Marvel Rivals fans were having a field day with mods earlier this month. But last week NetEase shut the party down in a season one update. Now, a workaround has surfaced to bring back everything from wholesome Chainsaw Man mod for Jeff the Land Shark to very NSFW 19-inches of Venom overhaul, at least for players willing to risk getting their accounts banned, or potentially messing up their gaming PCs.
If you haven’t been playing Marvel Rivals on PC or aren’t up to date on the modding scene there, fans have been creating all sorts of add-ons for the popular hero shooter since it launched last month. Those include everything from mods that try to optimize framerate performance to, uh, costume changes for Psylocke, Squirrel Girl, and others. The most popular mod of all over on NexusMods simply turned Iron Man into Dragon Ball Z’s Prince of all Saiyans.
But NetEase put the kibosh on the Marvel Rivals modding black market in its season one update last week, which introduced asset hash checking, a fancy way of saying that the game was now checking to make sure no rogue elements were being loaded into the game when players booted it up on their PCs. RIP GTA San Andreas’ Big Smoke as Punisher and CJ as Winter Soldier.
Naturally, it only took a few days for fans to find a workaround. As Dexerto notes, there are essentially two techniques for bypassing Marvel Rivals’ new asset hash check. The first incorporates the modded files directly into the game’s .pak files rather than separately through a mod manager. It’s a much bigger hoop than most players will want to jump through, but it works.
The second method is a bit more straightforward, but requires a very beefy SSD. It seemingly revolves around unpacking and repacking files quickly enough to skirt the new checks, and comes with the risk of overheating your PC as a result. “You can just extract the pak files like a zip and run them unpaked,” reads a new how-to by prafit1111 over on NexusMods. “The problem is, the game is loading 50,000 files versus 1 so this can be quite problematic even on the fastest SSDs. Using a solution like this could even make your SSD die faster.”
Plus, even if you don’t corrupt your game install or kill a piece of your rig, continuing to mess around with mods still risks permanently losing access to your account and all the cosmetics you’ve already purchased or unlocked. “It is not recommended to modify any game files, as doing so carries the risk of getting banned,” NetEase recently told IGN in a statement. But hey, I guess some things are worth potentially getting hit by the Marvel Rivals ban hammer, like wiping the entire enemy team as Pochita Jeff.
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