I’ve covered the high number of character leaks before, and what that could mean for the game. The number of leaked heroes at the time of that article seemed incredible, but the leaks keep coming.
We’re now up to 20 leaked heroes, and the community has previously speculated that the leaked characters were planted by the developers to hide the content actually coming to the game and maintain surprise among the fanbase.
In an X/Twitter thread, data miner VISCERAL provided screenshots of Marvel Rivals code – which included not just the names of heroes, but their ability tables too. This seems like a lot of work for the developers to put into planting fakes, so the idea seems unlikely.
KeoneSpirit and Rival_Leaks have since walked back their comments about the heroes being possibly fakes, and that they didn’t intend for it to snowball across the community like it did.
“The primary assumption from the main leakers (separate from me, the ones who have most info) now is that the ‘plants’ are in fact still real. And the developers did not intend for us to find them. That's why I edited the original post and since deleted it and have worked to help clear up confusion surrounding it.”
It’s been confirmed by the director that Marvel Rivals will introduce two characters per season – meaning that if the leaks are true, that we have the next three years of characters leaked already.
These are the characters that were originally deemed “real and “fake”:
Real: Ultron, Blade, Jean Grey, Emma Frost, Captain Marvel, Hit Monkey, Angela, The Hood, Valkyrie, MODOK
Fake: Locus, Quicksilver, Cyclops, Professor X, Colossus, Paste-Pot Pete, Gambit, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Beast, Jubilee, Jia Jing, Crystal
There’s still no telling whether any of these characters will make it into the game, but it’s starting to look like they will likely come in the next three years. NetEase could even scrap any character they want, since none of these characters are set in stone, so it’s a good idea to take this information with a large grain of salt.
I was buying into the idea that they could have been fakes, especially considering the huge number of heroes leaked – I’m not quite sure why they would have so many characters in the game files, unless they’ve just accepted data mining as an inevitability and aren’t going to bother hiding anything. Or what I think is more likely - that they never intended to put references to those heroes in the live version of the game, and they may be added eventually.
