I QA tested for Marvel Rivals, have you seen this?

[ Posted originally on a now defunct message board on 4/27/2025 by SamuelIron77 ]

I know it's weird to post this now, months after launch, when the hype cycle's already dying down. But I’ve been debating whether I should say anything, and to be honest, I’m still not sure I should.

I worked on Marvel Rivals as part of an external QA group. Third-party, contract-based, mostly backend testing: animation bugs, hitbox inconsistencies, patch note verification, that kind of stuff. Nothing exciting. I never expected anything beyond long hours and crunch. But there’s something still in the game—or maybe buried under it—that I can’t explain. Something that wasn’t supposed to be in our build at all.

And I don’t think it ever got removed.

All this started during a basic map rotation pass. We were testing verticality changes in New York (Block 6A, internal designation). There was a version of the map that had been split off for traversal testing—no combat, just an open city block with collision zones flagged for adjustment.

In that build, you could load in solo. No match needed, just a free-cam plus your chosen hero.

I picked Doctor Strange.

When the map loaded in, I noticed things felt heavier. Movement was fine, technically—no frame drops or asset streaming issues—but it felt like something was pushing down on the whole scene. Like the engine was trying too hard to keep the rendering stable. The colors were slightly desaturated, not dramatically, just enough to make the scene feel older somehow, like it had been saved and re-exported too many times.

The skybox had changed. Not broken—still rendered, still within the visual style—but the lighting was strange. No clouds, no visible sun, but everything had this cold dusk glow, as if a storm had passed but left something behind. The dynamic lighting was turned off too. Shadows were baked into the geometry in a way that didn’t match the objects casting them.

There was no music. Just Strange’s idle VO and the faint wind loop.

As I moved forward through the empty street, I noticed the storefronts had placeholder names. Not unusual—many were always tagged "TEMP_AD" or "PROP_DOOR_3"—but these were different. One of them just said “REMEMBER.” Another read “INHERE.” It could’ve been a joke by one of the artists, but I didn’t recognize the naming convention.

Strange’s cape physics were acting odd, too—tight and stiff around the shoulders, like he was bracing for a fall. I walked him down a narrow alley and turned the camera. That’s when I noticed the light cones weren’t casting correctly. They would dim as you moved closer, like your presence suppressed them. It wasn’t a graphical bug; it felt deliberate.

I kept walking. That’s when I saw the model on the far end of the block.

Just standing at the edge of the fog line.

A lone figure. At first I thought it was part of a new NPC set we hadn’t been told about. But as I got closer, I realized it was one of the playable characters.

Wolverine.

No movement. No nameplate. Just standing perfectly still, half obscured by the haze.

I tried pinging him. Nothing. I switched to free-cam and flew closer.

Still nothing.

It wasn’t until I dropped back into third-person that the model twitched. Not a full animation. Just a head movement. No easing or transition—just a single frame shift. It felt like a logic error. Like something in the scene graph was trying to reference a controller it didn’t have.

But then the street behind me changed.

When I turned the camera, one of the store windows that had previously been boarded up was now lit from the inside. Soft yellow glow. And through the dirty window, barely visible, was what looked like Iron Man’s silhouette—just the top of the head and the shoulder line.

But the scale was off.

I turned Strange back toward Wolverine.

Still motionless.

Except now he was facing me. I moved closer, expecting him to trigger or enter idle animation, but he didn’t move at all. No shoulder twitch, no ambient breathing. Just... frozen. That was the first thing that really stuck out. Every character in this game has micro-idles—fidgeting, breathing, shifting weight—but this one just held. His arms hung too low, slightly bowed at the elbows. His claws weren’t deployed, but his fingers twitched occasionally, like the rig couldn’t decide what pose to settle on.

From a distance, it could’ve fooled anyone. Wolverine’s recognizable design was all there—the blue and yellow, the cowl, that short frame, the exaggerated proportions that fit the Marvel Rivals style. But as I got closer, it started to unravel.

His outlines were wrong. Not glitched—just subtly thinner, sharper in some places, like the toon shader had been pulled too taut. His yellow wasn’t quite yellow. It edged toward rust, a muted ochre that looked out of place next to the rest of the stylized world. The blues on his suit were too deep, almost stained. Like something had been wearing it longer than it was meant to be worn.

