Marvel Rivals pt. 1: Heroic Conversation

Host The Direct Edition and Moose discuss the upcoming release of Marvel Rivals, a new hero shooter set to launch on December 6th. With vivid enthusiasm, they delve into their excitement for the game’s characters, including Storm, Namor, Squirrel Girl, and more. The conversation covers unique team-up abilities, a clear parallel to Overwatch, and perceptions of potential game balance. They also speculate on the broader implications of these abilities and the company's approach to monetization.

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 All right, what's going on nerd family? Welcome to I am a nerd celebratory podcast, where we get to celebrate all of our dirty stuff, old and new. Today, we are going to talk about Marvel rivals, which is due out this Friday, December 6th, so we decided to form up and go over a few things in anticipation of this release I have here with me, my remnant gamer brethren, the. Moose ow of mooses the beholder of not afraid to call dog water. 

You damn right. 

The man of some of the spiciest, angriest takes you've ever seen. I have here with me Moose. [00:03:00] Say what's up to the people, Moose. What's up to the people, Moose? How y'all doing? 

Marvel Rivals. Marvel Rivals is on Friday. Stoked. I been following it for a while just because of, I'm the huge comic book nerd. Oh yeah, this is right up your alley. Right up my alley, and I played Overwatch for a little while but I couldn't find like a team to play with. And then when they released overwatch two, by that time I was long out of it. 

Oh, you mean, oh yeah, that, oh yeah, overwatch 1. 5. Yes, overwatch 1. 5, my mistake, that's what it was. 

So by the time they released that, I was long out of overwatch and then I see marvel rivals and just even the art on it was so spicy. Just the character designs. Yes. And I was floored and enamored, I was like, this is gonna be my [00:04:00] shit. Oh, 110%. The art style alone has got me very interested. The characters look wonderful, in particular, Storm. 

Storm was the first character that I actually saw from the game and I was like Oh my god. Okay. I'm interested in this game now. Lord have mercy. 

It also looks like a fun game. The first character I saw was like shirtless Namor and even I was like questioning myself then. I was like damn, Namor look kinda good. Valid. Valid. 

Yeah, I was about to say, there's something for everybody in this roster, man everyone is covered. Yeah, there was. Besides Storm and Thick Squirrel Girl, was there anything else that, like That drew you in to Marvel Rivals? Yeah, I love me a hero shooter. Just, I'll play [00:05:00] any and all of them. I'll give it a good shot. 

And, NetEase is still one of those companies that still hasn't quite completely ruined my opinion of them yet. So I'm willing to, more than willing to give them the shot on it. They did currently running with Once Human which is really, a really good game if you're into survival, rust esque. 

Style games, but also you want your characters to look hot as hell men women, whatever you want Yeah, you can you can do yourself up quite nicely So it's the eye candy plus good games model that they seem to be going in the direction of with this title to and I say Between that and their dead by daylight, knockoff identity V. 

And then Naraka blade point was another one that Nettie's did that. I was like, okay, you know what? These guys know how to make a fun and engaging game with not do predatory microtransaction practices that kind of keeps me on board with that. It's not one of those companies where it's like, Oh God, here we go. 

They're going to give me. Three characters and then, oh, yeah, it's free to play or [00:06:00] you could give us 200 and then have all the characters. No skins, though. That's coveted. The battle pass, crap like that. I know we're going to get onto those skins and those that monetization later on, but let's go ahead and address the elephant in the room, right? 

So Marvel rivals clear, crystal clear parallel to overwatch. Oh yeah, that's. Yeah, we'll rip the band aid off that. It absolutely is very close and there were some characters I was watching and I watched somebody's YouTube breakdown of all the characters recently And it was a bit dated, but I was like, oh, there's our soldier 76. 

There's our May There's our you know, I was like, okay and I was thinking about all the trouble I'm gonna get into day one and get a permanent voice ban from being like Genji, get over here, for anyone playing Psylocke, and, the parallels are there, but, let's be real, though. There's a quote that's escaping me, it's something like [00:07:00] I'm terrible at quotes, we all know that, but effectively, the thing is, if you see a good thing out in the wild, you might as well chomp at the bit a little bit. 

