NetEase Discusses Marvel Rivals Character Design, Matchmaking and Where the Shooter Is Going
One of the hottest games right now — to no one’s surprise — is NetEase’s Marvel Rivals. Even when we played it during its closed beta, we knew NetEase had something special on its hands, given the mix of hero shooter with Marvel’s beloved roster of characters is something that’s hard to mess up.
Thankfully, NetEase has managed to knock it out of the park, and last month, the developers held their Ignite Tournament Finals in China, which MP1st was invited to attend.
Aside from covering the event, we also managed to speak with Guangyun Chen, also known as Guanguang, the Creative Director of Marvel Rivals.
In our chat, we asked Guangguang whether they’re allowed to design their own characters from scratch, what’s up with the matchmaking and a lot more. Read on for our big Marvel Rivals interviews, where we asked everything we could think of.
NetEase Talk Marvel Rivals With MP1st at Ignite 2025
MP1st: I know you said before that the studio can use Marvel’s full history of characters over the last 85 years. Sounds like a pretty much complete freedom reign, but were there any characters or even skins you were told now you cannot use those from the comics or anything?
Guangguang: No, we can use all the 85 years of characters and costumes from the comics.
MP1st: One thing about Marvel projects lately is the introduction of original characters, be that in movies or shows. Is that something that you’re even allowed to do down the road, just having a completely original character for the game that may be introduced to the full Marvel universe later?
Guangguang: Yes, we are allowed to introduce original characters in Marvel Rivals. Yeah, we are allowed.
MP1st: Is there anything in development in the process with that at this time?
Guangguang: Stay tuned.
NetEase Can Create Their Own Heroes for Marvel Rivals Confirmed!
MP1st: I think that everyone knew that Marvel Rivals was going to be a big eSports game from the start. It’s always interesting to see games in the competitive space coming from a more casual viewpoint. From a development standpoint, though, how do you balance the two, where you want to have competitive versus casual, where you don’t alienate one audience versus the other?
Guangguang(Translator): For the in-game balancing, actually we were considering all of the aspects as much as we can. Like, for example, the casual players you mentioned as well as those heroes who perform in tournaments, and as well as the rankings for competitive games, we can observe from the backend to see the heroes win rate and pick rate, and then see about the heroes’ DPS, damage taken, and healing, and other statistics or metrics at different tiers of players and to see how we are going to adjust them from the overall aspects.
MP1st: Building off of that, how much directly does player feedback impact how you move forward with the game and how quickly is that typically implemented once you get feedback?
Guangguang(Translator): It quite depends on what the feedback actually is. For some of the easier and actually more reasonable feedback, we will implement them as fast as possible into our game. But for some of the harder or bigger ones, perhaps we will need to take more considerations. After all, as always, we always listen to the community and players’ ideas to make the game better.
MP1st: Is cross-progression across existing platforms being worked on and what is the eventual goal for that if you are doing so?
Guangguang (Translator): For the cross-progression idea, we actually already released a post on the Discord discussion groups about this topic. And we would like to listen to players’ ideas and anticipations on that topic to see what we can come up with. Stay tuned.
MP1st: Is there a plan to ever allow competitive cross-play within the same teams?
Guangguang (Translator): Currently, we have yet to have such plans on that.
MP1st: I know that currently, it’s averaging like one hero a month being added to the roster. Are you worried at all that the roster may become too big at some point to where newcomers may become overwhelmed? Or is there a plan to ever maybe retire heroes to where it’s not too large of a roster? Do you have any plans, just kind of based on that?
Guangguang (Translator): Maybe, but actually we would focus more on the present situation and actually would see players having many anticipations on the upcoming new heroes to see that we could enlarge our roster. And for the current in-game environment, we also see that players’ anticipation are I believe more than the negative aspect that we could have foreseen. So in that case, we would continue to release heroes at a monthly basis for the upcoming foreseen seasons.
MP1st: On the topic of character development, how is the team able to create so many characters at a time, when you’re staying on the monthly release. Like do you already have a team that’s already working on say season 3, then have another on season 4? Like how does that whole process work to keep on that level of release schedule?
Guangguang (Translator): So for all these heroes, we do have different colleagues in charge of different heroes. For example, perhaps we’d have one group or one certain people that were in charge of the heroes for S3, and then for S4, and for S4.5. They’re all different colleagues that would be in charge of this. And for the internal pipelines, actually we have a well established pipeline that started from the story base to discuss the hero roster with Marvel team and then see how they’re going to give heroes interesting gameplay, and then the artwork things, and to combine them overall and to see how we’re going to tackle them in-game to give prototypes, as well as polishing all the heroes’ skills to make sure players would be interested in this hero. And all these things would happen in parallel so as to support our upcoming pipeline of the monthly-based hero update.
NetEase Talks to Marvel to Plan Content to Coincide With Movie Releases
MP1st: Kind of all of that, does Marvel have a say like ‘Hey, we have Fantastic Four the movie coming out. Can you kind of get them out first?” Is there anything like that, or is it still mostly your choice on the order of when heroes come out?
Guangguang (Translator): Actually, we do have a lot of freedoms, but also we work closely with Marvel team. So is a joint discussion and then we could achieve them together with both teams to make the game better.
MP1st: A very common trend we’ve seen with big multiplayer releases is that they don’t stay the same in five years or 10 years, they make a lot of concessions and change. Where do you see the game in 5 or 10 years? Do you see it evolving a lot or do you see it kind of progressing naturally?
Guangguang (Translator): So actually our team and our game are actually in the continually evolving development process. You can see that from our game launch at December of last year and since then and to now that we can see more of the new heroes, new maps, new roster, and new gameplay coming into the pipe and so on and so forth that we’re continuing to develop new content that will excite players. We’re also listening to the community and we see this as a joint cooperation between us and the community to build the game, build our world better.
MP1st: In competitive, there are obviously specific characters that get banned most, like noticing at the tournament that Human Torch has been getting banned a lot. [Guangguang laughs] How does Netease then use those statistics to continually keep the game balanced to where banned characters may not be as dominant in future patches, but are still viable and fun to use?
Guangguang (Translator): For Human Torch, this is also a part of the in-game balancing as we mentioned. We can see that even though be is pretty dominant in the recent tournament, but our backend statistics and overall watches, we can see that his pick rate and ban rate actually not be so that permanent in the lower to middle ranking tiers. So in that case, we will take all the aspects into consideration to see how we are going to make him more balanced instead of only focusing on the tournaments’ basings.
Guangguang (No-translator): Human Torch needs a lot of teammates’ resources to make him dominant.
MP1st: Which platform has the most players? And could you give us a breakdown of which sector spends the most, like which platform or which country?
Guangguang (Translator): Actually, our game has actually covered all the platforms, the PS5s, the Xbox Ones, [Guangguang interjected that he forgot PC], as well as many other platforms. So in that case, we can see that our games are actually favored by many players of different platforms. And we’re actually sharing a pretty large player base as well as platforms.
MP1st: What is the studio’s stance on leaks? It seems like it’s kind of changed. It seems like every time something new comes out, there’s a new leak. Have you just kind of embraced that over time or how does the studio handle that at this point?
Guangguang (Translator): Yeah, we do see that, but actually we’re actually implementing countermeasures to actually prevent some of the still in development content to be leaked.
MP1st: One of the biggest community concerns is matchmaking in competitive. Is Netease making any significant changes moving forward at this point or is it staying the way it is for the time being?
Guangguang: Matchmaking is a complex system and we are preparing a video to talk to the community about what’s behind our design. Maybe in two weeks. So stay tuned for the video and we will talk about how the matchmaking works in Marvel Rivals.
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