Let Me Think About the Damage

Depending on the state and location of a corpse, it can take months or years for the body to decay into nothing but bones. In Marvel Rivals, it takes 10 seconds, bones included.

While most players won’t stop the fast-paced action demanded of this hero shooter to stare at a dead body, they should consider it when there’s a lull in combat. If players used the full 10 seconds, they’d likely notice the distant expression wearing these corpses, the weapons laid around the body with enough distance to indicate failure, and the apathetic pose a body lies in when all life has been robbed from it. They might even peek at the damage done to the walls and floors that bear the scars these character models never accumulate. They might notice all of these things, then watch them pop and fade out of existence, like nothing happened, as the fallen hero respawns and joins the fun once again.

It’s very hard for me to not think about death, and to a broader extent damage, when playing Marvel Rivals. Both haunt the game’s spaces. Outside of heroes’ corpses, maps like Midtown, filled with destroyed buildings and burning trains, signal that death must’ve occurred in droves there, especially when paired with the hero’s struggles in facing the current vampire epidemic. Read any number of the lore stories in hero profiles, and you’ll realize that death is an ever-present element of these characters’ lives, even if it’s unspoken. And yet, the game is constantly keeping this aspect of reality at a distance. No matter the map, there are structures that will rebuild themselves. Corpses will vanish, walls will heal. Even when a player dies, the camera does not follow their body – it stays in one place for a moment, then automatically switches to the perspective of the player’s killer. Overall, the focus in moment-to-moment play is on the damage being done, not dealt, and its accumulation never allowed to sit with players outside of numbers.

On the surface, this approach makes sense for a hero shooter where winning isn’t technically concerned with kill counts. The goal is more often to stay on point A, or get something from A to B, or get in the way of those objectives – and the fun lies in dealing with the living obstacles blocking success. While each genre entry has its own mix of balancing heroes and their skills to create a unique take, fun is the overarching goal. So much fun that millions of players will come back every day to get more of it. With this in mind, I briefly wondered – why include corpses and visible damage at all?

Marvel Rivals exists in the world of superheroes and supervillains. While it is a space fully capable of mature conversations around death, any number of acceptable excuses could have been manufactured as to what happens when your health hits zero. Maybe the player model gets transported away by a Dr. Strange portal, or the X-Men’s own Nightcrawler teleports them out, or some other Marvel magic occurs that allows their characters to fall and come back again without making mortality a consideration. To portray death the way Marvel Rivals does, as a brief stillness in the midst of frenzied battle, is a choice.

In that case, all the little decisions to hide that choice shine in a different way, almost like an admission that acknowledging what’s happening at length might ruin the fun. While I believe certain omissions like blood are done to keep it T for Teens, the existence of bodies and destroyed surroundings evidently works for that rating. It makes their inclusion but quick erasure seem like a necessity to keep the good times rolling. Players need to know death has occurred to have fun, but they cannot be allowed to dwell on it. There’s a weight missing without the perception of a life being in danger, but more than 10 seconds of questioning mortality might be too much for someone who just wants to swing around as Spider-Man. With time, it might become overwhelming to see the potential consequences of being Spider-Man.

It makes me wonder what this game would be like if the corpses were treated, at least a bit more, like actual bodies. Would players still find this game fun if upon each respawn, they saw their previous body lying where it died? If corpses were allowed to accumulate, if the walls stayed damaged, would it only add fuel to the fire or make players log off? Would Marvel Rivals still be itself if players acknowledged what they’re doing to someone else, or what’s being done to them, for more than 10 seconds? Maybe this could happen in a future mode in Marvel Rivals, some version of rapid permadeath matches, but in the meantime I will make the guess that seeing death this way wouldn’t ruin the fun, but create a different blend of it.

Corpses are all over videogames already. Players are not strangers to the environmental storytelling done by placing a dead body with a note in the right place. Avowed is a recent example of this with its wealth of tragic skeletons, but the technique long predates it. Moreover, Steven Santana recently spoke at length about looting culture in games, highlighting the fact players ravage slain enemies in the same violent ways of the term’s origins while thinking nothing of those roots. Strangely, while the brevity of a corpse’s visibility in Marvel Rivals may hint at an antagonism towards its existence, their non-exploitable presence offers the chance for introspection, to observe and think without material expectation.

The closest Marvel Rivals comes to prolonged, visible defeat is its entrapment of the hero Blade. Players can see him chained and defeated in a spawn room of the Central Park map, unable or unwilling to raise his head and meet your eyes. While he’s not dead, it is impactful nonetheless to see such an acclaimed hero made immobile. It adds a level of severity to the overall lore, highlighting how dangerous Dracula currently is to our heroes and citizens. The ability to imprison, and not kill, his worst foe is a display of power in its own right. It shares so much without saying anything. It makes me imagine the stories that could be created around a dead body in a spawn room.

People know how to have fun while surrounded by death. While I don’t believe hero shooters need to start adding corpse text boxes, even though the thought is amusing, one dead body that takes longer to, or doesn’t, disappear could create an experience for Marvel Rivals that is both fun and introspective. It could ask players to create tales of battles that don’t just see death’s toll, but ask them to carry it for longer than 10 seconds.

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Wallace Truesdale is a writer who loves games and the many things they come into contact with. When he’s not ruining himself with sweets, you can find him blogging at Exalclaw, or hanging out on Bluesky and Twitch.