Might As Well Make Them All Blonde, Right, Marvel Rivals?

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Peter Hunt Szpytek

Published Apr 11, 2025

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Marvel Rivals is the hottest free-to-play competitive game right now. It gets a lot right by taking the Overwatch formula and putting a Marvel twis♉t on it. It’s easily one of the most popular of the year, and there seems to be no sign of it sܫlowing down, both in terms of its glo🐟bal popularity and the additions that NetEase is making to the game.

Marvel Rivals Season 2 launches on April 11, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:and fans can’t get enough of Emmaꦚ Frost, the latest hero being added to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the game’s character roster.

As exciting as Emma Frost’s abilities a💙re 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 ident🍒ify 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 ove♎rall 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 ma𒁃tch, it’ll be impossible to𝓀 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, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:thanks to the giant sword she carries. See? NetEase can make distinct blonde character🧸s without maꦦking 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 Ove🃏rwatch and Marvel Rivals, it’s that no one wants to play their role. Everyone just wants to pretend they’re DPS.

Regardless, I jus🙈t 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 Riဣvals 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’

Onꦫ 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 F🐠rost 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.

Luna snow during the Marvel Rivals hero ban phase in competitive mode.

If NetEase really wanted to have Emma Frost on the roster, it should have led with a different design for her to 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 ꦚstand 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 tꦗo 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 borrow❀s 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 ros🌟ter was diverse and easy to immediately identify based on nothing more than a character’s silhouette.

With the announcement that NetEase is going to be adding new𝔉 characters to Marvel Rivals more frequently than it ♓originally planned, I hope the studio learns an important lesson from Overwatch: It doesn’t ma𒅌tter 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 t๊he opposite direction of the one I know has the giant mace.