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Marvel Rivals Lead Says Doctor Strange's Portals Were Challenging To Make

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By Vaspaan Dastoor

Published Feb 6, 2025, 3:51AM EST

Vaspaan Dastoor is a News Editor for TheGamer. He has been in the industry since 2017, previously working as the senior editor atIGN Indiaand in the advertising world before that.While international games news is hisforte, he loves telling the world about India's growth in the industry.

He loves scouring the depths of the internet for niche or community-focused news, and always attempts to make you laugh along the way. With a weird affinity for top-down perspectives, the likes of Diablo, Baldur's Gate 3, and The Ascent all make Vaspaan's list. However, he's also an avid fan of the Mortal Kombat series, to the extent that he even liked the 3D games.

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Summary

Doctor Strange's portals, present technical challenges for Marverl Rivals developers.
An innovative portal rendering technique allows for creative tactical maneuvers in battle.
Even Dormammu would have struggled with it.

Marvel Rivals is almost an anomaly. The hero shooter not only looks and performs well, it's also fun to play, has a healthy content roadmap, and, most importantly, does not feature predatory microtransactions. It's no wonder that the game has managed to hold on to its player count for longer than any other recent multiplayer game.

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There's also the fact that we get to play as our favourite Marvel heroes and villains, with their powers tuned perfectly to fit the hero shooter genre. Things like using Jeff's Ult to toss a whole team off the map and Magneto's ult to send Iron Man's ult back at him add to the fun. But the most creative of these is Doctor Strange's portals. Understandably, NetEase had a tough time with them.

Marvel Rivals Devs Had A Hard Time Dealing With Doctor Strange's Portals

Speaking to Epic Games, technical lead designer Ruan Weikang revealed that it wasn't easy to make the portals work the way they do. Unlike games like Portal and Splitgate, which require the portal to be on a flat surface, Marvel Rivals allows you to place them in mid air, at any angle. This proved to be an "unprecedented challenge" for the developers.

[Doctor Strange open a portal around Adam Warlock in Marvel Rivals.]

"Creating portals that enable real-time spatial connections and bi-directional combat interactions not only presented complex gameplay implementation challenges," said Weikang. "But also introduced unprecedented performance demands when combined with advanced graphics features".

Weikang went into deep technical detail about all the things that the team tried, but those resulted in substantial CPU and GPU stress. Eventually, the team decided to implement a "modified ViewPort split-screen implementation. This approach integrates portal rendering directly into the main view pipeline."

Weikang concluded, saying "the end result successfully captures the essence of Doctor Strange's iconic abilities while adding meaningful tactical depth to gameplay, ultimately justifying the technical investment."

Thanks to this innovative technique, you can pull off some great stunts like tricking a team off a ledge as they rush out of their spawn area, or insta-killing Punisher and his turret.