Unreal Engine powers Marvel Rivals to create a new multiverse of Marvel Heroes
Since its founding in 1939, Marvel has built an extraordinary 85-year legacy in global entertainment, evolving from beloved comics to animation and blockbuster films.
As Marvel's influence continues to grow worldwide, its gaming ventures have captured players' imaginations with equal success. The recent release of Marvel Rivals, an ambitious multiplayer team-based shooter, has reignited fans' passion for Super Hero gaming.
This groundbreaking collaboration between NetEase Games and Marvel Entertainment showcases the incredible possibilities of Unreal Engine 5, delivering stunning visuals, rich gameplay mechanics, and an authentically realized Marvel universe that pulls players into an unprecedented gaming experience.
The NetEase Games team collaborated extensively with Epic Games throughout the development process, fully leveraging UE5's technical capabilities along the way. From dynamic lighting and shadow rendering to constructing complex destructible environments, the team strived to achieve optimal quality in both visual presentation and interactive experience.
We recently caught up with Marvel Rivals' Technical Lead Designer Ruan Weikang to get behind-the-scenes details and explore the challenges of the development process.
The interview delved into the team's innovative breakthroughs in technical optimization, character modeling, and multiplayer combat balance design, demonstrating how cutting-edge technology can breathe new life into classic IP while delivering a fresh Marvel gaming experience to players worldwide—and showcasing new possibilities for Super Hero themes in interactive gaming entertainment.
What are the key challenges in developing a Marvel-themed team-based shooter?
Ruan Weikang, Lead Technical Designer: The first major challenge lay in gameplay design. As a global premium IP with 85 years of history, Marvel commands exceptionally high player expectations regarding the authenticity of its Super Hero characters. The development team needed to ensure that each hero possesses not only distinctive personality and abilities but also maintains balance between characters to guarantee competitive fairness and integrity.
Furthermore, cooperation between Super Heroes proved equally crucial. Through the implementation of Team-Up abilities, the team enabled high interactivity between heroes, allowing players to create diverse tactical choices during combat. On the multiverse battlefield, heroes can utilize their superpowers to destroy environments and reshape terrain, securing strategic advantages for their team. These three core elements—Super Hero authenticity, environmental destruction, and team-based competition—together form the foundational pillars of Marvel Rivals' gameplay.
On the technical front, we've embraced UE5's latest innovations to bring this vision to life. The Lumen global illumination system delivers stunningly realistic dynamic lighting, while the Chaos physics system enables responsive environmental destruction that adds tactical depth to every encounter. However, as a competitive game at its core, maintaining optimal performance has been paramount. Finding the sweet spot between visual spectacle, gameplay innovation, and smooth performance has been one of our most persistent challenges.
Consider Doctor Strange's portals—they demand complex visual effects and dynamic interactions while maintaining fluid performance in multiplayer combat. Similarly, our environmental destruction system must deliver convincing physics simulation without compromising frame rates. These features have pushed our technical team to continuously innovate, finding new ways to optimize engine performance, resource management, and overall player experience.
What prompted the transition from UE4 to UE5 during development?
Weikang: The project initially began development with UE4 in 2019. However, we encountered a significant technical hurdle: our core environmental destruction system consistently fell short of expectations in terms of production efficiency, physics simulation, and performance metrics. Traditional global illumination baking techniques proved inadequate for our predominantly destructible, dynamic environments, further exacerbating technical limitations.
UE5's dual cornerstones—Lumen dynamic global illumination and the Chaos destruction system—provided an elegant solution to these challenges. Their synergy significantly enhanced dynamic scene performance while optimizing destruction effects implementation. In early 2023, following a comprehensive feasibility study, we initiated the engine upgrade process. The transition from initial engine migration to establishing a stable production pipeline was accomplished in approximately three months. Post-upgrade, our team completely revamped the scene creation and destruction pipelines leveraging Lumen and Chaos, substantially improving both production efficiency and visual quality.
While upgrading the engine and reconstructing core technical systems mid-development represented a significant risk, the results vindicated this decision. The upgrade enabled us to successfully implement dynamic environmental destruction across our multiverse battlefields, delivering rich, physically accurate visuals while maintaining exceptional performance in multiplayer scenarios. UE5's robust technical foundation not only enhanced player immersion but ensured smooth, responsive gameplay. In retrospect, the upgrade to UE5 marked a crucial turning point in development, with the final results justifying every resource invested in this ambitious technical transition.
How does the team capture the essence of Marvel's iconic comic book heroes in the game?
Weikang: Throughout Marvel Rivals' development, delivering an authentic Super Hero experience has been our paramount design principle. For each character, we conduct exhaustive research across all source material, particularly comics, to distill their fundamental essence. This might manifest as the source of their powers (such as Hulk's gamma radiation) or defining personality traits (like Loki's characteristic cunning as the God of Mischief). These core elements inform our gameplay design, ensuring each hero's most distinctive qualities are faithfully translated into interactive mechanics.
