Player Fantasies: Batman Is Not A Healer
Marvel Rivals has been killing it since its release, and for good reason. It’s got a great cast of diverse characters to play as, great gamefeel, a spectacular art style, and the post-release content drops have been both frequent and positively received - all things a hero-shooter that rides on its appeal needs to succeed. Now, I’ve always been more of a DC Comics fan myself, but I still appreciate Marvel Rivals and its representations of Marvel’s mightiest heroes. That said, I can’t help but imagine what a hypothetical “DC Rivals” would look like, and from what I’ve seen online, I’m not alone; fans from across the internet have cobbled together their own ideas for rosters for such a game, ranging from simple image collages to full-on video dissertations detailing the thought behind their choices and delving into how they imagine the characters of the DC Universe playing. But there’s one thing that I’ve found keeps coming up in these fan-made rosters that doesn’t sit right with me: the choice to make Batman a healer.
This decision is usually backed up with the sentiment that most players that pick up hero-shooters like Marvel Rivals or Overwatch, or to a larger extent any team-based game where healing is a type of class players can pick up, do not want to play healers. Instead, it’s assumed that most players want to play a “cooler” class of hero, such as the ones that deal big damage and get a lot of kills (or “eliminations” or whatever less violent word a game decides to use… cowards!). And in my experience, this thought process has a basis in reality - damn near every game I play of Marvel Rivals, I’m forced to flex into being a tank or healer (or, again, “Vanguard” and “Strategist”, ugh!) because the randos that I’m teamed up with almost always insta-lock in as damage dealers, and I need to fill the other roles if we want any chance at winning. It’s not that I don’t enjoy playing as tanks or healers, but games do start to feel very samey when I’m limited to an assortment of characters that makes up less than half of the roster. Which is a whole other issue.
Anyway, back to Batman. The fan-made rosters I’ve seen don’t always throw the Caped Crusader into the healer role, but the ones that do always use the same excuse for it: making Batman a healer would encourage more people to play healer, because Batman is a popular character. And while I half-agree with this sentiment - it would be great to turn a mega-popular character into a healer to coax more people into playing the role - hero-shooter character design is more complex than that. Typically, you should be able to tell what a character in this genre can do at a glance - both to attract new players into playing by enticing them with an appealing aesthetic that implies a style of play that they would enjoy, and to help players in the middle of a round differentiate combatants and make snap decisions. Marvel Rivals is unique in this area compared to its peers due to the fact that its entire roster is made up of existing characters. Some of the heroes on its roster have existing in the public zeitgeist since the 1930s, giving them a long time to settle themselves in people’s heads; a Marvel fan will look at Captain America and already have a concept in their mind of how he’s supposed to play, and that imagined playstyle is extremely important to Marvel Rivals’ appeal.
Marvel Rivals is insane to me in this way. Some of the game’s roster feel like they’d be right at home in a more grounded competitive shooter - characters like Jeff the Land Shark, who can support his team with pickups and swim around in the terrain, or Squirrel Girl, who just focuses on lobbing grenades into crowds of enemies - but some of the cast have elements of their gameplay that would sound ludicrous to me if this game didn’t exist. Three of the game’s Duelists can fly indefinitely, completely negating any cover you might be able to hide behind. Doctor Strange can create portals that connect literally any two points of the map. Spider-Man in particular plays exactly how you would imagine he would play, with all the wall-crawling, web-swinging action you would see in a single-player game, making him insanely hard to deal with in capable hands (read: not mine). And the reason some of these characters play the way they do is because we, as fans of Marvel, already have an idea of how they would play. NetEase simply had to capture these fantasies within the kits of each character, making them both functional and faithful to their source material. If you want to play as Wolverine in this game, you’re not gonna just get a hero-shooter DPS character with claws, you’re gonna get Wolverine.
In a more technical term, these are called player fantasies, and in my experience, they’re very important to the design of just about any game. Every game is built with a fantasy in mind that is intended to be captured through its gameplay, giving the player a real sense that they are actually doing what the game advertises. For instance, players who play ARMA want a gritty military experience where the guns and tactics feel real, or Tekken players want the feeling of a strategic hand-to-hand fight with a fantastical edge thrown in. This can be narrowed down to characters, too - if you play as Minecraft‘s Steve in Super Smash Bros., you don’t want to just play as any character, you want the character to feel like Steve. The same goes for Batman, and as such a popular character, other games have already tackled the challenge of making a game that makes you “feel like Batman”.
