The Complete Story Of Marvel Rivals So Far

Marvel Rivals is a multiplayer game where two teams of six characters battle each other. Their goal will vary from map to map, which involves capturing points or escorting payloads, and you have a lot of Marvel heroes and villains to choose from, each character with their own abilities, pros, and cons.

In a game such as this one, it’s normal not to be aware that the game itself has a story going on – after all, you’re just hopping on matches and fighting people. But this is Marvel, and the game has a grand story about saving the multiverse hidden within its online matches.

Premise

Doom’s Rise

Everything that happens during the game is essentially the fault of two versions of Doctor Doom, one being from the present and another from the future. Their work to unify magic and science gave them great control of the multiverse. However, their actions led to one another (they had the same idea and were doing it separately), and now they’re fighting one another and making it everyone else’s problem.

Their confrontation made the multiverse’s timestream fragile, even going as far as remodeling multiple timelines. That is why we have unique concepts from some maps, such as a Wakanda in space, Yggsgard controlled by King Loki, and an Earth that was taken over by Hydra. We’ll dive deeper into those soon.

According to Galacta, who oversees and narrates the events of the game, what the Dooms are doing will eventually destroy everything if left unchecked, and the game teases the fact that whatever they are doing is benefiting Knull, God of the Symbiotes and the essence of pure darkness within Marvel.

The Beginning

The Search For The Darkhold

The story kicks off with an encounter between Stephen Strange and Victor Von Doom. Doom is after the Darkhold to learn the curse that turns people into vampires. He’s not interested in making vampires but instead in learning how the curse works, as he believes it’ll give him hints on how to control time itself.

Strange currently has the book and refuses to help. This leads Doom to attempt his own machinations to control reality through science and magic, leading him into a direct encounter with another Doom, the one from 2099. Their clash causes the chaos stated above but also traps Strange in the Astral Realm because he was observing Doom performing his ritual and got caught by its blast.

Strange stays trapped for an uncertain amount of time and asks for the help of multiple Sorcerers Supremes from different timelines. Eventually, one of them hears him and believes him: Wanda Maximoff, the Scarlet Witch and the Sorceress Supreme of her dimension. He explains the situation to her and also tells her that during his time trapped, Strange noticed that Khonshu – Moon Knight’s patron – took the Darkhold to kill all vampires, though his method would also kill innocent people charmed by the creatures.

It’s also during this time that Dracula attacks New York, and his story there would continue further during the game’s first season.

Galacta

And How The Game Works

Galacta is the daughter of Galactus, but unlike her father, she avoids consuming planets, and it’s currently feeding off of Chronovium. In fact, she’s more receptive towards mortals, and she mainly oversees the universe and helps where she can. Her role in the story is very similar to how the Watchers operate, though she can meddle if she wants to.

To prevent ultimate destruction from both the Dooms’ actions and her own hunger, Galacta is preserving a handful of timelines, causing more Chronovium, and letting the heroes from these places figure out a more definite solution. She oversees the heroes’ progress in the fight against the Dooms or against one another as they try to figure out what to do and disagree with one another.

She can also replace characters during the conflict, so technically, when you swap characters, that’s canonically Galacta changing people around.

The game also has a very thorough lore for each playable character, though not all of its lore is unlocked. A lot of them come from different realities, though some are from the same place and are friends. A curious example is Captain America, who is from 2099 and is not used to this multitude of heroes, especially because a lot of these heroes look up to him by knowing his present counterpart.

We won’t dive into each character’s lore because there’s just too much, so instead, we will focus on the overarching story.

Marvel Rivals Infinity Comic

The Fate Of The Web of Life and Destiny

Marvel Rivals already has a few comics to help explore its story, though they don’t go as deep as you may expect. They have Galacta introducing things to us and proceeds to show two groups of heroes fighting each other over the Web of Life and Destiny.

The comics have two characters, Spider-Zero and Master Weaver, discussing how the Web of Life and Destiny should be dealt with during this multiversal crisis, and their difference in ideologies causes a conflict. Thus, there’s a fight between the heroes who agree with Spider-Zero and the ones who agree with Master Weaver.

