‘Progression is terrible, this isn’t a mobile game’: Marvel Rivals challenge-based battle pass has players begging for just an ounce of battle XP

On December 7, 2024By Littum

Marvel Rivals – the NetEase free-to-play hero shooter with a wide roster of Avengers and various other Marvel characters who probably wish they were – came out yesterday, and it’s had no trouble finding interested players. At the time of writing, there are currently more than 300,000 people playing Marvel Rivals on Steam alone. However, some of these players are already excited about Marvel Rivals’ battle pass progression.

As you’d expect from a free-to-play shooter, Marvel Rivals has a Seasonal Battle Pass, in both paid and free variants, that players can go through to unlock cosmetic rewards, with the paid version offering extra cosmetics and premium – currency. Battle Passes in Rivals do not expire – you can continue to work towards the rewards of a previous Battle Pass even after its season ends. It’s better than the limited-time live service monetization schemes that cut off your access to Battle Pass rewards as soon as the next pass starts, but the pain point for Marvel Rivals players is how you progress through the battle pass.

In Rivals, you earn your Battle Pass rewards by spending currency earned by completing limited-time challenges, and only from solving challenges. When you complete a battle, no matter how thoroughly you won or how many times you killed Captain America, you will not have made any progress towards your next Battle Pass reward unless you did as your daily and weekly goals required.

Since many of these objectives require playing as specific heroes or on specific maps, you can’t – beyond the most straightforward daily missions – simply progress in battle passes by playing however you like. And because there’s only a fixed number of timed challenges available, there’s actually a cap on how much battle pass progress you can make each day. Video games are in the age of incremental progress; the kids long to fill bars. If a match is completed without gaining some sort of experience, many of us have been trained to believe that it might as well not have happened.

Unsurprisingly, the players have not been thrilled. “I absolutely hate the mission/challenge based progression system. Often it encourages people to actively hurt their team by prioritizing challenge completions over winning,” said reddit user SecretTracer over at Marvel Rivals subreddit.

“Let people finish the game early. What’s the harm in that?” asked Tato23, another redditorwho said they are “disappointed” with the combat pass system. “Why should you developers dictate the pace for us to complete the pass?”

While there’s an argument to be made for enjoying Rivals for what it is and not tying all your fun to unlockable skins, NetEase’s reasoning for doing the game this way is probably more cynical. By controlling when new challenges appear in the game and giving dailies 12-hour timers, NetEase also pushes players to log in multiple times a day so they don’t miss any opportunities to get their passes. It’s both friendly (“yay, the pass doesn’t expire”) and pretty nasty (“oh man, I have a job so I missed 50% of my XP today”) at the same time.

“Progression is terrible, this is not a mobile game,” said the redditor literios. “People play games for different reasons, and maybe it shocks you, but progression can be part of the fun.”

Essentially, Marvel Rivals has landed on the same much-maligned battle pass framework that the Halo Infinite beta launched back in 2021 – a framework that was so universally loathed by its player base that 343 Industries was forced to add experience rewards to every match within days of the beta’s launch. Honestly, I think Magneto deserves better treatment.