Batman: Arkham City (2011), Rocksteady Studios, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
The Arkham series of Batman games have legendarily accomplished this feat with flying colors. Plenty of reviews exist from the time of the game’s release that state it exactly. The Binary Messiah’s 9/10 review of Batman: Arkham Asylum directly states in that one of the game’s positive features is it “Makes you feel like Batman”, and the statement was used so much by other outlets that Videogamedunkey even poked fun at it in his brief review of Batman: Arkham City. I wholeheartedly agree, though - the Arkham games do make you feel like Batman. They do this by basically presenting the player with all the tools you would expect Batman to have, and ample opportunities to use them. Hand-to-hand combat flows like you’re controlling a master martial artist, with parries, stuns, and takedowns that you would hope the Dark Knight would use. Alongside your fists, Batman comes packaged with a growing arsenal of tools for both combat and puzzle solving, from iconic Batarangs to more niche tools like hacking devices and voice mimickers. The game basically lets you live out your fantasy of having a tool for every job, but relying on your wits and skill to use them efficiently - which is basically Batman to a T. You can really tell that when Rocksteady was developing these games, they actually did go in with the mindset that they wanted the players to, well, feel like Batman. Meanwhile, less single-player focused games like Injustice also manage to capture the vibe of Batman with a combination of aesthetics and gameplay, working in tools like Batarangs and Grappling Hooks into the Dark Knight’s moveset alongside hand-to-hand fisticuffs moves that encourage smart play - counters, mix-ups, and outranging the enemy are basically a requirement for optimal Batman play. I’ve always wanted to give kudos to the guy who decided his supermove in the first game should be hitting the foe with a precisely-timed Batmobile.
So with all this in mind, how can Batman translate to a hero-shooter? A lot of Marvel Rivals fans have said he could just play like Moon Knight does, and while I don’t disagree, I’m not one for half-measures… so I wrote a moveset for him myself.
Batman would be an attacker, or in Marvel Rivals terminology, a Duelist. His goal as a hero is true to his history as a character - slip behind enemies lines unseen and take out enemies with a combination of stealth and fear tactics. This turns Batman into a considerably complex character that would be difficult to play, true to Marvel Rivals’ interpretation of Spider-Man, who is similarly elaborate and difficult to play despite his popularity. Also similar to Spider-Man, the first passive ability Batman would have access to would be a direct translation of his movement tools from his other video game appearances, namely gliding with his cape. This mechanic would work the same as it does in the Arkham games, which is a big ask for a hero-shooter, but to me this is the same as perma-flying characters in Marvel Rivals; it’s an absurd feature to give to the character, but it’s so integral to the fantasy of playing Batman that it would be a crime not to include. The next two passives would go hand-in-hand to allow Batman to achieve his goals - when Batman goes unseen for long enough, he gains additional movement capabilities increase and he gains a debuff he inflicts when making surprise attacks. This would give a Batman player the real feeling of sneaking around to take out enemies that the Arkham games provide, another pivotal part of the fantasy of playing as the Dark Knight.
From there, my version of Batman’s toolkit is actually deceptively simple. His only real methods of dealing damage are his Batarangs for ranged combat and his melee attacks for emergency scenarios. The rest of his kit is populated by various tools that make Batman’s job easier and help his allies - an echo locator to help him trace potential targets, a smoke bomb for covert escapes or to catch enemies by surprise, and a grapple gun to help him move around or close distance between him and a target. I’d want Batman to feel like he could strike from anywhere at any time, and really put the “superstitious, cowardly lot” feeling into his foes. To me, these tools are also the sort of “bare minimum” to represent his utility belt’s capabilities, and alongside the Batarangs, are essentially the character’s most iconic sorts of tools. As for his potential Ultimate ability, a swarm of bats has not only been a part of Batman’s famous repertoire since the iconic series Batman: Year One, but it has also made its way into other adaptations of the character like Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. On top of being iconic, it would provide him as a hero more cover to eliminate opposition and inflict his Fear mechanic, further tying his moveset together rather than branching it out too far from itself.
I firmly believe that this is the sort of thing most Batman fans would be looking for in a game like Marvel Rivals. They want to really feel like Batman, sneaking around and delivering shadowy vengeance on their foes… but it doesn’t solve the actual problem at hand, the one that others before me have identified. The problem that not enough people pick healers. Putting a popular character like Batman into a healing role would help rectify the problem, at least in theory, but it wouldn’t be true to his character and would only serve to alienate players looking for the proper Batman experience.