I pushed Strange forward. The camera felt tight, like a rubber band stretched to its limit. Every step made the fog creep in unnaturally around the corners of the screen.

Then the model moved.

His head turned—not in a smooth arc, but in discrete frames. Two degrees, then a pause. Then more. The eyes didn’t follow me, but the face did. Slowly, the shoulders turned with it, like it had finally caught wind of where the camera was.

He walked.

A perfect movement animation, but it didn’t belong there. There was no blend from idle. No logic trigger. Just the walk cycle, perfectly stitched in, like it had been force-fed into the animation queue.

I hit the button for Strange’s portal step—nothing. No effect. No cooldown. Like the ability didn’t exist.

Then the shadows around the Wolverine model began to ripple. Not the ground shadows—his outlines. They began to jitter faintly, flickering between frame-perfect lines and strange, almost hand-drawn alternates. Like the render pipeline couldn’t decide which style to settle on.

I looked closer at his face.

The expression had locked. A grin that didn’t match the rig. Too high on one side. The kind of smile you’d see on a character mid-animation, before the blendshape resolves. Except it wasn’t resolving. The geometry of the mouth was clipped slightly into the cheek, like it had been stretched manually.

Then the screen went black. No crash. No menu. Just a silent transition back to the launcher.

I checked the game directory.

A new folder had appeared in the content files: /Content/Characters/_echo/

It wasn’t part of the tracked build. Inside were image files—thumbnails, mostly corrupted. Most were gray blocks, but a few loaded. Screenshots. One of them showed the moment before the screen cut out.

Strange on the street.

Wolverine halfway through turning.

And in the distance, a second figure. Far enough away to be blurred out, but the red and gold was unmistakable: Iron Man.

Except his limbs looked wrong. Too long. Stretched like the rig hadn’t compressed correctly. No arc reactor. Just a dented chestplate and the glow of eyes that didn’t seem to reflect anything.

Over the next few days, more images appeared.

We hadn’t even launched a new build, but the folder kept updating. Like it was generating captures on its own. Sometimes duplicates, sometimes variations on the same scene. In one, Wolverine wasn’t present at all. Just Strange, facing down an empty street, as the Iron Man figure leaned slightly out from behind a lamppost. Like he had always been there, waiting for the scene to play out again.

Others had entirely different characters—Black Panther, Scarlet Witch—standing alone in that same foggy block.

But they were never moving.

And the Iron Man model was always there.

One of the senior testers said not to worry—probably a leftover from an old debug environment—but even he seemed unsure. A few of us started keeping track of the changes. Someone tried renaming the folder. Another zipped it and moved it offline. It always came back.

Different path. Same files. Slightly changed timestamps.

We stopped reporting it after that. Not officially. We left it out of our QA sheets, wrote it off as an untracked ghost branch no one wanted to own. But we all saw the same thing: the number of files growing. Like something was keeping its own changelog. Something trying to remember us.

The next day, Block 6 was gone. Not just removed from the map rotation—erased entirely from the dev folder. Even archived builds showed no record of it. It was like the entire test environment had been scrubbed and overwritten. I brought it up casually in the internal Slack. Said I was seeing missing geometry in a deprecated build. A few minutes later, someone from the tools team posted a reply: “Known issue with unauthorized sandbox instance. Internal team has deprecated this path. No action needed.”

That exact sentence had been used before. Months earlier, during a test cycle for a different patch. Same words. Same format. As if they had it saved somewhere. A template response. I asked around privately. One other tester messaged me: “If you saw it in Block 6, delete whatever it gave you. Don’t unpack the assets.” Then they unadded me.

I know this probably sounds like a crashout or paranoia, but I’m posting this here because I’ve seen a couple weird screenshots floating around the internet—stuff that didn’t make it into patch notes or model updates—and it makes me wonder if the folder really was ever removed.

So here I am, asking you guys:

If any of you data-mined the game and found anything labeled “_echo” or saw characters in solo mode that shouldn’t have been there—especially Wolverine or that weird Iron Man rig—please check your capture folders. Or just reply here. Even if it sounds dumb.

We weren’t supposed to talk about Block 6.

But we also weren’t supposed to see what was still living in it.

Edit

Pub: 05 May 2025 23:43 UTC

Edit: 05 May 2025 23:58 UTC

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