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Building a game like Marvel Rivals is not a linear process. Everything goes through different integrations and changes during development and, sometimes, things get left in the code that isn’t in the current version of the game. These sorts of things are gold dust to dataminers, who crack open a game’s code to see what secrets it holds. When a recent spat of rumors started to swirl around potential cards dataminers had found in the Marvel Rivals code, fans thought the developers were trolling them with false leads.

According to the developers themselves, that isn’t the case. “We would rather spend our time developing the actual game,” Marvel Games executive producer Danny Koo said in an interview. Surely that means that the characters found in the data are going to make future appearances in Marvel Rivals, right? Not necessarily.

“You can see that for each character’s design actually we come through a very complicated process and we make a lot of concepts, trials, prototypes, development, et cetera,” explained Marvel Rivals producer Weicong Wu. “So there could be some information left in the code, and it might mean that we tried those directions and they may appear or may not appear in our future plans. And whether or not they will appear in our future pipeline is highly depending on what kind of gameplay experience our players would expect in our game.”

“It was like someone doing scratch paperwork and then just left a notebook there,” added Koo. “And someone decided to open it with no context.”

That means that the previously circulated list of heroes being added to Marvel Rivals, which includes iconic characters like Professor X, Colossus, and Cyclops, won’t necessarily make their way into the game just because some fragments of their code remain in the game. 

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