We've also focused on capturing iconic moments that resonate with fans, transforming memorable scenes into playable experiences. Doctor Strange's signature portals and Spider-Man's web-swinging mechanics exemplify this approach, delivering both authentic character representation and engaging gameplay dynamics. While implementing these features presents significant technical and balance challenges, they're essential for creating an immersive Marvel universe experience.
Our development process maintains continuous collaboration with Marvel's veteran team. Each character undergoes thorough review through multiple weekly discussions, ensuring designs honor Marvel's legacy while introducing innovative gameplay elements. Marvel's team, leveraging their deep understanding of the IP and professional insight, provides invaluable guidance in exploring and amplifying each hero's unique appeal.
This collaborative approach has enabled us to not only capture the essence of Marvel's heroes and villains but also infuse them with distinctive gameplay identities in Marvel Rivals, delivering an authentic Marvel combat experience.
How did the team implement such diverse ability sets while maintaining stable performance during multiplayer combat?
Weikang: To transform comic book characters into playable heroes, we leveraged UE5's capabilities through extensive customization. We significantly enhanced the engine's Game Ability System (GAS), developing a comprehensive ability framework and toolset for managing combat logic and state transitions.
The Niagara visual effects system powers our diverse visual effects portfolio, with its Data Interface architecture enabling automatic effect range updates based on design parameter adjustments. During intense combat scenarios, overlapping ability effects can create performance bottlenecks in both CPU rendering threads and GPU processing. To address this challenge with our extensive hero roster, we developed a specialized performance testing methodology: simultaneous ability activation by 12 identical heroes.
This testing approach operates on the principle that if we can maintain performance standards with 12 identical heroes using abilities simultaneously, we can reasonably expect acceptable performance with any combination of 12 different heroes in actual combat.
This methodology reveals clear performance patterns: logic processing issues manifest as performance spikes, affecting 1% Low FPS, while rendering bottlenecks create sustained plateaus impacting average FPS. These test cases enable rapid performance optimization across our extensive Niagara effect library.
For identified rendering issues, we implemented two primary optimization strategies:
Through this comprehensive testing and optimization framework, we ensure all hero abilities meet our performance standards while delivering spectacular visual effects. This systematic approach maintains both visual quality and gameplay smoothness across all combat scenarios.
Doctor Strange's portals have received significant acclaim in Marvel Rivals, but they also present substantial performance challenges. What technical hurdles did the team face in their implementation?
Weikang: To bring iconic Super Hero moments into interactive form, we implemented signature mechanics like Spider-Man's fluid web-swinging and Doctor Strange's spatial portals. The latter proved particularly challenging from a technical perspective. Creating portals that enable real-time spatial connections and bi-directional combat interactions not only presented complex gameplay implementation challenges but also introduced unprecedented performance demands when combined with advanced graphics features like Lumen.
Our initial portal implementation utilized UE's Scene Capture system. While this built-in component facilitated rapid prototyping, it encountered significant performance limitations in complex combat scenarios. Scene Capture operations require serial CPU processing with the main view, resulting in substantial CPU wait states and redundant operations when multiple portals are active simultaneously, impacting both rendering and Render Hardware Interface (RHI) thread efficiency. Additionally, each active portal essentially required a complete scene re-render, creating substantial GPU overhead.
To address these performance limitations, we transitioned to a modified ViewPort split-screen implementation. This approach integrates portal rendering directly into the main view pipeline. While this required comprehensive modifications to the rendering pipeline for each pass, it significantly improved CPU parallelization and reduced redundant operations. The ViewPort solution enables GBuffer merging before post-processing, minimizing pixel overdraw and enhancing GPU efficiency. We also implemented dynamic resolution scaling for portal interiors when in player view, further optimizing GPU utilization.
The logical implementation required handling of character and ability effect transitions through portals. When objects traverse portals, the system generates appropriate model and effect duplicates while managing proper occlusion for portal intersections.
While balancing portal functionality with performance requirements presented significant challenges, the end result successfully captures the essence of Doctor Strange's iconic abilities while adding meaningful tactical depth to gameplay, ultimately justifying the technical investment.
Could you share your approach to scene optimization and achieving balance between visual fidelity and performance?
Weikang: Marvel Rivals' combat environments span the breadth of the Marvel universe—from Asgard's majestic halls and Tokyo 2099's cyberpunk cityscape to Klyntar's alien landscapes—each with unique artistic direction and destruction mechanics. Balancing visual quality with performance across these diverse environments required extensive optimization efforts; the team often jokes that each map represents its own research project.
