Summary

• Enhance teamwork with team-specific voice lines for ultimates in Marvel Rivals to improve coordination and strategy.
• Improve audio clarity in Marvel Rivals to make it easier to track mobile heroes and flankers in the midst of chaotic battles.
• Rework or remove season bonuses in Marvel Rivals to provide a more balanced gameplay experience that rewards mastery of heroes.

Marvel Rivals is exciting. The game looks great, is fun to play, and is an excellent addition to the hero-shooter genre. With 23 characters available to play, Marvel Rivals had more heroes playable during its CBT than Overwatch on release, which only had 21.

With TF2's massive issues, Overwatch 2 has had little to no competition for years, so NetEase's take on hero-shooters is a positive for the genre, even if you'd rather stick to Blizzard's take on it. Marvel Rivals could be better though, so we would like to highlight eight aspects of it that can be improved.

This list isn't ranked. None of these issues are game-breaking, and the impact they have on your game will be entirely subjective, and will depend on which heroes you main, if you play solo or with friends, etc.

8 Team-Specific Voice Lines

Make Good Use Of Those Amazing Voice Actors

Hero shooters are confusing by nature. While Marvel Rivals has the benefit of third person view's wider angles, you'll still end up having to react to things that happen off-screen. That's where voice lines for ultimates should come in. When you hear "HULK SMASH!", you know it's time to run away from the green guy. Unless you have one on your team too, because in that case you'll want to run towards him and help him smash your opponents.

There should be two distinct voice lines tied to ultimate abilities, one for your allies and one for your enemies. For example, when in Overwatch 2 your friendly Reaper uses Death Blossom, you'll hear him calmly say "Clearing the area". If he is an enemy, though, he'll shout "die" thrice. Additionally, this allows more flexibility in the quotes, with characters in OW frequently using their native language when heard by the enemy team (e.g. Sombra's "apagando las luces", which means "turning the lights off" in Spanish).

7 Audio Needs More Clarity

I Want To See With My Ears

This game can get messy, even for a hero shooter. Imagine the chaos of Overwatch 1 but with more alpha effects, destructible environments, and with half of the roster being able to fly, glide, or something in between. You can't keep the entire action on your screen.

Under these circumstances, audio cues become almost as important as visual ones. As it stands, it is hard to keep track of mobile Duelists as a Strategist, and almost impossible to hear a flanker unless both of you are indoors and far enough away from the action. The audio should be clearer, even if it sacrifices immersion.

6 Season Bonuses Should Be Reworked Or Removed

There's No One Size Fits All In Game Balancing

Competitive games have a tendency to become stale. MOBAs like LoL get considerable meta shifts every few months, although that comes with its own set of problems. Adding new characters works too, but brings with it another host of issues. Marvel Rivals opted for the Season Bonus system, which isn't a good direction to follow.

Giving tanks 150 extra HP, or Strategists 15 percent bonus healing isn't balancing, it is a blanket fix that directly harms players who've mastered their heroes. The Venom specialist who knows exactly how much damage he can take before using his Symbiotic Resilience will be punished after the season ends, because he has 150 less HP. Make these bonuses more unique, or remove them entirely.

5 Add An Accept Button

Sometimes You Just Run To The Bathroom At The Wrong Time

Marvel Rivals has an impressive array of systems in place. A competitive queue is available, they publicly addressed the elephant in the room that cheating was, and a remake system to punish AFK players at the start of games was already in place.

The glaring detail that was missing was the accept button. If you reached Gold or above in the Closed Beta Test, you'll have seen that queues could get pretty long. The accept button is the easiest solution to most early game AFKers, as it prevents people from joining a game unless they're at their PC or console saying "I'm ready to go". It should be a simple addition.

4 Team-Ups Should Benefit Both Parties

There's No I In Team, Right?

Team ups are one of Marvel Rivals' most interesting features, in theory. Special synergies between characters is an excellent concept for a hero shooter, and one which works even well given the game's roster. With that said, the execution needs work.

These team-ups are unbalanced in two different ways: some are way more powerful than others. While Scarlet Witch turns Magneto into an S Tier Vanguard, Hulk gives Dr. Strange a minor damage buff on a single skill; secondly, team ups only benefit one side of the combo. What does Rocket get from giving Punisher infinite ammo? Absolutely nothing. Nerf team ups if needed, but make them benefit everyone involved.

3 Shorten The Time To Kill

Duelists Aren't Dueling Much

Overwatch isn't a perfect game, but it laid the foundation Marvel Rivals was built on. One of the most crucial pillars NetEase missed, though, was the time to kill on squishies. In OW2, if a high-damage hero catches a healer off guard, they're dead. That can be a Genji combo, or even a Reinhardt drive-by.

In Marvel Rivals, one-shotting even Puny Bruce as a solo Duelist with no ultimate is a monumental task. This makes fights drag-on, and caps the game's skill ceiling relatively low. As it currently stands, every character is too durable and has to either be targeted by multiple people at once, or to make multiple mistakes to end up dead. Shorten the time to kill, and allow skilled players to make an impact by themselves.

2 Destruction Shouldn't Be Temporary

Let Me Blow Stuff Up For Good

Destructible environments are another amazing feature that Marvel Rivals brought to the hero shooter genre. Why is it, then, that NetEase didn't go all out with it? If the devs are afraid of the lack of certain structures being game-breaking, just make those indestructible.

Some of the best moments in Marvel Rivals happen when a point you are holding gets completely disfigured by a crucial pillar being destroyed, with Yggsgard's Royal Palace being an excellent example. These situations force people to adapt on the fly, so seeing the structures being rebuilt after a few seconds feels like a missed opportunity.

1 Incentivize Role Variety

There's More To Life Than KDA

Everyone loves feeling like the main character, getting a quad-kill, and seeing their name pop up at the top left of the screen. It is understandable, then, why everyone wants to play a Duelist in Marvel Rivals, especially when some of the IP's most beloved heroes (Iron Man, Spider-Man) are in that class. But this game is balanced around a 2/2/2 split, so the matches in which you get rolled over due to having three or four Duelists on your team feel terrible to play.

Role queue solves this issue, but brings with it too much trouble to be worth it. Duelist queues will be endless, and people will be forced onto an even split between the three roles, instead of being able to experiment. We don't know what the solution here is, but there should be some incentives in place to avoid the pitfalls that we saw Overwatch fall into.