i am playing rivals and deserve death (hero shooters ultimax)

video games
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hello. freaks. debutantes. delivery drivers. it’s me: you’re pal
ive been in a tunnel lost like a sailor deep into uncharted waters. it’s true. marvel rivals has consumed my life and i seek plainly to rope others into my fascination with 3v3, 6v6, 8v8, 10v10, 69v69 hero shooter paradises where the only rule is look good killing and try not to have a bad time. it’s worth it: i swear to god it’s so casual its like toothpaste for your brain after a long day. don’t you want to play… (hero shooter thread)

i really gotta have some space to talk about it though: rivaals is crazy, crazed, without limit, an endless sloth machine that always promises to pay SOMETHING out for the player and it’s done with the conviction of developers who had enough money and branding and backing to make the game look exactly like what they want: polished, polite, plain and yet deeper ruminations have not yet revealed why it has gripped me so deeply. is it the blorbos? is that the mark of a hero shooter’s success: the ability to have popular blorbos. who wants to help me find out.

this is a cry (petition) for help (play marvel rivals)

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I don’t play Rivals, but want to throw out there: Nothing wrong with enjoying live service stuff!

I don’t think folks around here are too into them, but I play Smite 2 these days, solo and with friends, exclusively in the casual modes. They’re the perfect games for a match or two on days where you’re kind of tired and don’t have the executive function to dig into something meatier that demands more of your time. Sometimes I don’t want to settle in for some Clair Obscur and live service slop is more appetizing.

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One thing I am curious about is whether you knew what all the gameplay modes/battle scenarios were when you started, or how you learned. Because I felt like I was plunked into something where visual language was maybe familiar to others but not to me. Sometimes I was meant to defend a thing, sometimes occupy a zone, sometimes something else, but it was never particularly clear to me. Was it to you, or do you learn it as you went along?

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Couldn’t get into Rivals personally but I think Overwatch 2 is excellent. I know it had a famously rough launch, but they’ve since reversed all their worst monetization decisions, and in my mind it is, at this point, inarguably a better game than 1 ever was.

My “competitive” “background” is in fighting games, so just like when I play one of those, my preferred way to play is to warm up for a bit, play ranked for 1-2 hours, and watch my replays when I have an especially frustrating match. I’ve always been horrifically bad at shooters so I’m pretty proud of the progress I’ve made this way, going from bronze to platinum rank in a little over half a year (I main Baptiste and Zenyatta :face_savoring_food:).

In summary yeah I think hero shooters are cool. Nothing wrong with liking (or even loving) them!

One of my biggest complaints about the game from when I tried Rivals at launch was that I didn’t like the way it conveyed most information. Even knowing generally what goes on in these sorts of games, I just felt like….why is it like this lol.

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something that’s Freak about me is ive never struggled with a games controls or the information being conveyed - its like parts of my brain in my youth were replaced with videogames in a way i can never fully turn the clock back on

you give me a blue circle and in my heart i know i gotta keep the red guys out of it. you give me a cart and i know i gotta push it somewhere - who cares what happens when i do, life, and teams fortress are about the journey not so much the destination

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I contribute two separate thoughts to this thread.

Thought 1.

I will never, ever, ever play Marvel Rivals. For a while, I was working at a place where we had a lot of downtime, and it was not disallowed for us to use that downtime to do whatever we liked, which including gaming, if we so chose. A co-worker of mine hopped on the bandwagon of Marvel Rivals, and hard, so he was playing it a lot, and so I was listening to it a lot. Now, I liked this guy quite a lot, so, I don’t want any of this to sound like I’m complaining about him, but, man, I feel like I would be best served by not even being in the same room as Marvel Rivals ever again in my life.

This is solely to me because Marvel Rivals has extremely fucking annoying barks. And, like, every single character, at least, the ones my co-worker was playing as or around, seems to have the most goddamned annoying barks. I hate their pre-match banter, I didn’t even listen to a lot of what they were saying in them but I just know whatever it was, it would have annoyed the hell out of me if I had. I hate how many things seemed to be called an “Area” of some kind. I hate what they say when they use their ultimate moves and I hate how it seems like they say it every single time they use an ultimate, and it’s always the same thing, and even if that isn’t the case, it sounds like it is, which for me, was the same thing. I hate way the “…one!” in the match announcer’s countdown at the start of a match seems to have a totally different vibe from the rest of the countdown. I hate I could identify which voices were Dr. Strange, Rocket Raccoon, Thor, Spiderman, and The Hulk, even though I never looked at the screen and have poor overall knowledge of comics. Nevertheless I hate that I never bothered to figure out what some of the other voices were.

I truly feel like if I were to find some kind of Youtube compilation of all of the barks in Marvel Rivals, listening to it would piss me off so much. I don’t even want to say that it was bad, I’m sure that it’s all slickly produced and created with love. It was just, like, all extremely annoying to me personally for reasons I can’t explain. Probably partly residual Overwatch resentment from wanting to get D. Va’s Taegeukgi skin during that one special event that was during, what, the Olympics I think? And so I spent a, not high, but bordering on middle double digits amount of money on lootboxes, and felt so goddamned empty and coated with despicable Blizzard slime when none of them had the skin I wanted, and it killed what little motivation I had to play the game, and suddenly made me realize how much I hated everything about Overwatch, how weird it was hear cheery twee barks and obsequious cinnamon roll dialogue from people who were ostensibly about to cheerily kill each other, and just that whole kind of learning in to the ludonarrative dissonance that seems to be a big part of what Overwatch so popular in the first place, and, then, Marvel Rivals all but leans into that sort of thing again, though, at least we all know that the source material for it is goofy and not supposed to take itself too seriously.

Thought 2.

Heroes of the Storm is the only good MOBA

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Does Apex Legends count?

That came out right at the time my friends and I were starting to be more serious than joking when we asked “Are we old?” None of us had much multiplayer experience but we did like Titanfall 2 so a team-based game in that universe was an easier pill to swallow than Fortnite. I somehow played 60 hours of it? We even won a few matches.

I’ve always been Overwatch-curious because one time another friend made a funny video of his hijinx in the first one set to good music.

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I love the game but yeah a lot about it repulses me. Can’t stand the pre-match Lore Distribution Banter and imo 99% of the unlockable skins look like they were plucked straight out of Fortnite. Every time they announce a new IP collab the psychic shield preventing me from reinstalling TF2 or learning Deadlock sustains a little bit more damage.

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I quite like the little banter between characters! It’s a nice way to fill space when waiting for a match to get started, or certain triggers like killing specific characters or surviving a fight just barely.

That said, I fortunately have zero interest in Rivals since I just don’t care about Marvel stuff. I think Overwatch 2 is the best the game has been in years but the monetization around launch was very discouraging and grimey. Can’t believe we’re at a point where loot boxes coming back is a good thing. Overwatch is also the only game where I eventually find myself unreasonably frustrated and angry before saying to myself, “Dude, it’s just a game. Who cares?” Then turning it off. I never played with friends because they all want to play ranked and I’m not touching the sweat modes with a 10" pole. Also, first thing I do in any multiplayer game is mute/disable voice chat anyway lol

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Yeah this is a must for me in ranked lol. Absolutely wild the way customers at my job show me more kindness and compassion than teammates in a videogame we all play for fun

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Also yeah I like this stuff! Very fighting game-y.

The pre-round banter drives me crazy just cuz I’ve heard it all a million times. That and in-game dialogue playing in my ear can sometimes make it harder to talk to my friends lol

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