It's only taken 3 days for Overwatch's worst meta to manifest in Marvel Rivals: "Games change. GOATS is inevitable."
Dec. 9, 2024One of Blizzard’s biggest Overwatch-shaped headaches is now NetEase’s to solve
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NetEase’s Overwatch challengerMarvel Rivals is enjoying a decent start to life with 10 million players in 3 days, and – what’s that? People are already resurrecting GOATS? Crud.
Not limited to esports, we also saw it in higher ranks of competitive play. And while that does mean that plenty of fans didn’t have to play against it, they certainly had to watch their favorite streamers get flattened by it at a snail’s pace. The whole meta certainly influenced Overwatch’s development as, alongside balance passes, we also saw the hero shooter limit how many players could fill each role in a given ranked game. On top of that, Overwatch 2 shrunk the team size down to five from six.
With all that in mind, you can see why any Overwatch fan might watch in horror as they load into a Marvel Rivals match to see, you guessed it, three tanks and three healers slowly rolling toward them as part of an uninteresting and effective mass.
“Games change. GOATS is inevitable,” esports journalist Liz Richardsonsays.
But will a Marvels-shaped GOATS meta actually be an issue? It remains to be seen, though fans have beendiscussing itover the past few months andsome believethe current hero balance means it won’t dominate as it did in Overwatch.
Still, it raises some interesting questions for developer NetEase. The Marvel-themed hero shooter takes notes from early Overwatch, though Blizzard had to change some things up for a reason. How NetEase tackles Blizzard’s design headaches could go a long way to deciding how much staying power it truly has.
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OurMarvel Rivals reviewsays the hero shooter is “so preoccupied with trying to be like Overwatch that it forgets to play to its own strengths” - like not having a GOATS meta, I guess.
Iain joins the GamesRadar team as Deputy News Editor following stints at PCGamesN and PocketGamer.Biz, with some freelance for Kotaku UK, RockPaperShotgun, and VG24/7 thrown in for good measure. When not helping Ali run the news team, he can be found digging into communities for stories – the sillier the better. When he isn’t pillaging the depths of Final Fantasy 14 for a swanky new hat, you’ll find him amassing an army of Pokemon plushies.
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