‘Marvel Rivals’ Devs Confirms Roster Leaks Are Real, But Cautions Fans That Datamined Characters “May Appear Or May Not Appear In Our Future Plans”
Whether an earnest look into their development process or an attempt to throw players off the scent of their future content plans, Marvel Rivals Producer Weicong Wu and Marvel Games Executive Producer Danny Koo have admitted that the numerous ‘in development’ characters discovered by dataminers are 100% real, but also cautioned fans to refrain from taking the existence of said progress work as confirmation of their future addition to the hero shooter’s roster.
As a result of Marvel Rivals‘ explosive popularity, the last two months have seen the game’s more tech savy fans digging into its included assets in the hopes of uncovering any hint regarding which of the eponymous comic book publisher’s many heroes or villains would be next up to gain Galacta’s attention.
In doing so, said dataminers uncovered numerous files, their contents ranging from simple character placeholder names to full-on kit descriptions, hinting at the current slate of characters NetEase is considering for the game.
At current, these character discoveries include a variety of general Marvel Universe residents:
- Angela (the Neil Gaiman-created Spawn character whose rights now belong at Marvel)
- Blade
- Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers)
- Crystal (of the Inhuman royal family)
- Hit Monkey
- The Hood
- Each individual member of the Fantastic Four (all of whom will be available in-game by the end of the month)
- M.O.D.O.K.
- Paste Pot Pete (perhaps better known by his current alias of The Trapster)
- Ultron (who despite being essentially finished was held back from the release roster due to balance issues)
- Valkyrie
As well as a number of X-related individuals:
- Colossus
- Cyclops
- Deadpool
- Emma Frost
- Gambit
- Jean Grey
- Jia Jing (a Chinese mutant with insect-like abilities who has made only a handful of appearances ever since making her debut in the 2012 Avengers vs. X-Men crossover)
- Locus (a former Mutant Liberation Front member capable of teleportation and flight)
- Nightcrawler
- Professor X
- Rogue
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While dataminers insisted that all of their leaks were legitimate, their veracity was soon called into question thanks to an errant post from a Marvel Rivals fan Discord server wherein a user claimed that in order to both patch up their own internal security issues and ‘keep the mystery’ of their games’ future content, NetEase had personally and intentionally ‘planted’ these files for public discovery.
However, it seems this claim was nothing but hot air, as according to the aforementioned Wu and Koo, each leaked character received genuine development attention from their team, albeit with some having already been cut from the team.
“So firstly we want to say that we don’t recommend anybody to make adjustments to the files” said Wu when asked about the possibility of ‘planted leaks’ during a recent interview with IGN’s Rebekah Valentine. “Also, you can see that for each character’s design actually we come through a very complicated process and we make a lot of concepts, trials, prototypes, development, et cetera. So there could be some information left in the code, and it might mean that we have tried those directions and they may appear or may not appear in our future plans. And whether or not they will appear in our future pipeline is highly depending on what kind of gameplay experience our players would expect in our game.”
“If I could have a ten-year plan, it’d be great,” Koo declared. “But the team experimented with a lot of play styles, heroes. It was like there’s someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there, and someone [a dataminer] decided to open it with no context.”
Ultimately asked “point-black if they were deliberately trolling people”, Koo clarified “No. We would rather spend our time developing the actual game.”
At current, Marvel Rivals‘ next two draft picks, The Human Torch and the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed Thing, are set to join the fight on February 21st.
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