I spent a great deal of time over the holiday ranking up in Marvel Rivals. I had previously thought that my journey to Diamond was fought with hard work and skill, but it turns out that there's a pretty significant bug that might've been holding my opponents back.
At first, I thought the reports of players with better PCs doing more damage than those who can barely muster up 30 FPS were hyperbole, but it turns out that there are some real downsides to settling for low framerates. Those shackled to a potato PC do less damage, and move slower when compared to players with 60 or 150 FPS.
Player nyin_ showed how a few heroes are seriously nerfed thanks to low FPS. Venom moves slower when wall running, Magik's dash is shorter, Doctor Strange has less horizontal movement, and Star Lord does slightly less damage. When I tested these differences out, I found that anything over 60 FPS doesn't make a difference to damage or movement range. But even at 30 FPS, the difference between Star Lord's damage output is hardly noticeable, and wouldn't make a significant difference to the outcome of a game.
However, I was surprised to see how different Magik and Doctor Strange's movement abilities were. Starting at the 15-meter line in the practice range at 60 FPS or higher, I could hit the target dummy with Magik's dash, but I fell short of it when limiting my FPS to 30. Doctor Strange's sideways jump is also a couple of meters short when the FPS is lower.
You may not think that this makes a massive difference in terms of winning or losing a game, but restricted movement can be a big deal. It can be the difference between reaching the objective and stalling the point until your team can join you, and taking a loss just meters away from the objective. It can also make combo attacks harder to manage, as you now have to initiate closer to the enemy, which can make some moves slightly more risky to pull off.
Marvel Rivals streamer Flats also explains how this bug can negatively affect players trying to replicate set moves: "So the people who kept coming into my chat and asking me how I was doing this Strange move…ok. So on Strange, there is this move that you can do right when you're walking up to the enemy, and you have ult. You hit shift, cancel it mid-air, and so you drop in on them, and you get some good distance, and people were like, 'How do you keep doing that?' And I'm like, what? I'm just walking, hitting shift, and then canceling it. But people with low FPS literally can't recreate it."
While this problem isn't great, other players point out that it's not the only bug plaguing Marvel Rivals right now. "Strange is such a perfect character that he can even counter this by opening a portal," a player says as they allude to the fact that Doctor Strange's portals have been known to completely tank performance in games for everyone. I've experienced the hit to my framerate when a well-meaning Strange player opens a portal—it even made the portal momentarily disappear.
There are also other issues with Marvel Rivals' optimisation. Other than clunky maps that freak out if there's too much going on, my biggest headache so far is disappearing characters. Player models often take a long time to load in at the beginning of a match, but I've also seen a Venom vanish into thin air in front of me, which is absolutely terrifying when you're playing strategist. I have noticed this getting better as the weeks go on, but it's still a real disappointment, especially when you compare it to games like Overwatch, which didn't see these kinds of issues at launch.
All of these bugs are pretty annoying, but I'm loving Marvel Rivals so much right now that I'm willing just to wait it out and hope for a fix soon. Although my patience isn't infinite, so I'd really appreciate NetEase polishing its game up a little more in the not-so-distant future.
