Jeff the Shark in stylized shot with hero name for the Marvel Rivals hero menu

Wipe the opposing squad with Jeff's silly ult and then spray on them. Screenshot by Dot Esports

Best mods for Marvel Rivals

Here are the best mods for Marvel Rivals.

Andrej Barovic

Published: Dec 21, 2024 10:41 am

Marvel Rivals is one of the best hero shooters ever to be released. In a world where Overwatch 2 lost the plot and Team Fortress 2 hasn’t had an update in seven years, it feels like a godsend.

Top Marvel Rivals mods

FPS Boost

A buff green man named the Hulk aiming his fist at an armored flying robot. Total mayhem is around them and smoke and debris are flying everywhere and a massive text stands on the image saying: "Marvel Rivals +150 FPS." — The mod promises a massive increase in FPS, though results will vary based on your hardware. Image via noizros on Nexus Mods

As with most Unreal Engine 5 games lately, Marvel Rivals seems to have caught a bad case of poor optimization. The game does not run well on most machines, with stutters being the most common problem voiced by the player base. The FPS Boost mod tweaks the game’s .ini settings to make it less demanding (and significantly worse looking) and to fix its stuttering issues. It is not a guarantee that this mod will fix everything that might be troubling your instance of the game, though it should relieve a lot.

Pairing this mod with the built-in FSR 3.1 and frame generation (if you can hit at least 80-90 FPS, don’t toggle it on otherwise) should boost your game’s performance significantly and make it smoother and easier to play. If by some chance the .ini changes do not work, the mod also offers a light tutorial on some in-game settings you should tweak to make it run much better.

Pochita Jeff

A couple of smiling sharks standing on a podium, both are orange and have the handles and blades of chainsaws protruding out of their heads in Marvel Rivals. — There’s nothing better for a murderous shark than a God damned chainsaw strapped to its head. Image via yakuzadeso on Nexus Mods

Most mods for Marvel Rivals are based on cosmetics, meaning they change the way characters look in the game. This will only apply to your instance and others will see your character as normal (unless they, too, have the same mod installed). Anyhow, Pochita Jeff is certainly one of the better-looking cosmetic mods for the game. It turns Jeff, one of the most popular heroes in the game at the moment, into Pochita, the horrifyingly cute chainsaw-dog hybrid from the popular Chainsaw Man anime and manga series.

It is a simple mod and comes in a couple of different variants (Jeff himself already looks a lot like Pochita, so not much work had to be done there) and gives this fantastic support hero some extra flair and character, though it’s not like he lacked them in the first place.

A bunch of heroes going toe-to-toe on the fields of Asgard. One is holding up a force shield, some are throwing bolts and glowing orbs, others still are shooting at each other in Marvel Rivals. — Why wait for pointless logos and movies when you can get into the action ASAP? Image via NetEase

Okay, I get it. Everyone wants to see some fancy animations and introductions for their shows, games, and other visual media. However, in the case of live-service titles, which you’ll probably log into several times per day, it can get tiring eventually. This pair of mods from yakuzadeso gets rid of all the annoying logo pop-ups and movies that only delay your jump into the next match. There’s no need to repeatedly remind one that NetEase and Marvel worked on the game while using the Unreal Engine. Once is good enough.

CJ as Winter Soldier

A character selection screen showing the heroes Punisher, Thor, Venom, Winter Soldier, and Wolverine. Instead of his regular self, the Winter Soldier is portrayed by an African-American man called CJ who is leaping out of his frame with his fist closed and raised up in the air in Marvel Rivals. — Just look at how mad he looks! Image via Leonaura on Nexus Mods

It wouldn’t be a list of mods without at least some mention of the GTA: San Andreas protagonist, Carl “CJ” Johnson. He seems to be the first character modded into every single game that supports modding, from Armored Core 6 to Baldur’s Gate 3 and beyond. In Marvel Rivals, he comes in the place of the Winter Soldier, having the ability to hop around and do crazy s**t to everyone on the map, all for the glory of the state of Grove Street, of course.

Big Smoke as The Punisher

The Punisher hero in Marvel Rivals portrayed as an African-American man wearing a green shirt and a hat, holding a massive gun smoking from its barrels. — Big Smoke loves his smoking gun. Image via Leonaura on Nexus Mods

Why have CJ in the game based on the Marvel universe (known for its many civil wars) and not include his biggest adversary? Big Smoke, at first one of the protagonists and then the main antagonist of GTA: San Andreas, is the perfect antithesis to CJ and his brother, Sweet, who unfortunately doesn’t seem to have a mod of his own just yet. Having him as the Punisher is near-perfect as he can use his firepower to absolutely wreck everything on the many Marvel Rivals maps, following his trigger-happy character from the original game.

Disable Outlines

The hero Captain America in Marvel Rivals facing to the side of the camera. He wears a massive suit modelled after the American flag, with blue, red, and white accents, and a giant white star on his chest. — Without the outlines, Captain America’s model looks mint. Image via yakuzadeso on Nexus Mods

While it is undeniable that Marvel Rivals went for that “comic book feel” and aesthetic, the black outlines on characters and items can sometimes be quite jarring. The 3D models look serviceable enough and do not feel too cartoony, making the outlines generally redundant if you don’t like seeing them. The Disable Outlines mod removes them entirely, giving the heroes a more realistic feel and allowing the underlying Unreal Engine 5 to really shine through.

Carnage skin for Venom

The hero Venom selected in the Marvel Rivals hero selection screen. He does not look like himself, but rather the hero Carnage from Marvel Comics, with strange red eyes, a black spider across his body, red skin, and pipes going through him. — The modder only lightly changed the original model but gave it so much more character. Image via Stardom1 on Nexus Mods

Venom is among the better-looking heroes overall in Marvel Rivals. It is a shame that Tom Hardy wasn’t given the chance to reprise his role as this infamous symbiote, though one can only hope for a future collaboration. Even so, his character remains fantastic and is only amplified by this brutal mod by Stardom1, who turns Venom into one of his symbiote cousins, Carnage. He looks precisely as his name implies, with glowing yellow eyes and irradiating red “skin,” embodying the concepts of brutality, savagery, and, well, carnage, so perfectly.

Symbiote Spider-Man

The hero Spider-Man from Marvel Rivals wearing a black-and-white suit with a massive white spider on his chest. — This black-and-white version of Spider-Man feels so much better, especially if you disable the outlines. Image via Stardom1 on Nexus Mods

While on the topic of symbiotes, why not turn the Amazing trash-talker into his best iteration from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3? Combining the aesthetics of Venom and Spider-Man, you’ll get an awesome-looking black-and-white iteration of the fantastic web-slinger, which I believe looks miles better than the default model the developers at NetEase went for.

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