Marvel Rivals reminds me of pre-identity crisis Overwatch in the best possible way, but it's far from ready

I wasn’t sure about Marvel Rivals after its initial announcement and previews, but the closed beta is giving me hope that something acceptable could come out of this one despite some glaring issues that need to addressed.

It’s hard to deny Overwatch 2 has been struggling for a long time now, and depending on who you ask, the same could be said about Blizzard’s once astonishingly attractive hero-shooter IP as a whole. The truth is that things started to spiral downwards after the first two years or so of Overwatch, after the powers that be deemed it wasn’t enough to welcome players of all skill levels and grow from there, and instead started chasing eSports-related growth. Now, OW2, despite some recent wins, continues to feel like a shell of its former self, and Marvel and NetEase’s shameless take on the formula might just be what many of us have been missing for years.

I must agree with my mate Connor in that Marvel Rivals very much feels like a reskin of Overwatch, but depending on which stage of Overwatch it’s trying to copy, that might be a good thing, as the current iteration of OW2 (it even feels wrong to treat it as a sequel) isn’t very good. Marvel and NetEase are just looking for that sweet hero-shooter money, right as most hero shooters and other live-service gambles are visibly starting to die out. All these recent developments are hard to predict, however, and harder to anticipate if we consider how long AA and AAA development usually takes nowadays unless you’re a studio full of dev wizards (there are some fascinating cases).