Marvel Rivals Dev Clarifies: Focusing on Game Development, Not Trolling Dataminers

Dataminers of Marvel Rivals have been buzzing with speculation about potential future characters after uncovering lists of names hidden within the game's code. The excitement began last month when names like those of the Fantastic Four were found, which were later confirmed with an official announcement. However, as more names surfaced, the community started to suspect that some of these could be red herrings, deliberately planted by the developers at NetEase and Marvel to mislead dataminers.

The community remains divided on which of these datamined characters might actually make it into the game. To get to the bottom of this, we spoke directly with Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu and Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo. While they denied any intentional trolling, they advised taking the datamined names with a grain of salt. Wu explained, "So firstly we want to say that we don't recommend anybody to make adjustments to the files [of the game]. 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."

Koo added, "If I could have a ten-year plan, it'd be great. 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." When pressed on whether they were deliberately misleading dataminers, Koo responded, "No. We would rather spend our time developing the actual game."

In the same discussion, we delved into how characters are selected for inclusion in Marvel Rivals. Wu and Koo revealed that updates are planned approximately a year in advance, with new characters being added every month and a half. The process involves NetEase first identifying the type of character and skillset needed to balance the game and diversify the roster. They generate a list of potential additions, focusing on adding new characters to keep the game fresh, fill gaps, support weaker characters with new team abilities, or counter overly strong ones.

After compiling potential additions, NetEase collaborates with Marvel Games to develop initial designs. They also consider community excitement and upcoming Marvel projects, such as films or comic arcs, to finalize their choices. This comprehensive approach explains the variety of hero names found in the game's code—NetEase is constantly exploring numerous ideas.

Since its launch, Marvel Rivals has been a hit, and the addition of new characters like Human Torch and The Thing, set to join on February 21, only enhances the game's appeal. Additionally, we discussed with Wu and Koo the potential for a Nintendo Switch 2 release of Marvel Rivals, which you can read more about [ttpp]here[ttpp].