Marvel Rivals has had an unbelievable first month, racking up hundreds of thousands of players on the first weekend and keeping that momentum up right even to now — the reveal of the game’s Season 1. While this new Season is going to bring a new map and new competitive ranking, the bigger deal is the addition of four brand new heroes, and the word four means a lot there. Mr. Fantastic, Human Torch, Sue Storm, and The Thing are the first post-launch heroes coming to Marvel Rivals, and they’ll be fighting to keep New York safe from Dracula.
Season 1: Eternal Night Falls will officially kick off on January 10, 2025 at 1AM Pacific Time/ 4AM Eastern. NetEase released a new trailer for Marvel Rival’s Season 1 today, focusing mostly on the story. While the story of Rivals isn’t delivered through cutscenes or big moments, there’s a surprising amount of narrative built into the game itself.
Each Season has unlockable stories you can read if you meet the requirements, and every single hero has a lore page and their own stories to read as well. If you’ve just been knocking out matches the story so far, as set up by Season 0, is that Doctor Doom has met his heroic counterpart from 2099, which causes a timestream entanglement that creates brand new worlds across the multiverse. Heroes and villains from across the multiverse fight to take down both Doom variants, before one or the other can lay claim to the new worlds that have been created.
Now the first season’s stakes have been set, as Doctor Doom has partnered with Dracula to plunge New York into darkness. Here’s the official trailer, followed by the description from NetEase:
“Darkness engulfs New York as the Timestream Entanglement leaves Doctor Strange trapped in the Entangled Astral Plane, scattering the Darkhold pages. Dracula and Doctor Doom disrupt the moon’s orbit, plunging the city into eternal night and unleashing an army of vampiric creatures. With the world on the brink, the Fantastic Four join forces with iconic Marvel heroes, standing together in the epic battle to break the mystical darkness with science.”
As you can see the Fantastic Four are taking center stage this time around, and all four will be coming to the game as playable heroes. But we don’t know if the entire group will be added to the game as the start of the season — and it’s more likely that we’ll see two added at the start, and the additional two halfway through the season. This is because Marvel Rival’s seasons are going to last roughly three months, so it makes sense NetEase would want things spread out. Season 0 was the exception lasting only one month, while every future season will use that three-month time frame.
Of course, every Season will haves its own battle pass that never expires, and once you purchase it, you’ll always have the ability to unlock off of it, until you’ve unlocked everything. You’ll have to restart your Ranked rating as well.
What we don’t know about the Fantastic Four, is what role each character will play. Although if I had to make an educated guess, I would say The Thing is likely a Vanguard, Sue Storm a Strategist, and Human Torch and Mr. Fantastic Duelists. Those would make the most sense, and fit with the current number of heroes each category currently has.
The other big question mark that we technically can’t answer right now, is if these heroes will be free or not. Just before launch NetEase announced that all 33 heroes would be playable for free in Season 0, but technically the company hasn’t said anything about post-launch heroes. It’s possible we could see newly added heroes free for a short period of time, and then paid later — or the phenomenal success of the game could simply inspire NetEase to make everyone free. We’ll likely have to wait for the Season to actually start before we have an answer.
There’s another very interesting detail about this Season, and that’s the inclusion of Dracula. The villain will likely play only a minor role in matches themselves, featured in graphics and loading screens, as well as some audio. But Dracula is the most notable enemy of the vampire-hunter Blade, who’s already featured in some prominent leaks for Marvel Rivals. It seems unlikely that we’d see five heroes in one Season, but NetEase has certainly been all about surprises with this game so far, so who knows. But more than likely, by the end of Season 1 we’ll have some kind of hint about what’s coming next.
