute it to Nexus Mods. I’ll be honest, it’s the kind of thing that, as a pretty seasoned mod installer, I’m looking at and wondering if the minor changes you currently get from most Marvel Rivals mods would make it worth bothering with.
“This application is a temporary fix for season one to get mods working,” Prafit wrote, “Use at your own risk. By using this you are actually circumventing a system that was created to stop us from modding on the Season one patch start. No one knows if NetEase will ban you, but they have never issued permabans as far as we know.”
Later on, they actually outline how they claim this anti-mod “system” added in by NetEase works and how their workaround circumvents it. “It turns out NetEase put in code to check the hashes of PAK files and only allow the game to load PAK files. However, it turns out you don’t have to use PAK files. You can just extract the PAK files like a zip and run them unpaked. The problem is, the game is loading 50,000 files versus one so this can be quite problematic even on the fastest SSDs. Using a solution like this could even make your SSD die faster.”
So yup, just install stuff in a way that requires your files to be far less neatly packaged, and could potentially contribute to a pretty key bit of your PC suffering more wear and tear, as well as risking a possible ban by testing just how far NetEase wants to push things. Even if you’re desperate to replace Mr Fantastic with Luffy from One Piece, as one of the early mods designed to work in with this season one workaround does, that’s a lot of risk to be taking.
Odds are this tug of war’s nowhere near done if NetEase really is set on taking a hardline stance when it comes to mods. Though, it’d maybe be nice to see it come to a solution similar to that of Space Marine 2 developer Saber Interactive, which responded to mods causing issues in online sessions last year by banning them from public online sessions, but still allowing them in private lobbies, in order to keep those who’d keep on using them separate from players after a vanilla experience.