Marvel Rivals Dev Vision Video Spotlights More Playable Heroes, Monetization & More

Marvel Rivals developer NetEase Games outlined what players can anticipate upon the game's global launch in December 2024. This was revealed in the Developer Vision video published online and hosted by Creative Director Guangguang, which delved into the game's roadmap as they're now "in the home stretch."

He also shared some key details and updates on a few core features, mechanics, and systems that have caused some concerns or need clarification before its release. Lastly, within the context of the forthcoming content, we finally confirmed how many playable heroes will launch alongside the game and what content players can look forward to from the launch day season.

With Marvel Rivals launching for consoles and PCs on 6th December 2024, the superhero team-based PvP shooter will welcome players to its launch day season, or Season 0, as the developer calls it. This season begins on the aforementioned date and will see 33 playable heroes available for this season; however, only 27 have been revealed, the most recent hero being Moon Knight, and six more heroes have yet to be announced.

This caused some confusion about the remaining six heroes who have yet to be announced, with just a few weeks left until its launch, as Hawkeye was recently teased in Moon Knight's gameplay trailer. As we can anticipate more clarification on this area, it's still left players with more questions than answers, which we'll update this page once concrete answers have been made.

Moving on to the game's roadmap, launch day, as mentioned before, will begin with Season 0, Doom's Rise, which sees new seasonal content available for players to jump in and "Ignite the battle!" This season, narratively, will focus on the calamity caused by Doctor Doom's "time experiments" that unleased the Timestream Entanglement, which saw "four new Chronoverses" created: 2099: Techno-Dystopia, Present: Evil Strikes, Mosaic Timeline: Unstable Space-Time and Collapsing: Even the Gods Die timelines.

This sees the converging of these timelines, where "futures, pasts, and alternate realities" are incorporated into the game's overall narrative, where the story continues to unfold in every match players participate in. The season will run for a month, according to the creative director, which the season is estimated to conclude on 6th January 2025 and will feature eight playable maps for Quick Matches and its various Competitive Modes, one Conquest map, and the revamped Practice Range to test out the playable characters.

Season 1 follows with more heroes, maps, and seasonal content added to the game, which the game's creative director stated will lay the foundations for future seasons. Furthermore, from Season 1 onwards, every Marvel Rivals season is expected to "last around every three months," which will likely see patch updates and hotfixes occurring frequently and consistently to balance the game.

Regarding the game's Monetization model, servers, and localization/language support, it's been confirmed that "all heroes unlocked will be free-to-play (F2P) at launch and beyond" and was reiterated as such. The game will also have a Battle Pass option, which will primarily include new costumes and other cosmetic items for players to progress to acquire these items; however, the Season 0 Battle Pass will be "priced accordingly" and will only contain "half the content" as the season will last for one month.

The game's Store will be frequently refreshed and "updated, " featuring costumes and other cosmetic items inspired by the characters' comic book appearances and looks, designs inspired by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and those that will reflect the game's continuously expanding story. On the server side of things, the developer looks to retain its standard "60 server tick rate" and also looks to extend it by adding more servers across other regions and territories to ensure that players will have the best gaming experience possible for Marvel Rivals by offering the Server Selection tool to choose the most optimal server for "lower ping and faster matchmaking."

Finally, the game will launch with localization support, featuring "full voiceovers" in English, Japanese, and Chinese Mandarin with text support for 16 languages. Based on the information provided on its Steam Page, the confirmed language support includes English, French, Italian, German, Spanish (Peninsular/European), Russian, Turkish, Thai, Spanish (Latin American), Korean, Japanese, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.