“Progress is terrible, this isn’t a mobile game”: Marvel Rivals’ challenge-based Battle Pass has players just begging for a morsel of XP after the game

Marvel Rivals – the free-to-play NetEase hero shooter with a wide range of Avengers and various other Marvel characters you’ll probably want – was released yesterday and had no trouble finding interested players. At the time of writing, more than 300,000 people are currently playing Marvel Rivals on Steam alone. However, some of these players have already expressed frustration with the progress of the Marvel Rivals Battle Pass.

As you would expect from a free-to-play shooter, Marvel Rivals features a seasonal Battle Pass, both paid and free, through which players can unlock cosmetic rewards, with the paid version offering additional cosmetics and premium currency . Battle Passes in Rivals do not expire – you can continue working towards the rewards of a previous Battle Pass even after the season ends. While this is cheaper than the limited-time live service monetization programs that deny you access to Battle Pass rewards as soon as the next pass begins, it’s the problem for Marvel Rivals players How You progress through the Battle Pass.

In Rivals, you earn your Battle Pass rewards by spending money you earn from completing time-limited challenges only from completing challenges. When you complete a game, no matter how thoroughly you won or how many times you killed Captain America, you will not have made any progress towards your next Battle Pass reward unless you have completed your daily and weekly objectives.

Because many of these objectives require playing as specific heroes or on specific maps, you can’t simply progress through the Battle Pass by playing the way you want, aside from the most basic daily missions. And since there are only a certain number of timed challenges available, there’s effectively a cap on how much Battle Pass progress you can make each day. Video games are in the age of incremental progress; the children long to fill bars. When a game ends without any experience points being gained, many of us think that it might as well not have happened.

Unsurprisingly, players weren’t thrilled. “I absolutely despise the mission/challenge based progression system. “It often incentivizes people to actively harm their team by prioritizing completing challenges over winning,” said Reddit user SecretTracer on the Marvel Rivals subreddit.

“Let people finish the battle pass early. What’s the harm?” asked Tato23, another Redditor, who said they were “disappointed” with the battle pass system. “Why do you developers have to dictate the pace at which we complete the pass?”

While there’s an argument for enjoying Rivals as it is and not tying all the fun to unlockable skins, NetEase’s rationale for running the Battle Pass this way is probably more cynical. By controlling when new challenges appear in the game and providing 12-hour timers for daily tasks, NetEase also pushes players to log in multiple times a day so they don’t miss an opportunity to level up their pass. It’s simultaneously friendly (“Yay, the pass doesn’t expire”) and pretty nasty (“Oh man, I have a job so I missed 50% of my EP today”).

“Progression is terrible, this is not a mobile game,” said Redditor Literios. “People play games for different reasons and it might shock you, but progression can be part of the fun.”

Essentially, Marvel Rivals landed on the same, much-despised Battle Pass framework that launched the Halo Infinite beta in 2021 – a framework that was so universally loathed by the player base that 343 Industries was forced to give everyone Play in adding experience rewards days after the beta launch. Honestly, I think Magneto deserves better treatment.

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“Progress is terrible, this isn’t a mobile game”: Marvel Rivals’ challenge-based Battle Pass has players just begging for a morsel of XP after the game

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