Marvel Rivals is the most popular free-to-play competitive game right now. It does a lot of things right by taking the Overwatch formula and adding a Marvel twist to it. It is one of the most popular games of the year and given its global popularity and the new changes NetEase is making to the game it does not look like it is going to slow down.
Marvel Rivals Season 2 begins on April 11 and fans are very happy with Emma Frost who is joining the games character roster as the latest hero.
Emma Frost's abilities and their effects on team composition are interesting, but there's one big problem with them: Emma Frost is another white woman with blue and white skin.
Who Am I Really Looking At?
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| Credit _Marvel |
I want to be upfront about this right now I am not writing this as a complaint about diversity in Marvel Rivals. That's a good and important conversation, but I'm not here to talk about that topic. I want to talk about why NetEase thought it would be a good idea to add a third blonde woman who wears blue and white clothes in a game that requires you to identify characters in an instant.
When Invisible Woman was added to Marvel Rivals in January, there were already complaints that she was mistaken for Dagger, who is one part of the Cloak and Dagger duo. Emma Frost will only make things more confusing because she looks and is shaped a lot like the others.
It is easy to see the difference between the three characters when you see them together, but it would be impossible to identify them in the heat of a match. It's already hard to tell Dagger and Invisible Woman apart, so adding another similar-looking character would make the game even more confusing.
Luckily, Emma Frost is a Vanguard character, so players will act differently when playing as Invisible Woman or Dagger, since they are both healers. But from my experience with Overwatch and Marvel Rivals I’ve learned that most people don’t want to play healer roles. Everyone just wants to pretend they're DPS.
Despite this I do not think it is a good idea to create more confusion when the game requires players to immediately identify who is a threat and what they can do. Marvel Rivals is like a harder version of Rock Paper Scissors. Players need to figure out which characters can beat others, and if they choose the wrong one they'll lose badly.
Emma Frost Is She Really Just Another One?
Apart from the gameplay issues, I find Emma Frost's design a bit boring at the moment as we've seen it before. Yes, people are excited to see another attractive woman added to Marvel's roster of rivals but when looking at the huge number of characters Marvel has to choose from I think choosing Emma Frost wasn’t a very creative idea.
Not only is she another blonde woman dressed in the same colors as the other two blonde women but after Luna Snow she is also the second character in the game to use ice-based abilities - while her thighs are dressed in blue and white.
If NetEase really wanted to keep Emma Frost in the roster it should have created a different design for her, so she could stand out from the rest of the cast. This would make the game easier for players to understand and help it get noticed.
We have not had a chance to see all of Emma Frost's other alternate costumes or colors yet, and I get that some people might defend the decision to keep her in blue and white as there would be more options available in the shop but I do not see much merit in that argument. It is not my business to pay real money to have a more readable design for a character.
Marvel Rivals takes a lot of ideas from Overwatch, but it's still missing one important thing that made Overwatch popular: its wide range of characters. diverse and it was easy to instantly recognize a character based on their shape.
With the announcement that NetEase is going to be adding new characters to Marvel Rivals more frequently than originally planned, I hope the studio learns an important lesson from Overwatch: it doesn't matter that Mercy and Tracer and Bridgette and Ashe all have the same faces because, in battle and I am not looking for their faces I'm looking for the person I know who can beat me up in less than a second. Or trying to run in the opposite direction from someone I know and who has a giant mace.
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