Captain America came out swinging this week with a new Marvel Rivals skin—literally. The game has a bit of a reputation for being gooner bait (which its creative director doesn't even really dispute), but Steve Rogers took things to a whole new level with a super soldier package in his skintight Seaside Sentinel swimsuit. Seriously, that thing is a distraction. And while he is hardly the first to have... let's say, distracting assets, NetEase has rolled out a 4th of July patch to tone down his bulge. And the community, being what it is, noticed immediately.

"These skins were so controversial that the devs had to release a 'hot fix'," Reddit user Glittering-Compote21 posted to over 4,200 upvotes. The skins in question are the aforementioned Captain America swimsuit, and Rogue's wedding dress, which was a little more transparent pre-patch. Though when I say 'toned down,' I don't necessarily mean 'smaller.' Captain America's bulge is still massive. As several fans pointed out, it's just the rigging that appears to have been changed, ensuring that "it doesn't bug out and flop around during emotes."

Or, as PunchTillItWorks said, a "cold fix."

"Looking at the assets in Blender it's the same," Spanksinsreddit continued. "They just adjusted the rigging and the positioning so it doesn't flop around." Or, as Sharp-Primary-213 so elegantly put it, "They just changed the rigging so it's not ready to poke someone's eye out in certain emotes." Steve Rogers is still packing Earth's Mightiest Avenger, it's just a little less animated.

Was It Really A Bug?

Granted, as you can see in the image above, with the 'rigging' changed, it does look a lot smaller—I would love to go back to my university lecturers and show them what came of my journalism degree.

This has stirred up a bit of a debate around how Marvel Rivals handles the two sides of the gooner coin, with a few fans noting that NetEase is much slower to 'fix' skins for female characters, if it even does. "I find it funny how ppl were complaining about Rivals sexualizing female characters for a year straight and nothing happens," adam whorelock posted on X. "But people start unnecessarily complaining about Cap's big ass donkey dick and not even a week later, they nerf his manhood."

Marvel Rivals is no stranger to bulge (see exhibit: Magneto), so it's a little odd that NetEase almost immediately tamed Captain America's, and there's plenty of dispute over whether it really was a bug. Some have suggested that the onslaught of posts online is what stirred up the "cold fix," not necessarily that it was broken. Knowing how NSFW the rest of the skins are, jiggle physics dialed up to ten would hardly be out of character for the game.

Marvel Rivals Like Follow Followed Third-Person Shooter Action Multiplayer Systems OpenCritic Reviews Top Critic Avg: 78/100 Critics Rec: 84% Released December 6, 2024 ESRB T For Teen // Violence Developer(s) NetEase Games Publisher(s) NetEase Games 10 Images Close
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