NetEase says it has permission to make original characters in Marvel Rivals. But please, for the love of God, don’t do it

The Marvel universe has no shortage of unique, interesting, or silly characters, but that’s apparently not stopping NetEase Games from potentially going full fan-fiction and making up their own in Marvel Rivals.

This is according to a new interview with MP1st, where the hero shooter’s creative director, Guangyun “Guangguang” Chen, stated, “yes, we are allowed to introduce characters” into Marvel Rivals. He later went on to only tease to “stay tuned” on the subject, but I’m here to ask, why? And to also say, no, do not do it. Please.

A classic Jurassic Park quote comes immediately to mind for me. Speaking of the creation of dinosaurs, Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm says the iconic line: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.”

I really, really hope that NetEase considers the latter half of this phrase. There is simply no need for Marvel Rivals to go create-a-character mode and come up with their own wonky superhero when there are nearly limitless options from Marvel canon to begin with.

There are decades of source material for NetEase to pull from when it comes to telling stories with fun characters. And judging from previous leaks and data mines, the company has already gone to the archives to pull some obscure ones like Paste Pot Pete, Locus, Jia Jing, The Hood, and others. And that’s before even getting into the discussion of a sprawling list of characters that players actually want.

There are multiple rosters of X-Men, Avengers, Spider-Verse, Asgardians, and countless other teams to comb through before we even consider the idea of original characters. And that day may soon come, especially if NetEase continues on this torrid pace of releasing one new hero every month. We could get there sooner than we think, but even then, I think we should get weirder with existing material than going into the realm of created characters, which would greatly cheapen the experience.

I’m probably being a little bit dramatic, because I doubt that Marvel wouldn’t in some way oversee the creation of new characters. And maybe NetEase could cook up something genuinely pretty cool. But I think that the myriad of options NetEase can deal with before getting to this point must be exhausted twice over before ever adding in an OC.

Marvel Rivals takes place across the multiverse, with different variants and versions of heroes through storylines and timelines. I’d rather see alternate versions of the same exact character before an OC, and I feel like I won’t be alone in this sentiment, especially when it comes to comic book fans.

A lot of the excitement for this game comes from Marvel fans who want to see their favorites as playable heroes. I don’t think many want to see made-up characters that they have no attachment to whatsoever, and so I can’t help but feel like original characters would make the game feel like a cheap knock-off of the Marvel experience. Please just give us any and every possible hero and villain before an original character is allowed to reach the concept phase.