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FISCHER: Defying all expectations

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

It can be a struggle coming up with a pop culture-related column week after week. Sometimes I just don’t know what to write about. Sometimes I’ll spend hours looking through headlines for a topic, but that didn’t happen today because I got distracted by “Marvel Rivals.”

Oh, wait.

Yes, the Marvel-themed online 6v6 multiplayer shooter launched last week and it’s kind of taken me by surprise.

FISCHER: Defying all expectations
Travis Fischer

Once upon a time, I poured hundreds of hours into “Overwatch,” but that game no longer exists, having been replaced by an inferior “sequel” some time ago.

I didn’t think I’d ever jump onto a similar game again. Good online multiplayer games are hard enough to find. Good ones that also don’t employ predatory monetization practices even more so.

A free-to-play hero shooter based on the Marvel license that utilizes a battlepass for monetization? Every single word in that sentence is cause for hesitation.

Hero shooters, as I’ve previously written about, are a tough nut to crack. You may recall the cautionary tale of “Concord,” a game that crashed so hard that two weeks after it launched Sony had the game shut down, players refunded, and the studio that developed it disbanded. Investing in a hero shooter these days is a hard sell, even if it’s only costing time instead of money.

And a hero shooter based on the Marvel superheroes? For every genuinely good video game out there based on an existing intellectual property there are 10 mediocre cash grabs farmed out to the lowest bidder that depend on the strength of the brand they are exploiting to draw people in. Marvel itself has been susceptible to this with the high profile flop of “Marvel’s Avengers,” another game that can no longer be purchased today.

Then there’s the fact that it’s free-to-play, which generally speaking means that it’s anything but.

So much so that the terminology has started shifting toward “free-to-download” instead. Sure, they may not charge for the most basic of the game experience, but all the fun stuff and sometimes even game-changing features get locked behind the paywall. At which point, the game is basically waging psychological warfare against its players to get them to open up their wallets.

No monetization model is more insidious in this regard than the now industry standard “battlepass.” The way it works is that you pay them money, and in return you get a limited amount of time to unlock a selection of in-game goodies. Essentially, once you buy it, it becomes a ticking clock to incentivize you to log-in every day to make sure you are able to unlock all your rewards.

It’s a trick that online multiplayer games use to make sure their servers stay populated with enough people at all times to keep wait time between matches down. It makes you play the game on their schedule instead of yours.

On paper, all of that combined is a recipe for disaster.

Still, I figured I’d give “Marvel Rivals” a try anyway. I wasn’t expecting much, but after playing a handful of matches I can honestly say that this game has no business being as good as it is.

The game itself isn’t breaking a whole lot of new ground, but the amount of style and polish is far beyond anything I expected.

The use of the Marvel license could have held back the game, but instead actually improves it. Developer NetEase has somehow managed to take characters like The Hulk, Loki, and Rocket Raccoon and develop ability sets around them that are fun to play, balanced well in a frantic competitive setting, and still remain true to the spirit of these wildly different characters.

Even the battlepass is uncommonly generous, being both reasonably priced and foregoing the usual time limit. There’s no pressure to unlock everything in a set period, largely reducing the FOMO (fear of missing out) that drives most online games these days.

I downloaded this game thinking I’d give it a try, find a bunch of problems, and never think about it again. I’ve been actively looking for things to complain about, and I’m struggling to come up with any.

So now I have a different problem. Which character am I going to main and how am I going to find the time to fit this game into my schedule?

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and still wishes there was a machine-gun robot to play.

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