Avengers: Endgame's Final Battle Becomes Playable in Marvel Rivals' New 50-Player PvE Mode

Thanos has his work cut out for him. NetEase has just revealed the first gameplay footage of Marvel Rivals' new "Path to Doomsday - Avengers: Endgame" PvE mode, and it features a whopping 50 players taking on the Mad Titan at once. Heroes like Captain America and Iron Man face off against Thanos' legion, as the big bad swings a massive dual-bladed sword that can instantly kill his foes. The scene loosely recreates the final battle scene in Avengers: Endgame, as the forces of good and evil clash on a desolate landscape next to a destroyed Avengers Tower. In practice, the mode looks a bit like a multiplayer version of Dynasty Warriors.

There's one other notable change: Thanos is now Giant-Man-sized.

While this 50-player PvE mode seems out of step with Marvel Rivals' usual six-versus-six multiplayer matches, NetEase Games has been building toward this moment. The game previously added a PvE zombie mode in which four players face off against a horde of undead that seems to behave like Thanos' army of underlings. Rivals also already supports a chaotic 18-versus-18 player mode, as well as the Times Square Hub, where up to 100 players can gather. Still, combining the game's larger-scale multiplayer with PvE will create a new kind of chaos. The mode will be released with Rivals' upcoming Season 10.5 update on Oct. 23.

What else is coming with Marvel Rivals Season 10.5?

Marvel Rivals' upcoming update unfortunately breaks one of the game's most impressive streaks: for the first time in 17 months, it won't get two new heroes in a season. While Rivals has added a new character roughly every month for over a year (seasons generally last two months, with a big update at the middle point of a season), NetEase announced that Season 10 will have only one new character, Gorr the God Butcher, so the team can focus on the many new modes coming to the game.

In addition to the 50-player Avengers: Endgame mode, Season 10 already brought the "Path to Doomsday - Avengers: Infinity War" mode, in which six teams of two players battle it out while earning upgrades and Infinity Stones. The yet-unrevealed Halloween: Night of Illusions event is also on the way, described as an "interactive puzzle." This season saw the release of the God Quarry map, alongside a long list of skins. NetEase has promised that after Season 10 ends, the studio will resume its breakneck pace of releasing roughly one new character every month.

Marvel Rivals is available free-to-play on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X. A Nintendo Switch 2 release is in the works.

The next Avengers movie, Avengers: Doomsday, hits theaters on Dec. 18.