If I wanted to party anywhere in the Marvel universe, I’d be reserving my beanbags and buckets of lentil chips for Dr Strange’s Sanctum Sanctorum. It’s a big posh wizard’s mansion, full of shelves of worrisome books and glass cabinets housing all manner of mystical nonsense that would make for an easy conversation starter, and probably some mildly apocalyptic drunken high jinks.
I mention this because players of Marvel Rivals appear to agree with me. According to publishers Nexon, a lot of you have been hosting impromptu mixers in the Sanctum Sanctorum when you really ought to be murdering each other dead. They don’t call it a “Doom Match” because it’s about speed-dating with your mortal adversaries, lads. Still, Nexon are nothing if not bendable in the face of customer whim. The meet-ups in Sanctum Sanctorum have inspired them to release a full-blown non-combat map set in New York’s Time Square, where 100 players can rub shoulders without yoinking each other’s arms off.
When I say “inspired them to release”, I should caveat that they’ve probably been planning this for a million years, and are merely framing it as a piece of direct fan service. Nexon aren’t some jovial uncle, magnanimously handing you another cookie in the face of steady mithering. They are a massive corporation with growth forecasts and other financial flimstackery that defies my comprehension. Still, let’s roll with the good vibes for the minute. Here’s a video of the new Times Square map.
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And here’s some explanatory chat from creative director Guangyun Chen. “Season 5 brings you the grand debut of New York’s Times Square,” he said in a pre-season 5 update video. “This is a non-combat map that can host up to 100 players. Hang out, dance, watch videos, read books, and let your imagination run wild.”
‘Let your imagination run wild’ feels like it’s doing a lot of work in a sentence that otherwise reads like somebody at a speed date furiously googling “sexy hobbies” under the table. These people are supposed to be superhumans! Hang out and watch videos? Nobody’s going home with you, Spider-Man. The videos on the display boards in the map trailer are all of other Marvel films, so this is both a social space and a Death Star beam convergence marketing apparatus for launching pieces of product placement into your brain.
“We’ve seen so many fun, friendly meets up in the Doom Match ‘Sanctum Sanctorum’ map,” Chen went on, “so we wanted to give everyone a dedicated space for socializing, relaxing, and sharing cool moments outside of battle.”
All jeering aside, I like when big multiplayer shooters acknowledge their status as tacit social platforms. I still cling to my memories of sudden amicability while playing Overwatch. I remember one match that very nearly became a full 12-player crouch-walk conga line, but then the enemy D.Va dropped a mechabomb. Perhaps it’s just the years of isolation talking, but I fancy I was really hitting it off with the other team’s Mercy before the nuclear fire claimed us.
Looking at it more widely, I really wouldn’t be surprised if Marvel Rivals harboured some aspiration to become a sandbox platform like Fortnite, with the extreme qualifier that it would have to displace the existing Fortnite – a game with a several-year headstart and no shortage of superhero partnerships – to do so.
Times Square isn’t the only thing coming in Marvel Rivals Season 5, which begins on November 14th. Gambit and Rogue are joining the line-up, and there’s an 18v18 Conquest mode called Annihilation landing on November 27th.
