Marvel Rivals creative director Guangyun “Guangguang” Chen has confirmed NetEase isn’t considering role limits for the time being, despite player demand.
For some context, Overwatch spent its first three years not limiting anyone on which hero they could pick, meaning you would have matches where everyone’s playing DPS or, less commonly, healers.
The topic of role limits in Marvel Rivals has been one of fierce debate, with proponents arguing it would stop players from using Overwatch’s notorious GOATs meta and force stubborn DPS mains to support their teams by swapping into other roles when necessary, but role queue critics say people should be free to choose whichever hero they want to play, balance be damned.
Well, at least for now, developer NetEase is siding with the latter, telling Dot Esports in no uncertain terms that role queue isn’t in the plans.
“Right now, we’re not considering a role queue,” said Chen. “The team’s goal is to offer a wider variety of team composition through team-up skills and their own designs, to let people play their Marvel superheroes rather than limiting players to choosing a role.
“From the data we’re seeing in our back end, things are going pretty solid,” Chen said. “We want people to have a Marvel experience where they’re free to select what they want. [Since the closed beta,] things have been rational and within expectations. In our Competitive play recently, there is a lot of different compositions emerging from players and we’d like to continue to monitor these fun compositions and how they impact our game.”
Again, it wasn’t until 2019, three years after its launch, that Overwatch added role limits, so it’s definitely still early to say whether Marvel Rivals will ever reverse course on the issue.
Marvel Rivals is getting a Splatoon mode and turning Groot into a Christmas tree for the holidays.