'Progression is awful, this is not a mobile game': The Marvel Rivals challenge-based battle pass has players begging for but an ounce of post-match XP

Marvel Rivals—the NetEase free-to-play hero shooter featuring a wide roster of Avengers and various other Marvel figures who probably wish they were—released yesterday, and it hasn't had any trouble finding interested players. At time of writing, there are currently more than 300,000 people playing Marvel Rivals on Steam alone. Some of those players, however, have already been bristling at the Marvel Rivals battle pass progression.

As you might expect from a free-to-play shooter, Marvel Rivals has a seasonal battle pass, in both paid and free varieties, that players can progress through to unlock cosmetic rewards, with the paid version offering additional cosmetics and premium currency. Battle passes in Rivals don't expire—you can continue working towards the rewards from an earlier battle pass even after its season ends. That's kinder than the limited-time live service monetization schemes that cut off your access to battle pass rewards as soon as the next pass starts, but the pain point for Marvel Rivals players is how you progress through the battle pass.

In Rivals, you earn your battle pass rewards by spending currency earned from completing limited-time challenges, and only from completing challenges. When you complete a match, no matter how thoroughly you won or how many times you killed Captain America, you won't have made any progress towards your next battle pass reward unless you did as your daily and weekly objectives demanded.

Since many of those objectives require playing as specific heroes or on specific maps, you can't—outside of the most straightforward daily missions—simply make battle pass progress by playing how you'd like to. And because there's only a set number of time-gated challenges available, there's effectively a cap on how much battle pass progress you can make each day. Videogames are in the age of incremental progress; the children yearn for filling bars. If a match completes without accruing some kind of experience point, many of us have been trained to think it might as well not have happened.

Unsurprisingly, players haven't been thrilled. "I absolutely loath the mission/ challenge based progression system. Often it incentivizes people to actively hurt their team by prioritizing challenge completions over winning," reddit user SecretTracer said over on the Marvel Rivals subreddit.

"Let people finish the battle pass early. What's the harm in that?" asked Tato23, another redditor, who said they're "disappointed" by the battle pass system. "Why do you devs need to dictate the pace of us completing the pass?"

While there's an argument for enjoying Rivals for what it is and not tying all of your fun to unlockable skins, NetEase's reasoning for doing the battle pass this way is likely more cynical. By controlling when new challenges appear in-game and giving dailies 12-hour timers, NetEase is also pushing players to log in multiple times per day so they don't miss out on any opportunities to juice their pass. It's both friendly ("yay the pass doesn't expire") and pretty nasty ("oh man I have a job so I missed out on 50% of my XP today") at the same time.

"Progression is awful, this is not a mobile game," said redditor literios. "People play games for various reasons and maybe it shocks you but progression can be part of the fun."

Essentially, Marvel Rivals has landed on the same, much-reviled battle pass framework that the Halo Infinite beta launched with back in 2021—a framework that was so universally loathed by its playerbase that 343 Industries was forced to add experience rewards to each match within days of the beta's launch. Frankly, I think Magneto deserves better treatment.