Marvel Rivals wants to go big for 2026, and the team has 'already planned more than a year ahead'

2025 was a pretty incredible year for NetEase's Marvel Rivals. Since dropping right at the end of 2024, it's gone through five themed seasons, increased its collection of heroes and villains by 12, and experimented with PvE with its rough-around-the-edges Marvel Zombies mode.

But the team is just getting started. "2025 was more of a warm-up period for us," Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo told Den of Geek. "Next year, we're going to have bigger plans. We're not going to slow down. We've already planned more than a year ahead and I can't wait for our players to see it."

I've been ruthlessly cutting live service games out of my library this month, as the dopamine hit from the endless progression is no longer justifying all the cracking traditional singleplayer games that have fallen by the wayside. So I'm on a Marvel Rivals break at the moment, but I sure played a lot of it this year.

I went from being more than a sceptic, hating how it felt to play and what NetEase had done to some of my favourite characters, like Magneto, to becoming a convert. The beta put me off, but shortly after launch I was hooked. It completely destroyed any interest I had left in Overwatch 2—though Blizzard had already done a good job of killing my interest before then.

"In the next year, we want to provide more game modes," said NetEase publishing and marketing lead Yachen Bian. "It's why we have prototypes in the game, like PvE and 18v18. We want to give the players more choices of different game modes beyond the basic gameplay because your fundamental experience might be very different. When you're fighting against zombies, it's quite different from fighting against other people."

I never managed to get into the zombie mode, full as it was with enemies where the only challenge was wrestling with my attention span, thanks to their absurdly large HP. Rivals is a punchy, swift game, but with this mode it ground to a halt. But I still appreciated the team's willingness to experiment, leaving me excited to see what it comes up with next year.

We'll have to wait until 2026 to find out what's coming, but NetEase has some big ambitions. "It's a lot of hard work and it always feels different and exciting," said Koo. "This game is releasing new content every week. Even my own team comes in every day asking what's new today. Everyone's excited. They want to continue to make this happen. Everyone wants to make this the biggest game possible."