Marvel and NetEase Games’ superhero team-based PVP shooter Marvel Rivals got announced last March and is already in beta on PC. At the PlayStation State of Play livestream on Thursday, fans learned that the game will also be released on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, with a closed beta coming to the PlayStation platform soon.
Marvel Rivals is a free-to-play game with a huge lineup of Marvel heroes and villains, with 18 characters confirmed thus far: Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Groot, Hulk, Iron Man, Loki, Luna Snow, Magik, Magneto, Mantis, Namor, Peni Parker, Rocket Raccoon, Scarlet Witch, Spider-Man, Storm, Star-Lord, and The Punisher. The premise revolves around converging timelines and multiple Doctor Dooms, with proceedings overseen by Galactus’ daughter Galacta, but really the point of Marvel Rivals is to see these popular and mega-powerful characters teaming up and using their diverse array of abilities in combat.
In an earlier interview with Polygon about Marvel Rivals, game director Thaddeus Sasser — who has also worked on series like Call of Duty, Battlefield, and Ghost Recon for two decades — emphasized that all of those different superpowers are definitely the fun part. “Having magical superpowers in a multiplayer game is something that hasn’t really been done to death,” he said. “It’s still kind of relatively fresh and new, and the way we’re doing it, and some of the tricks we’ve got up our sleeves should be pretty exciting for new players.”
