Technologies

Marvel Rivals Season 3: New Phoenix Trailer Had Me Screaming ‘What?!’

The new duelist’s first gameplay trailer shows off her explosive abilities and ultimate.

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.

Technologies

Starlink Plans to Send 42K Satellites Into Space. That Could Be Bad News for the Ozone

Technologies

Scary Survey Results: Teen Drivers Are Often Looking at Their Phones

New troubling research found that entertainment is the most common reason teens use their phones behind the wheel, followed by texting and navigation.

A new study reveals that teen drivers in the US are spending more than one-fifth of their driving time distracted by their phones, with many glances lasting long enough to significantly raise the risk of a crash. Published in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention and released on Thursday, the research found that, on average, teens reported looking at their phones during 21.1% of every driving trip. More than a quarter of those distractions lasted two seconds or longer, which is an amount of time widely recognized as dangerous at highway speeds.

Most distractions tied to entertainment, not emergencies

The top reason teens said they reached for their phones behind the wheel was for entertainment, cited by 65% of respondents. Texting (40%) and navigation (30%) were also common. Researchers emphasized that these distractions weren’t typically urgent, but rather habitual or social.

Teens know the risks

The study includes survey responses from 1,126 teen drivers across all four US regions, along with in-depth interviews with a smaller group of high schoolers. Most participants recognized that distracted driving is unsafe and believed their parents and peers disapproved of the behavior.

But many teens also assumed that their friends were doing it anyway, pointing to a disconnect between personal values and perceived social norms.

Teens think they can resist distractions

Interestingly, most teens expressed confidence in their ability to resist distractions. That belief, researchers suggest, could make it harder to change behavior unless future safety campaigns specifically target these attitudes.

The study’s lead author, Dr. Rebecca Robbins of Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said interventions should aim to shift social norms while also emphasizing practical steps, such as enabling «Do Not Disturb» mode and physically separating drivers from their devices.

«Distracted driving is a serious public health threat and particularly concerning among young drivers,» Robbins said. «Driving distracted doesn’t just put the driver at risk of injury or death, it puts everyone else on the road in danger of an accident.»

What this means for parents and educators

The researchers say their findings can help guide educators and parents in developing more persuasive messaging about the dangers of distracted driving. One of the recommendations is that adults need to counter teens’ beliefs that phone use while driving is productive or harmless.

While the study’s qualitative component was limited by a small and non-urban sample, the authors believe the 38-question survey they developed can be used more broadly to assess beliefs, behaviors and the effectiveness of future safety efforts.

Technologies

Nintendo Switch 2 Joy-Con Issues? It Might Just Be Your HDMI Cable

Make sure to use the Switch 2 cable included with the new gaming console.

As the Switch 2 continues to sell in the millions for Nintendo, it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’d be some issues with the console. It appears, however, that one problem Switch 2 owners are facing is actually just a matter of using the wrong cable.

Reddit users have posted about their Joy-Cons disconnecting when they’re playing on their Switch 2 while it’s docked, an issue spotted earlier by IGN. It does appear that, luckily, the issue can be resolved by using the included HDMI cable for the Switch 2 rather than an older, slower one — including the cable that came with the original Nintendo Switch.

Nintendo laid out the solution on its support page for when the Joy-Con 2 starts disconnecting from the console:

Confirm that you’re using an «Ultra High Speed» HDMI cable to connect the dock to the TV. If it’s not Ultra High Speed, your console won’t perform as expected when docked.
If you’re using a different cable than the one that came with the console, it should have printed on the cable that it’s «Ultra High Speed.»
The HDMI cable that came with the Nintendo Switch is not «Ultra High Speed» and should not be used with the Nintendo Switch 2 dock.

Nintendo didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the source of this issue.

Since the Switch 2 launch, many gamers have come to realize that Nintendo’s new console is very picky about what cables are connected to it. This goes for the HDMI cable as well as the power cable.

While the new and old Switch share the same name, they don’t share the same components. The Switch 2 is a huge upgrade in graphics power over the 2017 console, which means it needs the appropriate power supply. Not providing the Switch 2 with sufficient power could likely cause some issues, especially if the system has to do a lot of work to run a game.