Marvel Rivals is drastically speeding up development to release more heroes

Marvel Rivals Season 2 is almost upon us! And, on top of the new changes for the season and Emma Frost coming to the game soon, they’ve confirmed some exciting news that’ll apply from Season 3 and onward: Development on new content will be getting a lot faster.

Though Marvel Rivals is still one of the most popular multiplayer games on Steam and has retained a massive portion of players since launch, the industry is still incredibly competitive. Every game is competing for players’ time even if they aren’t in the same genre, with games that can’t keep up quickly failing.

As a result, the devs have made a bold choice: Shortening seasons from 3 months to 2, but not slowing down the pipeline of new skins and content.

This means that, for the foreseeable future, a new hero will be coming to Marvel Rivals every month starting with Season 3.

Marvel Rivals will get new heroes much faster

Marvel Rivals already had a pretty impressive roster on launch. Overwatch 2, its closest competitor, has a roster of 42. Meanwhile, Rivals already has 37 not including Emma Frost. At this rate, Overwatch will be overtaken before the end of the year.

And, considering there are hundreds of heroes to pull from the Marvel universe, who knows what we’ll get next? Leaks have already revealed over a dozen heroes in development, and other characters like Blade have been shown in-game already even if they don’t have a release date set in stone.

On the previous release schedule, fans weren’t sure when they’d see their favorite hero in the game. With over a dozen heroes leaked, it could have been years until they finally joined the roster. Now, fans won’t have to worry quite as much about the wait.

Creative director Guanguang confirmed the news in their Season 2 dev vision update, with a discussion starting at the 2:48 mark.

“After extensive internal discussions and thorough evaluations, we’ve decided that, starting from Season 3, the seasons will shift to a two-month format with a new hero debuting each month,” he explained.

He also explained that systems relating to the season ending and seasonal events like the battle pass will be adjusted accordingly, meaning it will likely get easier for players to grind their way through the pass and get every event item before things move on to the next season.

Guanguang also confirmed that the mission system and process of earning Chrono Tokens, the battle pass currency, would be revised by adding Weekly Missions and revising the way tokens are distributed effective immediately. This should result in players having an easier path to earning every reward.

“With our goal of keeping the audience’s excitement alive, just like our opening months, the real adventure with Marvel Rivals is just beginning!” he concluded.

While there’s no telling how much more difficult this will make the game to balance with such a high release cadence, it’s sure to be a change that’ll keep players engaged and make them want to try out new characters.