Marvel Rivals Chinese New Year event is similar to Overwatch

It’s hard to stop making Overwatch comparisons to Marvel Rivalsgiven how familiar the latter’s upcoming Chinese New Year event looks. Those of us who have been playing Blizzard’s hero shooters for the past eight years have seen all of this before.

The spring festivalwhich starts on January 23, introduces a new limited-time mode that’s basically Rocket League without the cars. It’s called Clash of Dancing Lions, and it takes place in a large arena with goals at each end. Teams pass a ball around and try to score goals with the help of Black Widow, Iron Fist and Star-Lord – in dancing lion skins, of course. If you replaced the heroes with Lúcio from Overwatchwould you just have Lúcioballa mode that has existed in that game since its first Summer Games event in 2016.

It’s also similar Marvel Rivals heroes get dancing lion MVP animations just like theirs Overwatch counterparties. It is clear that neither the game invented the celebration of the Chinese New Year nor traditional dance associated with it, but the similarities between the events are hard to ignore.

Overwatch is going bigger with its Lunar New Year celebration this year, in part because it’s coming back to China on February 19 via publisher NetEase, no less. IN a post last week on Xiaohongshu (aka RedNote), game director Aaron Keller announced a bunch of returning cosmetics and a whole set of Chinese mythology-themed skins coming in its next season.

But until then, it will be Marvel Rivals’ turn to celebrate. And while the new mode doesn’t play anything like Lúcioball, you can bet people will point out how blatantly it borrows from Overwatch. That doesn’t make it bad per se, but it does make you wonder how much of the game will be aimed directly at Overwatch fans in the future.