Marvel Rivals is the hottest free-to-play competitive game right now. It gets a lot right bytaking the Overwatch formula and putting a Marvel twist on it. It’s easily one of the most popular of the year, and there seems to be no sign of it slowing down, both in terms of its global popularity and the additions that NetEase is making to the game.
Marvel Rivals Season 2 launches on April 11,and fans can’t get enough of Emma Frost, the latest hero being added tothe game’s character roster.
As exciting as Emma Frost’s abilities are and the implications she’ll have for team composition, there’s one big problem with her: Emma Frost is another blonde lady with a blue and white color palette.
Literally, Who Am I Looking At?
I want to get in front of this right now: I’m not writing this as a complaint about diversity in Marvel Rivals. That’s a fine and important conversation to have, but it’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to talk about why NetEase thought it would be a good idea to add a third blonde lady who wears blue and white to a game about needing to identify characters in a split second.
When the Invisible Woman was added to Marvel Rivals in January, there were already complaints about her getting confused for Dagger, one half of the Cloak and Dagger duo. Emma Frost is only going to add to the confusion, thanks to her similar design and overall silhouette.
It’s easy to see the differences between the three characters when looking at them side by side, but in the heat of a match, it’ll be impossible to discern them. It’s already tough to know who’s who with Dagger and the Invisible Woman, so adding another lookalike hurts the game’s readability even further.
There’s actually a third blonde woman in the game: Magik. However, she doesn’t fall into the same issues because her colors and silhouette are completely different,thanks to the giant sword she carries. See? NetEase can make distinct blonde characters without making them look identical.
Luckily, Emma Frost is a Vanguard character, so players will behave differently based on the role than they do when playing the Invisible Woman or Dagger, since they’re both Healers, but if I’ve learned anything from my extensive time with Overwatch and Marvel Rivals, it’s that no one wants to play their role. Everyone just wants to pretend they’re DPS.
Regardless, I just don’t think it’s a good idea to add more confusion when the game requires players to quickly identify who’s a threat and what they can do. Marvel Rivals is a much more complicated version of Rock, Paper, Scissors that asks the player to know which characters can deal with each other and which will get completely steamrolled if they pick the wrong fight.
Emma Frost Is Just ‘Another One’
On top of the gameplay issues, I just find Emma Frost’s design to be a little boring at this point since we’ve already seen it. Yeah, people are excited for another attractive lady with her thighs out to be added to Marvel Rivals, but when looking at the vast number of characters in the Marvel pantheon to choose from, I find the choice to add Emma Frost to be uninspired.
Not only is it another blonde lady wearing the same colors as two of the other blonde ladies, but, after Luna Snow, she’s also the second character in the game who uses ice-based abilities –while her thighs are out wearing blue and white.
If NetEase really wanted to have Emma Frost on the roster, it should have led with a different design for herto make her more distinguishable from the rest of the cast. That way, the game could be a little more readable for players and help her stand out.
We haven’t gotten the chance to see every other one of Emma Frost’s alternate costumes or colors yet, and I imagine some people might defend the choice to put her in blue and white since there will be other options available in the shop, but I don’t find this argument to have much substance. It’s not my job to pay real money to switch to a more legible design for a character.
Marvel Rivals borrows so much from Overwatch, but it seems like the game is still missing one of the core aspects of what made that game successful: its roster was diverse and easy to immediately identify based on nothing more than a character’s silhouette.
With the announcement thatNetEase is going to be adding new characters to Marvel Rivals more frequently than it originally planned, I hope the studio learns an important lesson from Overwatch: It doesn’t matter if Mercy and Tracer and Brigitte and Ashe all have the same face because, in combat, I’m not looking for their faces, I’m looking for the one that I know in less than a second can heal me. Or looking to sprint in the opposite direction of the one I know has the giant mace.
