If the embed won’t play, the No One Rivals Doom cinematic is also here on YouTube.
The caveat comes first, because Doom would insist on it being in the opening paragraph and in a larger font: none of this is official, and NetEase hasn’t confirmed a word of it. What we have is a leak from the dataminer X0X_LEAK, posted on Sunday 8 November, claiming that Doctor Doom will join Marvel Rivals as a playable hero after Nightcrawler, under hero ID 1069, and that he will come in two flavours: a Vanguard version and a Duelist version.
So a tank one match and a damage-dealer the next, which is entirely in keeping with a man who has never met a job he didn’t think he could do better. The dual-role idea has a precedent, since Deadpool already juggles three roles, and earlier leaks spotted hero 1069 being added to the same multi-role file that handles him. Most players had assumed Doom would be a Vanguard, on the grounds that he’s built like a wardrobe with a cape and his leaked model is reportedly about the size of Thor’s. Now he may not have to choose. Doom does not compromise. He simply has two of everything.
As for timing, Season 11 launches on Friday 13 November, and NetEase’s Dev Vision presentation on 10 November should reveal what’s in it. Creative director GuangGuang has promised a return to two new heroes a season, after Season 10 managed only Gorr. Nightcrawler is the widely leaked first arrival, and Doom is expected in the mid-season 11.5 update in December. That would put him on the battlefield at about the same time Robert Downey Jr’s Doom reaches cinemas in Avengers: Doomsday on 18 December, and the game’s year-long Path to Doomsday event has been building towards exactly that. You don’t need a doctorate from Latveria State University to see where all this is heading.
It has been a long wait. Doom has been the villain of Marvel Rivals since before it launched: the 2024 cinematic No One Rivals Doom, embedded above, cast him as the big bad, at war with his own variant Doom 2099 across a tangled timestream, voiced by Travis Willingham. For two years he has been the man behind the curtain, and players have spent most of that time asking when they get to be him.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we’d happily bet that whichever version arrives first, the community will spend its first week demanding nerfs and its second week maining him anyway. And if you thought you had already had your fill of Doom on posters, socks and, as we noted the other day, Jeep adverts, brace yourself, because there are six weeks still to go. Until NetEase speaks, though, file all of this in the drawer marked rumour, the one labelled “very probably, but don’t quote us”.
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