Marvel Rivals Season 2 begins in the present day, which suggests it’s time to jam one other syringe into the scarred and bleeding flanks of the Nice Marvelbeast and extract a recent superhero. This season kicks off with Emma Frost, a Vanguard hero with very giant hams and a few strings to her bow. By default, she fights as a midranged psychic, casting beams, damage-multiplying orbs and crystalline shields. Swap to her diamond kind, nevertheless, and he or she turns into a tanky brawler with the power to seize and slam folks out of their ultimates or boot them into partitions.
That’s your first new Marvel Rivals character in Season 2, out now. The second might be Ultron, the bot with a god advanced, who lands in a couple of weeks. He’s a nimble Strategist who does his soiled work utilizing drones. Extra particulars to comply with.
There’s additionally a brand new map, the Krakoa Hellfire Gala. It’s the type of excessive society do the place you’d look forward to finding Agent 47 pushing a mop, eyes peeled for weaponisable suitcases. Hmm, how would a Hitman celebration degree work if all of the visitors had been superheroes? I can’t actually see Agent 47 dragging Ultron right into a closet and stealing his trousers.
The brand new Marvel Rivals heroes and map accompany the standard dwell service avalanche of character skins and balancing or structural modifications. There’ll now be weekly missions along with each day missions and challenges. Ranked mode is being given a rigorous rejig: the minimal degree for aggressive will now be 15, not 10, and gamers in Eternity and above will solely have the ability to queue alone or in pairs to cease folks forming large teams prematurely. We will count on new team-up expertise (and the lack of a few older ones).
Probably most anticipated is the addition of a field that makes your laptop go sooner. This being the brand new change shader compilation mode, an experimental performance-boosting characteristic which is being added to the sport’s launcher.
“Since our launch, we have heard your battle cries by means of the group and customer support channels,” explains a weblog put up. “Gamers on numerous PC configurations have encountered efficiency stutters and crashes, usually as a consequence of excessive reminiscence consumption throughout gameplay. PCs outfitted with 16GB of RAM or much less, when confronted with extreme RAM utilization can pressure the system to make use of swap reminiscence, resulting in undesirable slowdowns within the warmth of battle.”
The change shader compilation characteristic guarantees to “dramatically cut back” the sport’s reminiscence utilization, “reducing down on extreme FPS drops, frozen visuals, and crashes triggered by reminiscence shortages.” The builders warning, nevertheless, that it may need a couple of teething troubles to start with.
NetEase have elsewhere revealed that from Season 3 onwards, every Marvel Rivals replace will solely final two months as a substitute of three, which suggests you’ll get a brand new hero each month. Which is a whole lot of heroes. I hope the builders aren’t crunching to fulfill the demand. NetEase don’t have a spotless observe report for taking care of their workers.
