Marvel Rivals' latest update disabled mods, meaning you can no longer play as Skibidi Toilet or Vegeta
Marvel Rivals received a patch earlier this week which made Hulk less hulky and paved the way for the launch of its first season. It also did something else: disabled the mods players had been using to add custom skins to the game.
As spotted by IGN, players are reporting that the latest update adds asset hash checking, effectively blocking the use of edited files inside the game.
The move maybe comes as no surprise. Marvel Rivals is a free-to-play hero shooter that makes money by selling premium skins to players. Allowing mods enables players to make versions of those skins themselves for free. A number of such skins have proven popular on Nexus Mods since Rivals' launch last year, including replacing Iron Man with Vegeta and the Winter Soldier with CJ from GTA: San Andreas.
I can think of no live service game that allows this kind of modding, and the game's terms of use have forbidden mods since the off. Publishers NetEase have also stated publicly that players risk being banned for modifying any game files.
Inevitable or not, I am forced to write my little spiel once more: that games are better with mod support, and first-person games thrived once upon a time in part due to mods, and all of this used to be fields. I honestly doubt the existence of some daft, free, user-made skins is going to eat into Marvel Rivals' bottomline, and I'm sure there are technical workarounds that would allow the practice without threatening the integrity of online matches.
One supposes that there's another issue here: that license holder Disney wouldn't be too pleased if the Marvel characters they've leant NetEase end up covered in visible nipples. Cowards.
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