More than meets the eye.
I went into Marvel Rivals with the expectation that the hero shooter would feel like a giant reskin of Overwatch 2. During its alpha, there was a growing sentiment that NetEase had copied Blizzard's homework thanks to videos of Black Panther diving across maps like Genji or Hulk's two forms resembling D.Va and her mech. But after playing the closed beta for around six hours now, I'm starting to realise that the comparisons may have been an overstatement.
There's clearly some inspiration here, which makes sense considering work on Marvel Rivals began around 2019, arguably when the Overwatch hype was at its highest—I'd use Blizzard's work as a starting point for sure. While it's easy and helpful to compare characters from both games so new players can get a better understanding, Marvel heroes aren't a mirror image of the Overwatch ones. Instead, many similar abilities have been divided between various heroes.
For example, Adam Warlock plays a lot like Brigitte, with his primary ability resembling her armour packs and his secondary ability working a bit like her ultimate, but NetEase also decided to give him what is essentially Mercy's old ultimate, team rez. This means that the characters play differently, and you have to be aware of different issues and responsibilities. At no point in a match have I felt like I could close my eyes and let muscle memory from the last eight years of playing Overwatch take the wheel—although one of the Tokyo 2099 maps gave me flashbacks to Hanamura's first point.
It also helps that Marvel Rivals is a third-person shooter, which means there's not as much of a focus on precision aiming. Instead, it places a lot of responsibility on managing and coordinating cooldowns. Once you get the hang of this, the chaotic fights become way easier to handle, and you can actually do some pretty cool tricks, like using Groot's ultimate to trap enemies alongside a more explosive ability like Punisher's Culling Turret to eliminate them in one fell swoop.
This also isn't the first time we've seen a multiplayer shooter take inspiration from Overwatch. Games like Paladins and Concord have very similar features, while Valorant almost directly rips heroes from Overwatch. Valorant's Omen doesn't just look very similar to Overwatch's Reaper, but he has many of the same abilities, such as teleporting or phasing across the map. Sova, meanwhile, also looks like his Overwatch counterpart Hanzo, using a bow and arrow with a recon arrow to expose enemies and a wall-piercing ultimate, it's pretty obvious where the idea came from.
But while Overwatch clearly has a far-reaching influence on hero shooters, it doesn't have a monopoly on abilities. You go back far enough, and you can almost always see similarities between new and old games. The most obvious example of this has to be how Overwatch is clearly inspired by Team Fortress 2, whether that be Mercy's similarities to Medic or Tracer and Scout's likeness.
Marvel Rivals can definitely be hard to grasp at first, and NetEase needs to come up with a better way to convey the direction of incoming damage because right now, there's so much going on during fights that sometimes I don't even realise I'm being hit. But this isn't something that other hero shooters haven't had to deal with before. I would pity anyone trying to get into Overwatch 2 for the first time today—from the outside in, it can look ridiculously busy.
While Marel Rivals definetly isn't for everyone, my colleague Fraser Brown certainly thinks it's a dead man walking, I've found the hero shooter to be pretty agreeable. It's still very much early days, as it's just halfway through its closed beta, so hopefully, NetEase will take the time to address damage issues and patch a few powerful heroes. This shooter won't be gunning for Overwatch 2's crown any time soon, but I'd hope to see it go for it in the future—more competition is a great way to incentivize progress, which can be a great thing for all players involved.
