As Marvel Rivals gets ready to kick off season 3 next week, we’re getting our first glimpse at some of the upcoming changes. And, with respect to my poor beleaguered Blade bros, the biggest news for me is that Jean Grey, original member of the X-Men and sometimes terror of the cosmos, is joining the roster as Phoenix. 

There’s plenty more coming, including Blade in Season 3.5 next month, but Phoenix is the headliner for me, and here’s our first look at what she can do. 

Phoenix’s abilities in Marvel Rivals

Phoenix joins as yet another duelist — an already oversaturated role, but one that feels appropriate for her. She brings a mix of area-of-effect damage that can help chew through groups of enemies as well as mobility that lets her flit around the battlefield to find flank angles. 

Phoenix’s primary fire appears to instantly apply damage to enemies with no travel time (also known as hitscan) and apply some kind of flame stacks to opponents, represented by up to three flame icons above their characters. In the trailer, heroes appeared to detonate when hit at full stacks, releasing a burst of additional damage around them.

Her alternate fire sends a rapid-fire burst of flame that creates a series of small explosions, similar to Hela’s alternate fire. In the trailer, we see it used on a group of enemies with maximum flame stacks to detonate everyone and effectively burst down the entire opposing team at once.

Her first ability is a quick dash. In the trailer, Phoenix uses it to jump backward, dodging an enemy Venom looking to crash down on her. 

Her second ability appears to be a limited-duration flight, allowing Phoenix to freely fly around the battlefield for a few seconds. The flight is on a resource meter that recharges while Phoenix isn’t flying.

Phoenix’s ultimate is what made me scream. I’ve watched the trailer several times and my best description of how it appears to work is, «You crash to the ground, kill everyone in your way and explode.» And I mean everyone — in the trailer, we see Hela in her ultimate, wherein she flies up into the sky and her health jumps up to 1,000 HP, get erased when Phoenix ults through her. In addition to also killing Rocket and Psylocke in one shot, the ultimate also clears deployables like Rocket’s rez beacon and Peni’s nest while whittling Peni herself and Groot down to a sliver of health in the explosion. 

A mobile hitscan hero who with a stacking mechanic and a meteoric ultimate? Yeah, sign me up. Between this and Overwatch 2’s Freja, this longtime support/strategist main may have officially turned into a damage/duelist main.

When does season 3 start?

Marvel Rivals season 3.0 is scheduled to start on Friday, July 11 UTC. Typically, this involves servers going down for a few hours around midnight PT before being turned back on for the new season in the very early morning.

What about Blade? Haven’t we waited enough?

Rivals continues to make Blade fans wait, since that hero won’t be added to the roster until season 3.5. But at least that’s only a month away under the new season structure. 

Rivals season 3 balance changes

In the Dev Visions vol. 7 video, Rivals devs gave us a quick breakdown of the upcoming balance changes, though we’re still waiting on full details from official patch notes. Here’s the quick breakdown, with any confirmed details in parentheses. 

Buffs:

• Venom
• Thing (gains a new ability to jump to enemies, possibly knocking down fliers)
• Namor (primary fire)
• Scarlet Witch (ultimate)
• Invisible Woman (healing efficiency)
• Mantis (healing and ultimate utility)

Nerfs:

• Emma Frost
• Iron Man (poke potential)
• Punisher (turret)
• Mister Fantastic (survivability) 
• Loki (ultimate charge)
• Ultron

Team-up changes

Rivals is adding two new team-ups, tacking heroes onto two existing ones and removing two others (Storming Ignition and ESU Alumnus) from the game. It’s also nerfing another. Here’s the quick rundown:

• New — Primal Flame: Phoenix anchors to add damage over time and lifesteal to Wolverine’s attacks after his leap. 
• New — Ever-Burning Bond: Human Torch anchors to let Spider-Man shoot a burning web with a flaming tracer. (The flaming tracer stacks with Spidey’s regular tracers, devs said.)
• Updated — Symbiote Shenanigans: Adds Hela, giving her Soul Drainer Hel Sphere slowing tendrils.
• Updated — Stark Protocol: Adds Squirrel Girl, giving her an explosive, homing gauntlet. 
• Updated — Guardian Revival: Devs said they’d be nerfing some element of the Guardians’ team-up.

Other things coming in season 3

The battle pass is getting some adjustments to account for shorter seasons. Battle passes still offer 10 skins, but you’ll earn tokens at a faster rate to make it easier to progress through the entire battle pass in the shorter time period. Daily missions are also going away, with weekly missions shifting to permanent quests instead of being time-limited. Seasonal missions that offer large batches of tokens are also being added.

Rivals devs also announced a new competitive mode coming in season 3.5 but said we’d have to wait for any details about it.

The game is also adding accessories (which appear to be animated stickers that float above the KO notifications), new chroma options and visual effects for ultimate abilities. Perhaps the nicest quality of life change is the ability to mix & match MVP animations with any skins, instead of having certain MVP animations locked to specific skins. 

Rivals needs a win

Season 3 is a major turning point for the hero shooter, marking the start of its new two-month seasons where we’ll be getting new heroes every month — one at the start of the season and one at midseason. The new cadence is an aggressive pace for expanding the game’s roster, and threatens to keep the metagame churning even faster, assuming those new heroes are relevant at launch. 

