Marvel Rivals Adds 12-Player Mode, 50-Player Thanos Fight

Marvel Rivals has always been a small-team affair. Six heroes on each side, tight objectives, fast fights. That is exactly why it usually sits a little outside the multiplayer conversation we have here. This week, though, the hero shooter is getting a lot bigger.

The game's mid-season update, version 10.5, adds a 12-player PvP mode for a limited time. A 50-player PvE showdown with Thanos is also on the way later this month. Add two Halloween events, a new map and a fresh season event, and October is shaping up to be one of the busier months the game has had.

Six Duos, One Health Bar Each

The new PvP mode splits 12 players into six teams of two. Those duos face off in quick round-robin matches, rotating through opponents. There are no instant eliminations. Each loss chips away at a team's health bar, and once that bar is empty, the pair is out.

The hero pool is limited, so you can't bring your entire roster into it. To make up for that, players draft random cards before each match that modify their chosen hero. Infinity Stones also come into play and can be used in the middle of a fight. It sounds less like a standard objective mode and more like an auto-battler-style gauntlet built around shooter combat, with a healthy dose of chance mixed in.

The mode is available now and runs until Friday, December 11th. That is a generous window for a limited-time mode, but it still has an end date.

Assembling 50 Players Against Thanos

The bigger headline arrives on Thursday, October 22nd. A new PvE mode will drop 50 players into the ruins of the Avengers Compound, where they'll team up against Thanos and his army. It's designed as a celebratory recreation of the final battle from Avengers: Endgame, and that is about all we know for now. No further details have been shared, though more information is expected in the coming days.

For a game built around six-player teams, a 50-player cooperative fight is a big jump in scale. How it handles that many heroes on screen at once, and what players are actually doing beyond shooting at a very large purple villain, are the open questions.

Halloween Comes Twice

Before Thanos shows up, the spooky season kicks in. The All Hallows' Glow event starts on October 15th and brings Halloween-themed cosmetics. Then, on October 29th, Night of Illusions arrives, which the game promises will be "a thrilling, suspenseful, interactive puzzle experience." What form that puzzle takes in a hero shooter remains to be seen.

The Rest of the Mid-Season Update

The 10.5 update brings more than the 12-player mode. The 18v18 Annihilation mode gets a new map, Alchemax Headquarters. A new season event is live, with a Thor costume among the unlockable rewards. Meanwhile, the Times Square social hub has been decorated with highlights and photo spots that keep the Avengers: Infinity War celebration going.

Our Take

The pattern here is hard to miss. Marvel Rivals is stretching beyond its core format in both directions: smaller duo teams in the PvP gauntlet, and far larger lobbies in Annihilation and the upcoming Thanos fight. It looks like a game testing how flexible its foundations really are, rather than just adding more heroes and maps to the same structure.

That matters for the wider hero shooter space. Rivals' most obvious competitor keeps evolving too, with Overwatch's latest season adding new rules and maps of its own. Big co-op set pieces could be one way for Rivals to stand apart. Marvel fans with long memories may also notice that massive superhero team-ups used to be MMO territory, as the Marvel Heroes rogue server community still shows.

It is worth watching whether the Thanos event is a one-off spectacle or a sign of a recurring large-scale PvE format. The card drafting and Infinity Stones in the duo mode also deserve attention, because randomness can be a lot of fun or deeply frustrating, depending on balance. Halloween is crowded this year too, with events like Warframe's Nights of Naberus competing for players' time, so the October 22nd details could decide how many people actually show up for the fight.