‘Marvel Rivals’ Is Making Losing With Grace A Little Easier

Nothing’s worse than getting trounced in a competitive multiplayer game and having to sit through the embarrassment. Luckily for Marvel Rivals players, NetEase is making it just a little easier to wave the white flag when getting completely trounced by strangers online.

In the hero shooter’s newest update releasing today, developer NetEase is making a significant change to how surrenders work. While the game has typically required a unanimous team vote to bend the metaphorical knee to the better team, today’s update will reduce that requirement by one vote. This change applies even after someone leaves the match. So if your team of five wants to call it quits, they’ll need just four votes, and so on. Only teams of three or two need everyone on board for a surrender.

It may seem like a minor tweak, but it can make all the difference if your squad is down a person and can already see the writing on the wall just minutes into a match. It also means that one teammate adamant on pressing on through an unlikely victory can’t force everyone to endure.

The change, of course, also leaves room for big squads to call it quits before the close of a match. We recommend playing with friends to increase the likelihood that most of the people you’re playing with are actually in agreement with a surrender. It should be interesting to see how this change affects play overall.

The update comes just a few weeks ahead of the game’s third season. The season starts July 11 and, according to teasers from NetEase and leaks online, will include newcomers Blade and X-Men’s Phoenix as playable heroes. The season will start Marvel Rivals’ shift to two-month-long seasons instead of the usual three. The season will still be split into two halves as usual, with season 3.5 beginning August 8.

NetEase creative director GuangGuang said during a developer diary in April that the team wanted to make this change in order to deliver heroes and updates to the meta at a steadier pace. With two-month seasons, they’re promising players a new character every month.

Marvel Rivals continues to be one of the biggest PvP free-to-play shooters out today. It still enjoys a healthy player base six months after launch across all consoles. With the game being as successful as it is, it wouldn’t be surprising to see it arrive on the newly released Switch 2. In fact, NetEase stated as early as February that it was interested in making such a port.

“We’re already in contact with Nintendo and working on some development kits,” Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu said during DICE in Las Vegas. “And whenever we find that we could provide great performance for our game on Switch 2, we’re open to that.”