Marvel Rivals—the NetEase free-to-play hero shooter featuring a wide roster of Avengers and various other Marvel figures who probably wish they were—released yesterday, and it hasn't had any trouble finding interested players. At time of writing, there are currently more than 300,000 people playing Marvel Rivals on Steam alone. Some of those players, however, have already been bristling at the Marvel Rivals battle pass progression.
As you might expect from a free-to-play shooter, Marvel Rivals has a seasonal battle pass, in both paid and free varieties, that players can progress through to unlock cosmetic rewards, with the paid version offering additional cosmetics and premium currency. Battle passes in Rivals don't expire—you can continue working towards the rewards from an earlier battle pass even after its season ends. That's kinder than the limited-time live service monetization schemes that cut off your access to battle pass rewards as soon as the next pass starts, but the pain point for Marvel Rivals players is how you progress through the battle pass.
Since many of those objectives require playing as specific heroes or on specific maps, you can't—outside of the most straightforward daily missions—simply make battle pass progress by playing how you'd like to. And because there's only a set number of time-gated challenges available, there's effectively a cap on how much battle pass progress you can make each day. Videogames are in the age of incremental progress; the children yearn for filling bars. If a match completes without accruing some kind of experience point, many of us have been trained to think it might as well not have happened.
Essentially, Marvel Rivals has landed on the same, much-reviled battle pass framework that the Halo Infinite beta launched with back in 2021—a framework that was so universally loathed by its playerbase that 343 Industries was forced to add experience rewards to each match within days of the beta's launch. Frankly, I think Magneto deserves better treatment.
