I mentioned in my review of MvC3 that there is no Spectator Mode. This means if you join an eight-player lobby and you’re not one of the two players currently fighting, you cannot watch the match and are instead forced to watch their license cards do a little dance in the lobby screen while you wait for potentially seven other players to fight before joining in on the fun. Watching friends and other players fight is entertaining and a great way to learn new tricks so this was a surprising omission, especially since it was included in Super Street Fighter IV as well as the XBLA version of Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
We were previously told by Seth Killian a few days before release that it would be added later via a patch. Well don’t get your hopes up. Producer Ryota Niitsuma talked about why this is impossible in an interview translated by iplaywinner. When asked if it was because of technical issues, he responded:
“That’s correct. This title is a 3-on-3 and the game speed is very fast, so the volume of communication data is larger than in SSF4. Even if we added in all those kinds of systems, they’d be no good if the matches were full of lags“
So there we have it. No Spectator Mode…ever.