Light count management emerged as our primary optimization focus for each environment. The implementation of Lumen raised the stakes for lighting performance control. To facilitate intuitive lighting design within performance parameters, we streamlined UE5's lighting complexity visualization to focus on light-object overlap areas, adjusting performance thresholds for spot and rectangular lights accordingly.
This approach enables our art team to avoid problematic light overlap regions—indicated by red or white areas in the complexity view—while meeting performance targets. Additionally, to address resource consumption from large-volume lights, we implemented Light Mask Boxes to constrain lighting calculations to specific zones. This system allows for precise artistic control while maintaining optimal performance characteristics.
Beyond lighting, UE5's suite of complexity visualization tools proves invaluable for comprehensive scene optimization. These tools enable our design, programming, and art teams to establish clear, measurable standards balancing visual quality and performance requirements.
How does the team leverage Lumen global illumination and Chaos physics to create large-scale destructible environments as a core feature of Marvel Rivals?
Weikang: Implementing extensive environmental destruction presented our first major technical challenge: selecting an appropriate global illumination solution. Traditional baking approaches proved inadequate for environments dominated by dynamic objects and frequent lighting changes.
During our UE5 upgrade, the integration of Lumen and Chaos immediately revealed a critical technical hurdle. While we had high expectations for this technology combination, technical evaluation showed that Chaos's Geometry Collections (GC) couldn't generate distance fields—a crucial requirement for Lumen's software-based ray tracing. This limitation would result in incorrect global illumination, manifesting as light leakage and static lighting in destroyed areas. Effectively, UE5's native implementation didn't support direct integration of Lumen with large-scale Chaos destruction.
Our primary task became enabling distance field generation for GC assets. We developed a hybrid approach, attaching Static Meshes (SM) capable of distance field generation to each fragment. During the fragmentation process, we convert building collision geometry to SM components and process them simultaneously, maintaining consistent material properties.
By managing visibility between SM and GC fragments appropriately, we achieved proper distance field generation. This solution enabled successful integration of Lumen and Chaos systems, establishing the foundation for our dynamic environment pipeline.
There are distinct debris motion patterns when different heroes destroy structures. How did you achieve these varied destruction effects?
Weikang: After establishing our destructible combat environments, we focused on creating hero-specific destruction feedback. Given each hero's unique combat signature, structural destruction needed to reflect their distinct attack characteristics. Whether it's Hulk's devastating punches, Punisher's sustained turret fire, or Storm's sweeping tornados, debris exhibits carefully crafted motion patterns that reinforce each hero's identity.
These differentiated destruction effects leverage the Chaos Fields system, with customized impulse configurations matching each ability's visual language. Beyond conventional spherical force fields, we developed specialized patterns, such as the spiral force field for Storm's tornados, enhancing the tactical depth and visual authenticity of environmental interaction.
Large-scale destruction typically imposes significant performance costs, yet Marvel Rivals maintains smooth performance despite extensive environmental damage. How did the team achieve this optimization?
Weikang: Implementing large-scale environmental destruction while maintaining competitive performance standards presented our greatest technical challenge. Fragment count emerged as the critical performance factor.
To meet both gameplay and visual requirements, we implemented a two-tiered fragmentation system for static structures. The first-tier fragmentation determines the initial break patterns and surface areas when triggered by hero abilities.
Building upon these primary fragments, a secondary fragmentation process creates smaller debris pieces. When heroes attack structures, the primary fragments decompose into these secondary fragments, which then undergo physics-driven motion influenced by Chaos force fields. This dual-layer fragmentation mechanism is the primary contributor to the overall fragment count in our environments.
Initially, we used Chaos to directly fragment buildings through Geometry Collections, resulting in thousands of fragments per structure. As scene fragment counts increased, physics simulation for collapsing structures imposed substantial CPU computational overhead.
Additionally, post-fragmentation scenes experienced dramatic increases in polygon count, significantly impacting GPU rendering loads and memory utilization. To optimize Chaos performance without compromising competitive gameplay, our technical team implemented several fundamental improvements:
Beyond these core optimizations, our engine team implemented numerous logical improvements, striving to maximize destruction system performance while preserving competitive gameplay integrity.
Marvel Rivals is now available on the Epic Games Store (EGS). What other official channels can players use to learn more about the game?
Weikang: Thank you for the interview! Players can visit our official website at www.marvelrivals.com and follow us on social media for the latest updates:
Discord: discord.gg/marvelrivals
Twitter: twitter.com/MarvelRivals
Instagram: www.instagram.com/marvelrivals
Facebook: www.facebook.com/marvelrivals
TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@marvelrivals
YouTube: www.youtube.com/@MarvelRivals
The game is also directly available through the Epic Games Store.
How to install Unreal Engine
Download the launcher
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Install Epic Games launcher
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Install Unreal Engine
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