You know Marvel Rivals as the "super hero team-based PvP shooter" it's advertised as… but not for much longer. Creative director Guangyun Chen has the game's content planned out through 2027, and he believes it will become something greater. Something almost indefinable.
"Our goal is to shift from being 'just a shooter' to a comprehensive Marvel 'moving anime' experience," he tells FRVR in a new interview.
"What?" says a top comment in a related Reddit thread.
It's like some people have never looked at Marvel Rivals, a perfectly straightforward PvP shooter, and sighed to themselves, "If only this were a comprehensive Marvel 'moving anime' experience.'" I know I haven't.
But I think I roughly know what Chen means – Marvel superheroes and the superhumans in otherworldly anime both convey style through action. Marvel Rivals is, vaguely, an anime in the sense that its characters are animated to do impossible things, and it seems like developer NetEase is eager to make a deeper connection between the mediums by adding more characters and context to the 6v6 game.
Chen says definitively, "We are moving beyond standard 6v6 PvP." To do this, Marvel Rivals needs to keep a busy calendar through 2027.
Upcoming content includes new PvE options, a mode Marvel Rivals first experimented with in 2025 during its first Halloween event, and the Path to Doomsday roadmap, which Chen says features "five MCU-related updates inspired by the Infinity Saga, including new game modes and themed content."
These aspects of NetEase's "current plan maps out content through 2027," Chen says, and "with over 9,000 Marvel characters to draw from, we aren't worried about running out of options soon."
Some players still have their gears stuck processing that whole "moving anime" thing – one person quips in the Reddit thread mentioned earlier, "Moving anime experience? My favorite!" – but if you look past that opaque comment, it seems Chen is simply preparing for a future where Marvel Rivals is bigger, with no easily definable genre.
