Marvel Rivals breaks its 17 month streak of adding 2 heroes per season, but its creative director reassures fans it’s not ‘the new normal’

Marvel Rivals‘ massive hero roster and regular character additions are some of its defining features. So it comes as a huge surprise that NetEase has decided to forgo tradition for the sake of focusing on improving its foundations.

For the first time in eight seasons—that’s 17 months—Marvel Rivals will just be getting one hero, Gorr the God Butcher, in a season. “We’re locking our crosshairs on just Gorr the God Butcher,” creative designer Guangyun Chen says in a dev diary. “In the first half of the season we’ll be rolling out one new hero and one new map. In the second half our focus will shift to phase 3 and phase 4 of the Path to Doomsday events. These will feature two brand-new game modes, with specific details dropping closer to the start of season 10.5.”

Marvel Rivals doesn’t have a creative block when it comes to inventign new heroes—it’s got a huge backlog of characters at its disposal. But two new heroes per season does put considerable strain on the game’s balance. Traditionally, new heroes are completely busted when they’re first added to Marvel Rivals. This is due to NetEase’s “fun first” approach, but also because of the serious backlog of fixes that preoccupies the devs.

Only adding one new hero in season 10 will hopefully ease this strain a bit so the team can focus on polishing existing heroes, without worrying about anyone new for at least half a season. It also gives the devs a chance to focus on improving other areas of the game like adding more game modes for variation’s sake.

It’s a good move from NetEase, but Chen stresses that this isn’t a permanent change: “We want to reassure the community that a single-hero season isn’t the new normal.” In fact, they’ve already decided what two new heroes will be coming to Marvel Rivals in season 11.

The devs are not waiting until the second half of season 10 to get stuck into the balance, however. Marvel Rival’s lead combat director, Zhiyong, runs through the list of hero changes for this season, which is so vast it involves “about 70% of the roster”. The current changes aren’t groundbreaking, with Strategists still getting their ults faster than everyone else, and many heroes only getting minor tweaks, but it’s a start.

There’s also a significant change coming to Marvel Rivals’ competitive ban system. “The opposing teams will now take turns banning and revealing heroes in the following order,” Zhiyong explains. Bans in competitive Gold 3 lobbies and above will now take the following structure:

The first team bans a hero, it is revealed. The second team bans two heroes which are revealed. The first team bans two heroes which are revealed. The second team bans one hero which is revealed.

Double banning heroes will also no longer come into play as “regardless of which team bans them, that hero will become unplayable for both sides for the rest of the match.” This means players will get six hero bans for each game. “We hope this adjustment adds more strategic depth to the banning phase,” Zhiyong adds.

Hopefully, this small pause on new heroes will give the devs a little bit of breathing room to get stuck into some of the more complicated pain points like power creep and the Strategist’s massive healing output. If Marvel Rivals could get its balance under control, then it could actually stop what has been a muddled few seasons.