Marvel Rivalen Season 2 starts today, which means that it is time to jam another syringe in the scars and bleeding flanks of the large Marvelbeast and to extract a fresh superhero. This season starts with Emma Frost, a Vanguard hero with very large hams and a few strings for her bow. They fight them as a municipal psychic, cast rays, damage-multiply-orbs and crystalline shields. However, switch to her diamond shape and she becomes a tank -like fight with the opportunity to take and hit people out of their ultimates or to start in walls.
That is your first new Marvel Rivals character in season 2, now out. The second will be Ultron, the bone with a god complex that lands in a few weeks. He is an agile strategist that does his dirty work with the help of drones. More details to follow.
There is also a new card, the Krakoa Hellfire Gala. It is the kind of high society where you would expect agent 47 to push a mop, eyes that were peeled for weapons. Hmm, how would a Hitman party level work if all the guests were super heroes? I can’t really see 47 Ultron dragging in a cupboard and stealing his pants.
The new Marvel Rivals Heroes and Map accompanies the usual Live Service Avalanche of character skins and balancing or structural changes. There will now be weekly missions in addition to daily missions and challenges. Range mode gets a rigorous rejig: the minimum level for competitive will now be 15, not 10, and players in eternity and above can only be in line or in pairs to prevent people from forming large groups in advance. We can expect new team-up skills (and the loss of a few older ones).
Possibly the most expected is the addition of a box so that your computer goes faster. This is the new Switch Shader compilation mode, an experimental performance boost function that is added to the launcher of the game.
“Since our launch we have heard your fight through the community and customer service channels,” explains a blog post. “Players on different PC configurations have come across performance stutters and crashes, often because of high memory consumption during gameplay. PCs equipped with 16 GB RAM or less, when confronted with excessive RAM use can force the system to use Swap’s memory, which leads to undesirable delays.”
The Switch Shader compilation function promises to dramatically reduce the memory use of the game, “cutting serious FPS drops, frozen visuals and crashes activated by memory shortages.” However, the developers warn that it can have a few teething problems in the beginning.
Netease has revealed elsewhere that from season 3, every Marvel Rivals update will only last two months instead of three, which means that you get a new hero every month. That is many heroes. I hope that the developers do not crack to meet the demand. Netease does not have a flawless track record for taking care of their staff.