Marvel Rivals: How it's Success is Honestly Sad

Has incompetency warped our judgement?

One of my new favorite games to play is Marvel Rivals. It does the “hero shooter” genre right. The characters are quick to learn and feel amazing, the sound design and is stellar, and the developers have done a wonderous job maintaining the authenticity of the characters. Most impressive, I feel, are the amount of customization in the options, able to bind keys and adjust how the abilities react for each hero.

It is a stellar game all around, where all game studios should learn from!

But here’s the caveat. The concepts Marvel Rivals introduce are far from new. The implementation, while masterfully done, is not innovative by any stretch of the imagination. The developers took these concepts and used a wondrous level of skill and talent to create a fleshed out game. Even after months, players are still finding new and unique interactions between characters and how they play.

This level of competency, however, should not be a surprise to us - it should be the standard.

We’ve seen time and time again of game studios fumbling the bag. Blizzard had a treasure called “Overwatch.” Instead of tending to it with the right level of care, they sundered the franchise through various means: DEI garbage, game breaking balancing that causes great frustration, ignoring the desires of fans, even going as much to insult the fans promising a “whole new gameplay experience” with Overwatch 2, but slaps them across the face when in reality it’s just OW1 with a few tweaks (they slap them again bringing back “classic mode,” a legacy competitive format.)
Outside of Blizzard, we have had the 500 million dollar disaster of Concord, Dragonage: Veilguard, The Last of Us 2… disaster after disaster after disaster our gaming community has suffered through.

It’s shocking how games like Doom Eternal, Space Marine 2, and Helldivers 2 came through fruition in this environment. All of these are excellent games in their own right, and have brought many innovative ideas along with. Even then, there was great strife and problems caused outside the control of the developers, and even the studios for these examples. Be it publishers like Sony trying to destroy the good faith of Helldivers 2 players through invasive policies, or media hit pieces by “games journalists”, excellence faces an uphill path unlike ever before.

---

---

In the 80s and 90s, there were no limits to what game developers could make (outside the obvious…technical limitations of course.) Their imaginations ran wild and they were able to create a wide variety of amazing things. Sure, it also came with a lot of garbage (you certainly know if you ever watched Angry Video Game Nerd.) But the garbage that came was not socially engineered. There were no “blue haired whales” in HR demanding you to make the game for an audience who won’t buy it. The terrible games of the olden days were mostly caused by game developers not knowing any better, and at worse, resulted from gross corporate mismanagement.

Many argue that the mid-late 2000’s was the golden age of gaming. You had World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, Halo 2 and 3, Half Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare… there were a plethora of games that innovated and enhanced the experience for players. Not just through exciting gameplay and graphics, but through story telling as well.

After this era, we sadly tapered off, and slumped back with the aforementioned slop we’ve been receiving in the past 5 years or so. Call of Duty was exploited and cursed into an annual or semi-annual release, akin to EA sports games, Fortnite fueled a brain-rotting culture and laid a foundation of a brightly colored autistic creative styles plaguing other game franchises. Overwatch, and mobile games fueled a gambling craze and “pay to win” became a new standard. Then of course, you have the cultural nonces that infested these companies, from the Gamer Gate fiasco with the ilk of Anita Sarkisian, to Sweet Baby Inc, causing a deterioration of quality of our favorite franchises. Games are being ‘re-released’ just like reboots of movies and shows, but with a “fresh coat of paint for the modern audience.”

Some golden nuggets can be found today, sure. However, you have to look at the environment we have to dig through to find them now: that being a mound of shit. Marvel Rivals is a miracle, but it shouldn’t have to be! That’s not to say that we need to pursue perfection, just a standard of quality. Praise should be reserved for those who are willing to go the extra mile, who do the impossible, and brave enough to take action in the face of danger. It should not be granted to those who simply do their jobs any average Joe can do.

Sadly I wish I had the perfect solution to this mess, but I could only offer these three suggestions:

• Boycott the garbage

• Ignore the garbage

• Highlight the gold

As much as I want to suggest mocking those who make this type of trash, it sadly emboldens them, because they care not whether the attention is positive or negative, as long as the attention is there. That attention brings advertisers, which is how they achieve the money to continue inundating our market with slop. We used to “ignore the trolls” in the early stages of the internet (the golden age of the internet, I’d argue.) Sadly, because of how social media has evolved, people forgot this principle, and got caught up in rage and click-bait.
But if we can return to that mindset of ignoring the trolls, and adopting the three principles I offered, not just for gaming, but for all forms of media, then perhaps we could put a stop to this runaway train before it inevitably falls off the rails.

---