…
So I think we should do it with The Joker instead.
Joker is just as popular of a character as Batman, being his iconic nemesis and all. He’s had comics, cartoons, even films dedicated to him and him alone. He has no shortage of fans, not by a long shot. However, unlike Batman, he’s a much more fluid character that can fit a number of roles. He can be funny and serious, overly-cartoony and worryingly grounded, laughably silly and deadly serious. Joker is practically a liquid, filling whatever container he’s poured into, so long as he can retain his iconic, clownly style and panache. If you ask me, if a game like this needs a popular character to fill the role of a healer to encourage more players into playing that role, then he’s the man for the job. And don’t worry - I gave him the same treatment as Batman.
Joker was considerably harder to assemble a kit for than Batman. This in small part due to the fact that there already exists a hero-shooter character with a vibe almost copyright-infringingly close to his: Junkrat from Overwatch, the maniacal criminal with a penchant for sowing chaos with his area-denial-based kit. Joker is an agent of chaos , which is probably to thank for his ability to take on whatever role a story calls for, but I wanted him to embody that in his kit as a hero-shooter character. As a Support, Joker would be less of an overt “healer” and more of a straight up support character, whose role is both to upkeep his team and be a nuisance for the enemy. Hence, his abilities often have aspects that confront his foes with debilitating statuses or make him frustrating to deal with. A six-shooter pistol with a comical BANG! flag that acts like a kick-me sign for whoever it hits, chattering teeth that bind an unfortunate victim in place for his team to eliminate, and laughing gas that doubles as both a healing AoE and an area-denial tool for his enemies that leaves them unable to heal their own wounds. The only part of his kit that is straightforward would be his alternate fire, which simply throws playing cards to allies for some on-command healing. For an Ultimate, I decided to hearken back to the Adam West era of the franchise by giving Joker a bomb he just can’t get rid of, spewing his laughing gas behind him and making him a literal ticking timebomb that enemies would be better off running away from or disabling from a distance.
By making Joker more of a unilateral “support” character, he upholds the fantasy of a psychopath that invokes misfortune on the people around him, sows chaos on the battlefield, and best of all, encourages enemies to kill him. Joker’s main goal in comics these days has been to make Batman finally give up his code and resort to putting him down once and for all, and by making him such a nuisance on the battlefield, Joker can remain true to his motivations and the fantasy of playing him by drawing the ire of his opponents. Even I’m shocked by how well it works out. And because of not just how popular the Joker is as a character, but how easy to grasp and useful his abilities would be, he would make for the perfect choice of a character to include as a “healer” to coax in the crowd that otherwise wouldn’t touch the role with a ten-foot pole.
Now, I did say I’m not one for half measures. I had fun putting these two concepts together, and as I learn more about game development in Unreal 5, I’d love to put together a prototype like these two and make them actually real… but I must admit, Batman and Joker aren’t the ones I have in mind. No, like the other content creators I mentioned above that have made their fan rosters, I too have done the same. Perhaps it’s just my Guard Dog project on my mind, but I really like the idea of a hero-shooter character prototype, and being such a big DC fan, I couldn’t help myself.
Below is my own fan-made roster for a hypothetical DC Rivals game, but for the moment I won’t be showing any of the movesets I have cooked up for the cast. As I up my skills with Unreal 5, I want to see if I want to try my hand at making any of them real first - perhaps as practice for the Guard Dog, or even instead if I get tied up in the creative process enough. We’ll see - I’d hate to go back on my word considering the other posts I’ve made here, but a prototype is a prototype, and there are some kits in my pitch document that I’m really interested in seeing brought to life. But that’s for another time. Hopefully sometime soon I’ll be able to add such a prototype as a new section to my portfolio!
Attackers:
Aquaman
Batman
Black Canary
Bloodsport
Blue Beetle
John Constantine
Fire & Ice
The Flash (Wally West)
G.I. Robot
Green Arrow
Harley Quinn
Marilyn Moonlight
Martian Manhunter
Plastic Man
Raven
Robin (Damian Wayne)
Static
Tanks:
Big Barda
Cyborg
Green Lantern (Jo Mullein)
Gorilla Grodd
Lex Luthor
Superman
Swamp Thing
Wonder Woman
Supports:
Dove
The Joker
Krypto
Livewire
Mister Terrific
Poison Ivy
Stargirl
Zatanna
