The upcoming closed beta test for Marvel Rivals is coming in late July, and the dev team has promised this one will be several times bigger than the closed alpha in terms of players, content, and new features.
In the latest Marvel Rivals “Dev Talk” volume, the team behind the third-person hero shooter confirmed July’s closed beta test will have a player base “five times” the size of the closed alpha test from this past May. The servers are being expanded from just North America to also include both Europe and Asia, and the servers themselves will be upgraded to 60-tick rate.
Cross-platform play and “multi-platform friend functionality” are also being added, which will permit players on PlayStation, Xbox, and PC to both friend each other and play each other. Crossplay can be turned on or off in the game’s casual modes, but it won’t be on for ranked modes. Similar to what Riot is doing with VALORANT, there will be a PC-only and console-only ranked queue that are separate from each other. The team also confirmed they’re working on cross-progression.
Lots of new content is coming to Marvel Rivals in July’s closed beta test, highlighted by the arrivals of two new heroes: the highly mobile vanguard/tank Venom, and the “unparalleled tactician” Adam Warlock. These heroes can be played on the new map Tokyo 2099: Spider-Islands, but they can also be temporarily “banished” by a newly implemented hero pick/ban system.
With all these changes, Marvel Rivals is getting closer and closer to the full release state the devs envisioned for the game. A release date for the game has not been revealed as of yet.
