Fun’s over: The latest update to Marvel Rivals has killed support for PC mods that change the looks of its heroes, like turning Iron Man into Vegeta or Mantis into a goth.
Just after season 1 started on Friday, players started asking in the Marvel Rivals Discord why their mods weren’t working. It turns out the game now scans through its files to check if they’ve been altered through a feature called asset hash checking. Anything it doesn’t recognize simply won’t work.
“It’s possible, although not likely, that a workaround can be found and I will update everyone here if/when that should happen,” MerryJoyKey, the creator of the Marvel Rivals mod manager on NexusMods, wrote in a comment today. They’ve postponed updates to their mod until a solution is found.
NetEase didn’t warn players about the change, nor was it in the season 1 patch notes. The only statement the studio has made about mods was on Wednesday when it told Polygon, “It is not recommended to modify any game files, as doing so carries the risk of getting banned.”
So far, there have been no reports of anyone being punished. According to the game’s terms of use, mods were never allowed and could always get you banned, but that didn’t stop players from using them anyway. Thousands of people shared and downloaded mods on NexusMods in the last few weeks, enough to compete with Skyrim and Cyberpunk 2077 in the list of the games with the top mods of the month. Custom skins based on United States presidents Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama were removed by the site as part of its rules against mods “relating to sociopolitical issues in the United States.”
It’s common for online competitive multiplayer games to take a hard stance against mods. In some cases, they can change the game in a way that gives players an unfair advantage, like removing geometry from a map. Marvel Rivals mods didn’t go that far and most of them were fairly tame, but it’s possible they could have gotten out of hand as time went on.
Now players will have to dress their favorite heroes the old fashioned way and save up enough money to buy skins on the shop. The era of Iron Man Vegeta and Iron Fist Goku seems to sadly be over.
