Summary
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The director of Marvel Rivals has confirmed again that there are no plans to add role-playing to the game.
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Apparently, some players thought that the new season would mean an update for the missing feature, but apparently not.
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The developers want players to explore team composition, and Rivals takes a “Marvel-esque approach” to team composition.
Marvel Rivals has had a pretty incredible first month. Millions of people played it, it was the most played game on Steam last weekend, and you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who had a bad word to say about it. That's unless you ask someone who's used to playing turn-based hero shooters, and those people will only be more annoyed with this missing feature's update coming this week.
Marvel Rivals director Guanyun Chen spoke with Metro about all things related to the popular hero shooter, and the role turn was one of the first topics discussed. Like Overwatch, different characters in Rivals have different roles, and ideally a team of six will consist of vanguards, duelists, and strategists. Since there is no role queue that forces certain players to choose certain roles, this does not always happen.

Relatives
Marvel Rivals bans a tool that gave some players an unfair advantage
“Deception in any form will be dealt with mercilessly.”
Despite requests to introduce a role queue in Rivals, forcing us to choose more balanced teams, Chen confirmed that this is not planned and explained why. Chen describes his team's stance on the matter as a “Marvel-esque approach,” where players assemble their teams and test how different characters work together, especially when it comes to the game's many team abilities.
The Marvel Rivals team still has no plans to add a character queue
No matter how badly you want it
The key, according to Chen, is to give players freedom and give them an almost unlimited number of different team compositions to experiment with. If Rivals had a role queue and each team had to have at least one strategist, this would be impossible. If even after all that you're still hoping for a change of heart, Chen closed this section of the interview by saying, “We believe that no amount of role rotation will lead to a richer gaming experience for everyone.”
This means that for the foreseeable future, if you want to have a team made up entirely of tanks, you can. I wouldn't recommend it, but if you're a Venom main and happen to run into a lobby with five other tank buffs, it can happen. This also means that if you're struggling because your team doesn't have a healer, you should be the one to step up and switch to strategist.
If the problem is that there aren't any strategists you like on the list, you may not have to wait long for new ones. NetEase will reportedly be adding a new character every six weeks, and there's a chance they'll include a doctor or two. The next characters, The Thing and Human Torch, won't be strategists though, so they'll only add to your role queue problems, especially if the community shines with them.

Marvel Rivals is a team-based superhero PVP shooter! Assemble an all-star Marvel squad, develop countless strategies by joining forces to form unique Team-Up skills, and fight on devastating, ever-changing battlefields in the ever-evolving Marvel Universe!
- Released
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December 6, 2024
- OpenCritic rating
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Strong