Still innovate, of course, but Obviously, if you're going after a market share, these, they're going after the Overwatch players currently, so why not give them an end to where it's oh, all the Hanzo mains look over and they're like, oh shit, this is like Hanzo, oh, okay, like I'll give it a shot, get their foot in the door, give them what they want, give them, give the pharaoh means they're iron men and stuff like that, Give them what they want, but then innovate. 

As long as they innovate, I can't be too mad at them for that. Yeah, and I hear the innovation that they're trying to do is two of the things that Overwatch didn't have was destructible locales and team up abilities. Oh, like the whole rocket and squirrel, like piggyback riding and it's not squirrel. 

Jesus. [00:08:00] My brain, dude, as soon as I saw the character reveal for her squirrel girl, like she's my favorite Marvel hero, just period like overall back when Marvel Marvel heroes was a thing that MOBA esque, MMO esque ARPG I put hundreds of hours in on Squirrel Girl alone. 

So she's already like pinnacle. So she'll be on my brain this whole time. 

Yeah, that's fine. But then I know you mentioned Rocket and Groot as team modes, but there was some right now. As far as after the alpha and the beta, there was supposedly like seven different team up abilities. Ooh, okay. Okay. And of course one of them was called Ragnarok rebirth which was Loki and Hela, who, all right. 

You have my interest. There's a metallic chaos with Magneto and Scarlet [00:09:00] witch. Oh, okay. All right. Hold on. Let me see if I can find a quick description. Yeah yes, here we go. Loki and Hela. Yeah. Queen of hell, Laufey sun reborn. When Hela lands a final hit in defeating an enemy, she can instantly resurrect Loki in the respawn phase. If Loki is alive. A Nastron crow will fly to him granting blue armor. Oh, that's nasty. 

Oh, that is nasty. Okay. Okay. So that's their team up ability. Magneto and Scarlet witches is called magnetic. Or metallic chaos. So Scarlet, which can infuse chaos energy into Magneto to enchant his great sword upon [00:10:00] receiving the chaos energy. Magneto can unleash its full force. Striking down enemies with his enchanted greatsword. 

Ooh. Okay. Huh. Alright, you definitely have my curiosities there. And I'm wondering, God, it's such a The only other thing, the only other point of reference I have for this is Heroes of the Storm. There was a there was a co op character, Cho'Gall. One person, it was two players, one character. So one person would basically be Joe, and the other person would be Gaul. 

One of them would be responsible for moving around and doing the movement based abilities, like the dash, punch, and things like that. And the other would just be the spellcaster, other half of him. It was a two headed ogre. It's giving me vibes like that, but the problem is obviously they're, they work independently of each other. 

So this isn't a one to one comparison. I'm just wondering how [00:11:00] I'll match defining, I guess is probably the word I want to use. Those partnerships are going to be like, if somebody picks Hella. Are you going to get flamed, like why the hell is nobody picking a Loki, this is a broken ICO, you're ruining the comp, are people going to flame you for not picking the team ups are they going to be that good, or are they just little bonus incentives, and only having five at launch is Hotbed for toxicity a brewing if they're any good, yeah, that very valid point. 

I can see that as well. It's are you going to be like pressured into picking somebody that you want to play? And I know they already going to have I don't think the roles are going to matter. Or they do matter because with Overwatch, you had to have a certain amount of character, not characters, but certain someone to play a certain role. 

Like you had to have a tank, you had to have A DPS, you had to have a support character before the game would start. Oh yeah. [00:12:00] And rivals is going the same way as you can still not the same way you can have six vanguards, but they can't be the same character is what the way that they're going with it. 

I see. I see. 

Go ahead. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cut you off there. You were saying? No, I was going to say you mentioned Rocket and Groot earlier and how detrimental it was going to be because it says that Rocket, when he's riding on Groot's shoulders, he's only receiving a damage reduction. So that doesn't seem like a very game changing team of ability. 

Yeah, that one doesn't sound, that one doesn't sound too bad at all. Like that, that one I'm I'm pretty okay with. You're making yourself one big target instead of two independent targets. Splash damage is gonna wreck the shit out of you. So a damage reduction, that's That's okay. 

That's a good counterbalance. But on that token too, what incentive do I have? Okay, I get a damage reduction. Sure. [00:13:00] But if somebody, hits, hits group with a rocket, he is now hitting two targets. Like how big is this damage reduction that's obviously we're not going to know until we see this in action. 