That’s important because Rivals has been bleeding active players since launch. Based on SteamDB data, the start of each new half-season brings in fewer players than the previous. (For example, fewer players joined for season 2.5 than for 2.0.) Most games lose players over time, but for a live-service game, that kind of consistent drop is bad news because it means fewer players coming back each season to spend money on battle passes and cosmetics.

And while Rivals was a hit at launch, the game has struggled with player retention, whether it’s due to in-game toxicity, role-based infighting, frustrating metagames or just generally losing the luster of being a brand-new game. 

How do you fix that? Not easily, that’s for certain. But adding an iconic member of the original X-Men and giving her fun gameplay in the form of mobility and unique mechanics can sure help. 

I’ll tell you this much: It’s working on me. 

Microsoft is moving ahead with mass layoffs, cutting a little less than 4% of its workforce or about 9,000 roles across the company. Perhaps unavoidably, multiple games in development within Xbox Game Studios have been cancelled as a result.

When reached for comment, Microsoft directed CNET to reports Wednesday by Variety, confirming their accuracy.

«To position Gaming for enduring success and allow us to focus on strategic growth areas, we will end or decrease work in certain areas of the business and follow Microsoft’s lead in removing layers of management to increase agility and effectiveness,» Microsoft Gaming chief Phil Spencer wrote in a staff memo Wednesday morning, as published by Variety.

Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty confirmed the game cancellations in an internal email published by Variety, naming Perfect Dark and Everwild specifically, as well as other «unannounced» titles.

«We have made the decision to stop development of Perfect Dark and Everwild as well as wind down several unannounced projects across our portfolio,» Booty wrote in the email. «As part of this, we are closing one of our studios, The Initiative.»

Booty added that the decisions to axe these games «reflect a broader effort to adjust priorities and focus resources to set up our teams for greater success within a changing industry landscape. We did not make these choices lightly, as each project and team represent years of effort, imagination and commitment.»

What Xbox games have been cancelled?

Perhaps the most significant title cancelled amid these new layoffs was a reboot of the classic FPS series, Perfect Dark. The studio that had been working on this new title, The Initiative, will be shut down entirely. 

The long-awaited new entry in the sci-fi espionage series has been in the works since the studio opened in 2018 and first showed off gameplay footage for the title during an Xbox Games Showcase in June 2024.

Another notable title getting the axe is Everwild, a long-gestating new IP from Rare, the revered British studio Sea of Thieves, which Microsoft acquired in 2002. Over the decades, the studio has also produced the original Donkey King Country games for the SNES, the original Perfect Dark for the Nintendo 64, Conker’s Bad Fur Day and the Banjo-Kazooie series.

According to unnamed sources who spoke to Video Games Chronicle, numerous job cuts and a broader restructuring are expected at Rare, resulting in the game’s cancellation. The sources also confirmed reports over the years about Everwild’s somewhat turbulent development, claiming that it had «struggled to nail down a clear direction for the title.» 

The game has reportedly been in development for the better part of a decade, being officially announced in 2019, followed by a trailer in 2020. In 2021, reports emerged that development on the game had been «rebooted.»

The other title reportedly put out to pasture was an untitled new MMORPG from Zenimax Online Studios, the creator of the popular MMO Elder Scrolls Online, which has reportedly reached upward of 25 million players since launching in 2014. 

Details about what this title was are sparse, with Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reporting that the game went by the codename «Blackbird» and had been in the works since 2018. Windows Central said in its report about Perfect Dark’s cancellation that Blackbird was once intended to act as a successor of sorts to Elder Scrolls Online.

According to Variety, all games that were shown off during the 2025 Xbox Games Showcase in June will continue being developed.

California Tinder users will find a new feature when they open up the dating app on July 7: A mandatory Face Check on their phones will be required before they can log into their profiles. 

The Face Check step will begin with a new request to record a video of your face, a more casual version of setting up Apple’s Face ID login. Tinder will then run checks comparing your face data to your current profile pics and automatically create a small face badge for your profile. We know just how it works, because Tinder has already launched the feature in Canada and Colombia.

The technology, powered by FaceTec, will keep biometric data of the user’s face in encrypted form but discard the scanning video for privacy. Tinder will be able to use the face data to detect duplicate accounts, in an effort to cut down on fake profiles and identity theft.  

Tinder’s facial recognition rollout is also made to prevent catfishing, or people pretending to be someone else on Tinder to scam or blackmail them. But that also points to a deeper problem on the rise in dating apps — a growing number of bots, many controlled by AI, are designed to glean personal information or fool users into scammy subscriptions, among other problems. 

Tinder’s working against these bots on several fronts, including this Face Check push as well as ID Check, which requires a government-issued ID and other types of photo verification. 

There’s no word yet on when Face Check will move beyond California. 

The dating app also recently released a feature in June to enable double-dating with your friends, which Tinder reports is especially popular with Gen Z users. If you’re worried about the latest hazards on Tinder, we have guide to safety practices. 

A representative for Tinder did not immediately respond to a request for comment.