Marvel Rivals Season 2 begins today, which means it’s time to jam another syringe into the scarred and bleeding flanks of the Great Marvelbeast and extract a fresh superhero. This season kicks off with Emma Frost, a Vanguard hero with very large hams and a couple of strings to her bow. By default, she fights as a midranged psychic, casting beams, damage-multiplying orbs and crystalline shields. Switch to her diamond form, however, and she becomes a tanky brawler with the ability to grab and slam people out of their ultimates or boot them into walls.
That’s your first new Marvel Rivals character in Season 2, out now. The second will be Ultron, the bot with a god complex, who lands in a few weeks. He’s a nimble Strategist who does his dirty work using drones. More details to follow.
There’s also a new map, the Krakoa Hellfire Gala. It’s the kind of high society do where you’d expect to find Agent 47 pushing a mop, eyes peeled for weaponisable suitcases. Hmm, how would a Hitman party level work if all the guests were superheroes? I can’t really see Agent 47 dragging Ultron into a closet and stealing his trousers.
The new Marvel Rivals heroes and map accompany the usual live service avalanche of character skins and balancing or structural changes. There will now be weekly missions in addition to daily missions and challenges. Ranked mode is being given a rigorous rejig: the minimum level for competitive will now be 15, not 10, and players in Eternity and above will only be able to queue alone or in pairs to stop people forming big groups in advance. We can expect new team-up skills (and the loss of a couple of older ones).
Possibly most anticipated is the addition of a box that makes your computer go faster. This being the new switch shader compilation mode, an experimental performance-boosting feature which is being added to the game’s launcher.
“Since our launch, we’ve heard your battle cries through the community and customer service channels,” explains a blog post. “Players on various PC configurations have encountered performance stutters and crashes, often due to high memory consumption during gameplay. PCs equipped with 16GB of RAM or less, when faced with excessive RAM usage can force the system to use swap memory, leading to unwanted slowdowns in the heat of battle.”
The switch shader compilation feature promises to “dramatically reduce” the game’s memory usage, “cutting down on severe FPS drops, frozen visuals, and crashes triggered by memory shortages.” The developers caution, however, that it might have a few teething troubles to begin with.
NetEase have elsewhere revealed that from Season 3 onwards, each Marvel Rivals update will only last two months instead of three, which means you’ll get a new hero every month. Which is a lot of heroes. I hope the developers aren’t crunching to meet the demand. NetEase don’t have a spotless track record for looking after their staff.