Marvel Rivals players praise effort put into Doctor Strange’s portals
Marvel GamesMarvel Rivals players sing NetEase’s praises after a developer revealed the tech challenges involved in creating Doctor Strange’s portal mechanic.
One of the most impressive features in Marvel Rivals is the magical portal that Doctor Strange can conjure.
Sometimes players employ it tactically by helping an Iron Man teammate teleport his ultimate to catch enemies off guard. In addition, the feature is popularly used as a trap that launches opponents off the map for easy kills.
Despite its triumphs, the portal feature is also known to cause lag in some cases. Technical Lead Designer Ruan Weikang explained why in an interview for the Unreal Engine blog, where he spoke candidly about the technical hurdles NetEase faced during production
Marvel Rivals dev explains complexities of Doctor Strange’s portals
During the interview, Weikang cited the implementation of Strange’s portals as one of the more difficult challenges.
“Creating portals that enable real-time spatial connections and bi-directional combat interactions not only presented complex gameplay implementation challenges but also introduced unprecedented performance demands when combined with advanced graphics features like Lumen,” the developer explained.
Getting characters and ability effects through the portal proved a herculean effort, as well. Weikang noted, “When objects traverse portals, the system generates appropriate model and effect duplicates while managing proper occlusion for portal intersections.”
Performance limitations arose because of things like each active portal necessitating a complete scene re-render, resulting in “substantial GPU overhead.”
Marvel GamesNaturally, Marvel Rivals players are even more impressed by the game’s portal system after reading Weikang’s comments.
The community sang NetEase’s praises in a Reddit thread, with one person writing, “The fact that we can shoot through it, in a real-time multiplayer game, is unbelievable.”
Another user joined the chorus to add, “Respect to the devs who put in so much time and effort just to get this one mechanic right.”
Several others applauded the studio for dedicating time and resources to a complex feature that only works with one character. “The fact they had to code it for literally just one character and they put enough effort in so that it works pretty damn well is so impressive,” reads one such response.
And since the Marvel Rivals community keeps finding new strategies with Strange’s portals, it’s possible some facets of the mechanic have yet to be revealed.