i’m ok with the current season pass model. you buy the game once and you get all the updates, you pay if you want the added characters and stages and skins if the game has them. the thing where people get stuck with outdated versions of the game that no longer have players or support should stay dead
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I’m waiting to hear if there’s going to be any kind of upgrade option like SFV’s champion edition that put all the costumes and character in one package that was a better deal than buying it all a la carte. The fact they mention a save transfer leads some small hope. If not it just a repeat of the MVC3 to UMVC3 deal but this one comes with the Fall Guys lobby game for the value add.
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They do have weapon skins in this game but you have to play story mode for them. They probably should’ve added some more skin packs for those that want to put cash down for more.
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ungrateful
they gave you a Gold Ship lobby skin for free and this is how you respond?
I had to sign dark pacts with Gamblor for more Gold Ship
I think the DLC model has largely killed my interest in modern FGs. Much prefer having one big update with lots of stuff to learn than a bunch of incremental ones. There’s just no thrill to them for me, having to keep up with somewhat frequent patch notes and character additions/tweaks makes these things feel less like a fun sandbox to mess around in and more like fucking homework (for me)
Also they’re still fucking expensive, they never discount the dlc enough and it can be confusing figuring out what to buy!! No I’m not too old for this shit I could beat all you all at these games believe it!
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deffo hate modern fg patch culture and I only feel motivated to play games that are past their support window
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You can buy the weapon skins in GBFV–don’t have to play Story mode.
Arcsys hasn’t actually diectly said anything about the work involved precluding alt costumes, it’s all conjecture from fans, and misled conjecture due to early misunderstandings regarding their art pipeline to some extent. It’s still almost all bone-based, the main difference with, say, street fighter is secondary animation is actual animation rather than physics. So as long as you’ve got the same skeleton an alt costume is not particularly more work than usual (and of course you could always author the extra bones if that’s really necessary). That being said of course, Arcsys is actually a pretty mall company (although they’ve grown a lot in the last couple years).
Other than Elphelt, Sol’s dragon install in Xrd works by swapping the model and reusing the normal animations, Videl in DBFZ has an alternate model that’s admittedly a haircut change but still a significant one IMHO to the extent that the long hair versions require extra bones, at least three of the Granblue girls that were touched up to be less immediately fanservicy have alts that are closer to their mobile versions, plus the weapon skins, and there might be others, but it’ all still pretty minor stuff.
My general feeling is they don’t do it because people still accept paying for the mere palette DLCs so they don’t way to set expectations higher.
Re buying a new game instead of a patch, something to not discount is it might come with a new campaign, with FG players don’t care about admittedly.
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Xrd’s lead character modeler actually discusses it here, about 23 minutes in, says “If you want to make characters wear extra clothing [their process] makes it very, very difficult.”
Video’s from 2018 so of course their process may be different now.
I coulda swore he also discussed it in this GDC video but that is harder to skim through, did think if there was any fan misconception it came from this video though.
So it’s def Arcsys who planted this seed, though yeah, they may make plenty of money off selling colors so why bother with new skins. And I guess I’m down with that as a player, I’d feed the beast and buy colors if it meant they never do alt costumes, few things tick me off more than not being able to instantly ID a character in a competitive game.
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idk why people are against patches. in the old days, as with granblue apparently, you bought the patches. now you buy the characters. if you don’t want a character, you don’t buy them, you still get to play the game with everyone else. I’ve yet to be aware of an example of a game being stuck on a patch that makes it a dramatically worse experience than something earlier, so I’m not sure what the downside is. maybe your character gets nerfed a little or something and it makes you sad, but it beats buying a new version of the game entirely where the same thing happened. imagine if you bought street fighter 5 on launch and you were stuck on a season 1 version of the game because you never bought the rest because season 1 was fucking terrible. if you wanted to try out the current version years later, you’d have to buy it again. now you don’t. you won’t have half the roster, but it beats having nothing.
I don’t even play any current fighting games, but people act like the shitty balance of so many old games is some mystical advantage because, idk, there’s charm in playing a character that is completely useless.
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feel like it’s probably not the concept of patching but how they’re used a lot of the time and how easy it is to imagine nightmare versions of super turbo and quakeworld where the numbers are swapped around every couple of months to appease The Subreddit
though i disengaged from playing comp games way too seriously ages ago and my last experience of anything even close to this was bungie/destiny where swapping the meta around was something they’d do in lieu of #content
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Yeah the frequency of patching combined with most FG resources moving to Discord is just a fucking hassle. If things like patch notes were included in-game, alongside updated tutorials and such, it would probably be less of an issue for me. I’m very glad devs like ArcSys actually release patchnotes now but they’re not in-depth enough and that shit should be in the game. Looks like SF6 may be taking steps towards correcting that at least with the training mode frame data.