And then they're going to have to take a look at it. The balance team is going to have to take a whack at it and be like, Oh, okay it wasn't as good as we wanted to. Is we're going to increase the percentage or it was too good. We have to roll it back or delete, disable it because it was totally busted. 

People found ways to like infinite spawn Loki or something. Yeah, shit, shit, shit's going to happen. It's unavoidable in any hero based thing. So we'll leave that at, we'll leave that to the developers to hopefully fix in a timely fashion. Yeah. Or the game just dies. 

For however long it lasts. Yeah, but when you're going on about the the roles that is a genuine concern of mine Overwatch handles that in a way I feel is pretty darn good in the fact that they have separate queues now for if you're queuing up as a tank, a support, DPS you [00:14:00] queue up as that and you get a separate rating when you're playing rated match made games, You get your tank rating, you get your DPS rating, you get your support rating, so there's, you're incentivized, sometimes you get a little bonuses oh, we're running short on supports right now, Q isn't a support, you get a little, extra, match points and stuff I forget what they're even called in Overwatch, it's been a while, but that's handled fantastically, and maintaining the composition is is good, and it's a good way to avoid toxicity. 

League of Legends has this problem a lot where in quick matches and things like that where the roles aren't specified, it's everyone going, Oh my god they implemented something like Overwatch later, yes, I know, but I can hear the people in the audience now, They have that, you can separate by roles, yes. 

Prior to that, though, it'd be like, Okay Yeah, we don't have any, no one wants somebody tanky, everyone wants to do some DPS, good game, and then they immediately just run into the middle tower 30 times in the first 5 minutes, throw the match, and then hold you hostage by not forfeiting, having some structure is a good [00:15:00] thing that I really hope that they They have, and then maybe have the ability to do custom games that that don't have those kind of restrictions for the people that want to make custom lobbies. Yes, that's what I was hoping that there was some type of local play or something like that, that you don't have to jump on with if you just want to run a few matches with your buddies and something like that, do a three on three or a six on six if you have enough people, but not having it to always like point towards being online. 

And, but yeah, so 

Just, that was just one of my thoughts. I was just hoping it was some type of localized play, but he went far between, I'm sure with the a shooter, a hero shooters like this. I figured that it would be the either if it's not the last thing on their mind. Something they're not really looking forward to implementing, but yeah, and I'm very curious [00:16:00] hopeful To see how they handle the problems that we already have in this field, You know again take what's already there And innovate on it. 

Let's see how well they can do that. Yeah. Now, there is another team up ability. This one is the only three man team up ability so far. Ooh. And that includes this sounds a little OP. This, that includes Hulk, Iron Man, and Doctor Strange. Okay. All right. You have my curiosity. So hope charges, dr. 

Strange and Ironman with gamma radiation. So when dr. Strange uses maelstrom of madness, he unleashes excess gamma energy. When Iron Man uses armor overdrive, he will initiate a gamma upgrade. Interesting. So it's basically augmenting their current abilities. Yeah. And Hulk doesn't really have to, it sounds [00:17:00] like Hulk's involvement is just being there. 

And once he's in the match, then they, once they pop their augmentations, their self augmentations that they have, they just. Better versions. If I'm hearing that as it sounds like. That's what is reading like, and my mistake, it's not a three man team up ability because it says Hulk and Ironman or Dr. 

Strange. So it's not that it's not all three of them together, but if they are together, it seems like he can team up with either Ironman or Dr. Strange, as long as they're on the team. So that actually brings a good question to mind. And I wonder if If he can do that team up with either Iron Man or Doctor Strange, I wonder if Rocket would be able to, for instance ride on Hulk's shoulders and add damage reduction to that. 

I wonder if it specifically has to be group. Yeah. Ah. [00:18:00] Yeah. I, tough call. I would assume from a developer standpoint that they would do it. Specific to those characters currently? Is this a 1. 0 release or is this like a beta, like a pre, like an early access release? This is a 1. 0 release. Interesting. 

Okay. Then it is certainly plausible that, maybe they could do it, with other characters. I would presume. Early on they'd want to maybe gauge the community to see oh, yeah Are they using it maybe send out some surveys or take a look at streamers and maybe you know Ask some of the content creators that they're in with and I feel like a can should we expand this to you have that? 

