Marvel Rivals dataminers think the developers are trolling them with lists of potential future characters hidden in the game’s code. But NetEase and Marvel say they have better things to do…like actually make the game.
Last month, dataminers began sharing names of potential future heroes hidden in the code of Marvel Rivals, a few of whom seemed to be confirmed pretty quickly as real when the Fantastic Four were officially announced. However, as the list of datamined heroes grew, a different rumor began to circulate in the community: some of the names were fake, planted there by developers to mislead dataminers.
Even now, there’s disagreement in the community as to which, if any of the datamined characters are really being seriously considered for the game.
We recently had the opportunity to directly ask Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu and Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo if they’re secretly performing an elaborate troll. And while it sounds like there are no pranks being pulled here, we should still take all the names being found in the code with a grain of salt. Here’s what Wu had to say:
“So firstly we want to say that we don’t recommend anybody to make adjustments to the files [of the game],” he began. “Also, you can see that for each character’s design actually we come through a very complicated process and we make a lot of concepts, trials, prototypes, development, et cetera. So there could be some information left in the code, and it might mean that we have tried those directions and they may appear or may not appear in our future plans. And whether or not they will appear in our future pipeline is highly depending on what kind of gameplay experience our players would expect in our game.”
Koo added, “If I could have a ten-year plan, it’d be great. But the team experimented with a lot of play styles, heroes. It was like there’s someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there, and someone [a dataminer] decided to open it with no context.”
I pushed a little, asking them point-blank if they were deliberately trolling people. Koo replied, “No. We would rather spend our time developing the actual game.”
In the same conversation, we also discussed how a character gets chosen to be added into Marvel Rivals in the first place. The two told me that the team plans updates roughly a year in advance, and is committed to keeping its current pace of adding new characters every month and a half. For each update, NetEase first looks at what type of character and skillset is needed to balance out the rest of the game and add variety to the roster, and come up with a list of several different possible additions. Wu told me that part of NetEase’s strategy for achieving game balance is to focus less on aggressively tweaking existing characters to be perfectly fine-tuned, and more on adding new characters and experiences to keep things fresh, fill gaps, support characters that are a bit weak with new team abilities, or counter characters that might be a little too strong.
Once they have a list of possibilities, NetEase then takes these suggestions to Marvel Games, and begin working on initial designs. From there, they look at what the community is currently excited about, as well as what’s planned a year in advance in other Marvel divisions, such as if a big film or comic arc is coming that they can tie a character in with. That helps them come to a final decision on who’s going in. All this explains why there might be a lot of different heroes listed in the code – NetEase just has a lot of ideas it’s tossing around all the time.
Marvel Rivals was great at launch, and each new character only seems to make it more powerful, with the Human Torch and The Thing set to be the latest heroes joining the game on February 21. We also spoke to Wu and Koo about the possibility of a Nintendo Switch 2 release for Marvel Rivals, which you can read about here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