Essentially, this is the conflict you deal with every time you play on the Spider Lands map in Tokyo 2099.

The story itself isn’t concluded, but it shows that the situation is so complicated that the heroes are going as far as fighting one another because they are not sure if the other heroes’ approaches are the way to go. This is also evident by other information from the character’s lore, such as T’Challa not knowing which Doom he should side with for the better of Wakanda while also believing he’ll ultimately have to make a choice.

The Birth Of Yggsgard

Schemers Gonna Scheme

Odin has entered a deep slumber – similar to how he’s done in the MCU – which was triggered by Loki and his many schemes. Dooms’ timestream manipulations affected Yggdrasil, and its sap became Chronovium, something Loki used to his advantage and looked into the future. This tree affected by Chronovium became Yggsgard.

Using the tree’s sap, Loki saw multiple futures, with most of them leading to Yggsgard’s destruction. Still, he saw one future where Yggsgard was safe and with him on the throne. His goal is to ensure this future to save his people and also take advantage of becoming a king, a perfect mix of genuine care and his mischievous ways.

Loki isn’t doing things by himself, though. He’s doing so with the allegiance of Hela, and together, they both ban Thor to a different dimension, ensuring he would not be a problem. Loki promised Hela she could expand her realm into the land of the living, but it does seem she’s manipulating him more than he’s manipulating her.

Hela is using this opportunity to take the souls of all beings she can, even involving celestial and creatures from other realities. However, her plans got the attention of Knull.

Wakanda And Klyntar

Knull Strikes

In this broken multiverse, we have a Wakanda that became an intergalactic Empire rather than staying part of Earth. Though that’s all well and good, the timestream entanglement made Wakanda and Djalia – the Ancestral Plane – intertwine with one another, and the gods, including Bast, grew silent.

T’Challa could only communicate with Bast’s sister, K’Liluna, but didn’t ask her anything as she had betrayed Bast in the past. What he learned after finally talking to Bast, though, was that she was helping another King in Black – Knull.

Helping (or further corrupting) Bast is your goal on the Wakandan maps.

Knull is taking advantage of the whole chaos to grow in power, and some characters, like Magik and Venom are actively fighting Knull’s forces. This led our lethal protector to Klyntar, where he united with Adam Warlock, and they are fighting to prevent Knull’s essence from going deeper into the planet, where the Necrosword lies, a weapon that could be useful to kill Knull but also make him far more powerful. Preventing our helping Knull’s essence is your goal on the Klyntar map.

Season 1

Eternal Night Falls

The first season kicks into a plot thread that was already touched upon in trailers and some heroes’ backstories: vampires attacking New York. This season talks about how Doctor Doom gave Dracula access to Chronovium and helped him achieve control over New York using it and the Darkhold. With a blood moon on top of New York, the city became his personal playground. For D&D fans, New York basically became Barovia from Curse of Strahd.

That said, the stationary moon is affecting the rest of the world, slowly compromising the whole planet in the process. For now, Reed and Tony are trying to find a more permanent solution while the rest of The Fantastic Four and a few heroes, like Magik, Moon Knight, and Cloak & Dagger, are fighting in the streets, saving people directly. The event missions are actually the lore behind what’s currently going on.

It’s also worth noting that there’s an ongoing fight to get the Darkhold. As mentioned in the beginning, Khonshu took it and intended to use it to kill all the vampires right away, but the consequences would be grave for the innocent, too. Doctor Strange and the Scarlet Witch take the book from him, but the pages get scattered in the process, making things a bit more complicated.

This leads to season one’s map, Midtown. The heroes are fighting over whether they should use one of the Darkhold’s pages to defeat the horde vampires, as Khonshu intended. One of the teams is willing to do whatever it takes, while the other disagrees with the use of the page and merely intends to collect it before the vampires and the opposing team do it.

This season also shows that Blade is currently captive, which is a likely tease of the character showing up in the future.