I would be curious. I'd be curious to see if that is something that could be Expanded to other characters. Yeah, that's the last three is with the Punisher and rocket it's called ammo overload. All [00:19:00] right. All right. I started thinking about the Guardians of the Galaxy movie with Rocket like snapping together pieces of a giant gun. 

But this one says Rocket throws an ammo overload device in the target direction upon entering the device's range. The punisher received the buffs of infinite ammo and faster firing. Okay. Oh, yeah, I just pulled up the pulled up the wiki for this. Looks like he has that with Punisher and Winter Soldier. 

Okay. Okay. Yeah, it may be interchangeable. Yeah, because it says in this iteration of it that I'm seeing is frozen ammo overload device, target direction the Punisher and the Winter Soldier receive the buffs of infinite ammo and faster firing. God. That seems busted, especially with Punisher's abilities, because he's just a walking arsenal, like that's his whole thing.[00:20:00]  

Plus his ultimate is already an infinite ammo. Barrage anyway, so that's nasty. 

Okay, did you see the black panther and magic? No. Magic just opens a portal that Black Panther can use to teleport to other locations on the map. Okay. That's not much of a buff at all. It just allows them to cover a great distance. I was gonna say there's definitely some merit to that. 

Especially if it's, if it's a hidden teleport, not telegraphed to the other team. Pull freaking numbers. Especially in the cases of characters with good crowd control. Things like like a Symmetra portal or something like that. And it's oh yeah, they have no idea that there's a portal behind them and your whole team can just land behind the payload. 

Or at least when your crowd controllers can land behind their payload and, just drop a fat [00:21:00] CC on them. And then it's wipe city, baby. I curious to see how that works. Yeah. And in the launch trailer, she was shown magic was shown using the same ability with Psylocke. Ooh. Okay. So they're hoping that. 

In game should be able to do the same thing that would be nice. I would like to see something like that. Because if you haven't watched the launch trailer, I highly suggest you check it out for everybody out there as well. Because there was some clips in there where they were introducing new characters, such as I'm getting a little bit off base here, but a new character such as Iron Fist, Hawkeye, Black Widow. 

And then they went to like action scenes. And it seems like that they were highlighting team up abilities. Whereas like squirrel girl, one of her abilities is firing her slingshot. [00:22:00] That's her main weapon in the game. So in the trailer, Spider Man shot a wet bomb and she caught it and then she fired it and it exploded. 

Yeah, I was actually just reading that one as well. The webbed acorn team up Billy. Okay. So they were highlighting team up abilities in the trailer. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Junk rat and demo man Mains are eating good with squirrel Grow. That's something. I was junk rat ma. 

. Yep. Yeah. And I made the shit outta demo man and pyro and TF two and played the hell outta junk rat. But and Overwatch one, so this is. Already, I was like, please God, give Squirrel Girl a kit that I vibe with because I'll still play her begrudgingly because it's Squirrel Girl and I'm absolutely, I don't even care. 

I don't care. I'll man her. Please let me at least enjoy it a little bit. I know. I'm ready to run through everybody. That's valid.[00:23:00]  

The last one I see on here is Luna Snow and Namor. I haven't looked too much into them. Snow infuse Luna Snow. She's the one with the booty shorts, right? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. She, or the skirt is either short the two-one hair and the Yeah. The skirt or the the booty shorts. Yeah. Yep. That's her. The one that I'd let ruin me. 

Yeah no, I know which one we're talking about now. Yeah. So she infuses ice energy into Namor and then, who then can tap into the ice energy to power up abilities at will. So most of these kind of seem like just power ups. Which I'm totally cool with, especially if it's widespread. If it's just oh yeah, if you happen to have these two heroes, you gain a little, you gain a little bonus. 

You need to it just a little extra bonus or kind of changes the way it's played. Oh, I'm all for that you may you make those team ups a little too powerful though You're gonna turn every match into [00:24:00] a a try hard sweat competitive match regardless of how casual it is Yeah We can take it out of the way, all you gotta do is choose Loki. 

But I don't wanna play Loki. Yeah. I don't wanna play, I fucking hate Loki. You gotta play for the comp, think of the comp, bro! Quickest way to get me out of that game. It's with the exception of Loki and Hela and I guess Rocket and Groot. Everything else is from the ones that I see here. It's like a power up. 

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Black Panther and Magic, because she teleports them.