Marvel Rivals does almost everything right, but boy does its progression suck
Marvel Rivals had a huge launch, surpassing more than 10 million players in its first three days. For the most part the community seems thrilled with it, as am I. My social media feeds are filled with clips of players pulling off crazy team KOs or spitting an entire team off the map as Jeff the Land Shark. But one issue that has been voiced by a lot of the community is that the battle pass progression sucks.
And I agree, but Marvel Rivals' progression problem goes deeper than its battle pass: there just isn’t a lot to earn or play for.
Beyond a few skins to earn from general achievements and small UI updates when you reach a certain proficiency with a character, there isn’t really anything to show off your skill with a hero or how much time you've devoted to the game. So many shooters thrive by giving players carrots on the end of a stick to chase, whether it be camos in Call of Duty, ribbons in Battlefield, or the regular cadence of XP from challenges and tasks in Fortnite.
In Marvel Rivals there isn’t any of that. All of the rewards you can earn are either UI elements only you can see or some generic spray that does nothing to convey a particular achievement or time dedication. It’s disappointing considering Marvel Rivals avoids many of the pitfalls that other live service shooters have from a content delivery perspective.
Say what you want about Concord, but even that game understood that you needed to bake in rewards for each character that go beyond a few cosmetics. It had reward tracks for every hero with dozens of skins, weapon camos, charms, and more to earn, and that was with entirely original characters. Marvel Rivals squandered the advantage of decades of comic history to show up on day one without a sweet range of unlockables.
Most of Rivals' costumes are all locked behind microtransactions. If there was something meaningful to chase just by playing, that would be fine, but there just isn’t. I’m not oblivious to the fact that making cosmetics takes a substantial amount of time and effort from developers, and selling them is how a live service game stays afloat. But with so many characters in the game, I have to wonder if more of that time should have been spent on fleshing out the game’s progression to make players want to keep playing it.
The lack of meaningful stuff to earn wouldn’t be so bad if battle pass progression was at least rewarding. Right now it is designed to make you play every day or wait until the end of a week to knock out all the challenges and tasks in one go. You can’t just play for however long you like and finish the battle pass quickly by earning XP. Instead, every item is locked behind earning Chrono Tokens, which are only given to players upon finishing some of the weekly challenges, daily challenges, and seasonal tasks. At launch Halo Infinite was widely criticized for similar problems with its battle pass design. It's great that, like Halo's, the Rivals battle pass doesn't expire. But it needs work.
Earning Chrono Tokens is painfully dull, and it drags. I want to keep playing Marvel Rivals, but once I finish the daily challenges I don’t see much reason to. I don’t have anything to earn, so why should I keep playing instead of just coming back the next day to repeat the cycle? I’m not interested in grinding ranked, and call me shallow but I am motivated by having something to chase. So are many others. It's why TikTok has been full of Dark Matter grinds in Black Ops 6 since it launched.
My biggest fear for Marvel Rivals’ future is that all of this will just stay untouched and new progression paths and rewards won’t be added in. My doomer scenario is Marvel Rivals releasing a new season every three months with skins for 10-12 characters, leaving the rest without anything for that season. Given that each Battle Pass page only has rewards for one character in Season 0, this seems like an easy prediction to make, though I hope I'm wrong.
When you add in the fact that several heroes will be joining the lineup each season, you can see how the problem is only going to get worse. It could be several seasons before a character gets a skin, or even a new spray and emote.
Overwatch 2 has really suffered from this recently, with characters proven to sell skins, like Mercy and Reinhardt, getting new costumes and outfits every season. But newer heroes like Venture haven’t seen a single skin since they joined the roster.
I’m not asking for the Rivals devs to suddenly drop 10 skins for every character that take hundreds of hours to earn, or even a mountain of cosmetics to mirror the hundreds of calling cards, camos, skins, and emblems available in Call of Duty every year. But it would be nice to have something to earn, because right now there is as close to nothing as you can get.
In an ideal world, I would take a few skins that can be earned by completing challenges for each character. But I’d also be happy to see alternate visual color schemes or more visual effects for the MVP screen. Maybe NetEase could add a sigil or emblem by a player’s name that shows their proficiency with a character in the middle of the match.
These are small additions that really give me and many others a reason to invest long-term in a game. So many live service games are fighting for my time in 2024, and that is only going to increase in 2025.
I could be playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 to earn Dark Matter. I could be playing The Finals’ newest season, which has a far more impactful battle pass progression flow. I could return to Fortnite and grind several battle passes at once with its recent Fortnite Crew subscription changes. But I am here playing Marvel Rivals because it is the most fun out of all of them. Now, I just need NetEase to give me a reason to stay logged in every day.