Also I cannot train against DLC characters without buying them (unless there’s a game that offers this feature and I don’t know about it), that’s a pretty big issue if you want to compete.
Also deliberately overtuned DLC characters are definitely a thing and I am not gonna bust on folks who feel like they’re being pressured into paying-to-win. Like, I remember Leroy at launch, that shit was fucking ridiculous, I usually roll my eyes at balance complaints but I do not blame anyone who dumped the game while he was at his worst (best).
Like I’m not against patches in theory and I really don’t carry a torch for the way things used to be but as I said earlier drip feeding content and game tweaks doesn’t appeal to me at all. I’m glad Japanese devs are less patch happy than Western devs but there’s something about the way things are handled that makes me feel fuckin’ tired whenever I boot up a game after a break and I have to relearn a bunch of shit. This isn’t an issue I have with things like Dota! I’m not sure exactly why this is! I am probably going to obsessively think about it for the next 3 weeks! But maybe it all really boils down to:
Or maybe it’s cuz I don’t think any recent fighting games are good enough to put any real work into, that is probably the problem.
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you can in some games, but I don’t remember which ones. should definitely be a standard feature, along side many other things that are not standard features in fighting games (replay takeover plz)
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The Skin mods for strive shows its absolutely possible to make alt skins for these games with out being forbiddingly difficult. For Arc I guess it’s just the ratio of quality and effort to time and money isn’t worth it for them.
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I’d never seen that one. I stand corrected about Arcsys never mentioning it then!
(Also they don’t talk about it in the GDC one)
One big use case I could see, although I don’t know whether it currently exists in fighting games (but it does in other genres), is maybe the system was more interesting (or even just different enough) before the patches. Like, my fave fighting game is Vampire Savior and it is a cult hit that eclipses its sequels Savior 2 and Hunter 2. In the modern approach Vampire Savior would have been overwritten by the inferior Savior 2 and lost to time.
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I never really care about the overall balance. If the game is still fun at the end of the day, bad balance just means less information to retain because people are only going to be playing the viable characters. Might get blown out once in a blue moon by a low tier character specialist, big whoop. Tekken Tag 1 is a great example of this. By all accounts, it has shitty balance because it has 3-4 viable characters. But it also means that’s pretty much all you’re going to go up against and that makes the metagame a lot easier to grok than something like Tekken 7 where most characters are viable.
My day job in software development is all about constantly adapting to change and evolving platforms. All I want is a break from that in my entertainment, and I’d rather just be bad at dead games that stay stable than be bad at games whose changes I don’t have the time or desire to keep up with.
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i think patches also cause us to lose the history of how developers respond to community strategies and where their creative desires were taking them. you can load up super sf2 in an emulator if you wanna see that exact moment in capcom’s thinking but you can’t fire up sf5 1.03 or whatever until someone figures out how to emulate an entire service game backend
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looking at the history of the metagame of games like smash bros melee shows that “balance” is provisional and more or less a function of who the top players are at the time. multiple characters have moved in and out of the top tier list that no one would have ever thought would be remotely viable. I’m sure this has happened in other more traditional fighting games too.
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oh yeah, that’s the other thing I forgot. every time I launch a game and it tells me all my saved replays are now unplayable because the patch changed makes me wonder why they even bother with the replay feature at all. just let me export direct to mp4 if you’re gonna do that shit
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Sure but Melee is in a category of its own.
I haven’t been into fighting games until recently, but in Strive I could see that the ability space of the characters was constrained and known enough that you could put all their attributes in a spreadsheet, represent execution barriers as success percentages similar to RNG dicerolls, and come up with a theoretical strength score for each character.
A half-assed version of that wouldn’t work, but a full-time game designer could wind up producing one with a pretty good relation to reality, after ensuring their assumptions were themselves carefully informed by reality.
I would be curious to hear the devs talk about this, but I suppose the balancing process probably was a mix of that sort of modeling plus player reported experiences, whereas in a messy game like Melee it was probably 100% the latter. And in Strive they got it mostly right and most characters were in the viable range of tier and didn’t move around that much, although the DLC characters were balanced worse for some reason.
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