If you logged off Marvel Rivals a few days ago and haven't checked back in, you missed something good. On July 30 NetEase dropped Path to Doomsday: Avengers Age of Ultron, a new PvE mode where you and a squad of up to four players play as the Avengers and try to stop Ultron from turning Avengers Tower into a graveyard of Sentry bots
It's not a reskin of an old mode either. You fight your way through the Tower first, then get pulled into something called Ultron's Data Space, a corrupted digital area that looks nothing like anywhere else currently in the game, before facing Ultron himself as the final boss, twice, because apparently beating him once wasn't punishment enough
The playable roster is pulled straight from the movie. Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow and Scarlet Witch are confirmed, with some reports also listing Thor and Hawkeye in the mix, and every hero has a kit that's been reworked specifically for this mode. Leave your ranked muscle memory at the door, Iron Man isn't throwing the same combos here that he does in a normal match
There's two difficulties, Normal and Hard, and Hard only opens up once you've cleared Normal. Push through and you can earn a free Ultron skin along with titles, sprays and an emote tied to different challenges. NetEase have called it a limited time event, currently set to end August 27, though anyone who played Blood Hunt earlier this year will remember that mode got extended after the community kept asking for more of it, so nothing is set in stone
This is chapter two of a bigger series called Path to Doomsday, which started back in Season 7 and is building toward something much larger tied to Avengers Doomsday later this year. Chapter one leaned PvP with a mode built around the first Avengers film. Chapter two ditches that completely for cooperative PvE instead, which honestly feels like the right call for a mode built around a tight cinematic story rather than another ranked lobby
New content like this is always more fun with people to actually play it with instead of queuing solo and hoping for the best. If you want to work out which hero pulls their weight on Hard, figure out the Data Space section as a team, or just want someone to run it with, come find us