Marvel Rivals breaks its own concurrent player count record following the introduction of Season 1 and its new content. Read on to find out more about the update that just got players all hyped!
Marvel Rivals Reaches 600k Peak Players
Season 1 Brings New Content
Marvel Rivals is on a roll! The smash hit free-to-play team-based shooter breaks its own concurrent player record following the start of Season 1: Eternal Night Falls.
Marvel Rivals’ Season 1, titled Eternal Night Falls, began last January 10th, and introduced lots of new content such as new characters, a new map, game improvements and optimizations, as well as a new ranked tier and a new Battle Pass. When the weekend rolled in, players across the globe scrambled onto the servers to get a first look at all the new content to play with, racking up a whopping 644,269 concurrent players on January 11th. This 640k-strong record beats the game’s previous peak of 480,990 players on its launch week.
Eternal Night Falls centers around the vampire lord Dracula and Doctor Doom, who plunge the city into a cycle of eternal night and unleash an army of vampiric creatures to build Dracula’s Empire of Eternal Night. Faced with this adversity, the heroes also get a new set of allies to join their cause—the Fantastic Four! With an exciting season ahead, it’s no surprise that fans wanted to get their hands on it immediately.
For more detailed information on the changes introduced by the update patch for individual character skill tweaks, players can head over to the official Marvel Rivals website or the Marvel Rival Steam community logs for the full patch notes.
New Update Removes Mods
Though with the flurry of additional content that the update gave to players, it also took away some of the others—namely, fan-made content or mods. Since the update was launched, it has seemingly introduced asset hash checking into the game. Asset hash checking essentially checks for inconsistencies in what you’re running on your PC while playing the game, and anything that isn’t officially verified—like cheats, hacks, and unfortunately mods as well—can get the respective account a warning, or worse, a ban. While it is helpful for ratting out those unfair cheaters in game, players who may have just wanted a little spice in their game through custom skins are now also unable to use them.
In response to the news, the community is rather divided. Some lamented that Luna Snow’s Hatsune Miku custom skin and Venom’s "hefty" stalk upgrade will now be lost to time, while others believe this is a step in the right direction for a free-to-play game whose only source of profit is through cosmetics and in-app purchases, and to better eliminate ill-intentioned cheaters from playing.
Source:
Marvel Rivals Official X (Twitter)
Marvel Rivals Season 1 Balance Post/Patch Notes
