I like that they put Dr. Cossack’s daughter in V.
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Hakan is like the only “new” SF character that feels like they could’ve existed in the original SF2 or 3S roster. His normalcy vs monster/freak ratio is so spot on to SF2/3’s vibe, it’s perfect.
I like a lot of the new characters besides Hakan, but Hakan definitely embodies the feeling of classic SF design to me the most.
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We know SFV was underfunded but given how SFxT, V (even with all its updates) and MvCI turned out, I’m starting to think IV, TvC and MvC3 were good because Dimps and Eighting led development. Before that and you’re talking 20+yrs ago and most of those people are gone. I suppose Itsuno is still kicking ass.
There’s that but also I don’t think there was any pressure to push an “esports” angle.
IV, TvC, and MvC3 were all varying degrees of “unbalanced” that wouldn’t have been tolerated just a few years later.
(This may also be why they’re varying degrees of good, unlike the latter games.)
It’s been interesting seeing how people react to Strive, and how…Blizzard-like? so much of the player base is. Just a whole lotta people demanding nerfs and tweaks on a level I haven’t witnessed before. Does this have anything to do with the topic at hand? I don’t know, I’m gonna go to bed now I hope.
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honestly i live for the drama of frequent nerfing and tweaking to any popular vidcon, best thing about all these games-as-services
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I hate how volatile FGs have become as a result of the amorphous metagame. There is no longer a game where 400 hours in your character actually gives you a steppingstone to widely encompassing mastery, rather than what is now a complete solution. The immutability of a large standalone arcade release necessitated contentment and forced a compromise between an entire competitive playerbase and game designer as players can spend decades picking away to a game’s core.
New tech was discovered in Super Turbo in the 2010’s. That’s not something that will ever happen in a current fighting game. They’re all solved and leave nothing to be discovered because every minor tweak or character release is a perfectly-fitting puzzle piece, perfectly laser-cut without texture or imperfection. The whole DLC character thing is like, antithetical to long-term competitive play because by the time a game has a “complete edition” with every character, you’re either already years too late for the gold rush of discovery, or you’re playing the last generation game that’s unhip and out of date because the developer has moved on to the next silver platter.
Not to mention I just fucking hate esports and I hate how many scrubs cry about Sol having too many pressure options or whatever because they’re two weeks new to the genre instead of having spent real physical coins for the privilege of a player teaching you, the hard way, in the real flesh zone, how to block and dodge everything, whether you wanted to get off the machine or not. Now you can just cherrypick your ranked matches, or spend zero time playing against another player but still have the attitude that the devs owe you to make the game easier.
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I’m not really sure what this is supposed to accomplish other than fetishizing lost paradigms. I love super turbo. it’d be a better game if o. sagat and claw were less ridiculous and cammy was playable. you can always argue for what exact level of hands on is appropriate, but total hands off is just dated. people even community balance old egregious titles that are nonetheless still beloved these days, with things like ratio tiers in MvC2 and CvS2, soft banning characters with infinites in old KoF or marvel games, etc.
it doesn’t take much to know that Strive would/will be better with nerfs to sol and tweaks to some brainless abusable normals, that’s just the application of knowledge. in the old days, those balance changes still came, they just came by calling the game XX #Reload and charging you for it instead of releasing a patch. even arcade machines got revision changes. the other thing is we remember the games that are still loved despite shit balance or strange meta altering bugs, but we don’t remember the games that just fucking died that maybe didn’t have to.
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Yes I’m fetishizing practice, practicing gets me horny and makes me cum
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Weekly patches are not the same thing as balance updates. The gap between AE2012 and Ultra SFIV meant practicing the current game in its entirety and adapting to powerful playstyles
The gap between a Strive balance patch is enough time for players to complain and then get what they want without any effort on their part, without having learned anything, because a character being unbalanced is automatically the game’s fault and not the player’s fault for being unable and unwilling to adapt and change the way they play and practice the things that they’re losing to
strive literally lets you pick your ranked matches. you can get to the highest rank while entirely avoiding fighting a specific character. I’ve lost count of the number of strive players I’ve seen just refuse to fight a character because they’re “broken” or whatever and complain about people being braindead when strive is like one of the most accessible games in a decade
speak for yourself. Fightcade is thriving and I actually play the games.
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folks, who’s excited for mortal kombat at evo
It’s ok Felix I wasn’t going to post anymore
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i don’t have strong feelings about games being balanced sooner than later, i guess. i mean i also don’t really love the demands from players to devs because of the weird entitlement stuff that seems to plague all forms of fandoms these days, but i’d say my main complaint is that there seems to be a much shorter window of time from people “learning the game” via trial and error to just immediately knowing the best strats in these games which shift as soon as a new patch drops and then everyone rushes to memorize the new strats. it makes keeping up with a game feel a lot more intense and like something i don’t have the time for
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a large part of it is that I simply don’t like returning to a game after a hiatus and having it be completely different. Tekken 7 season 1 is not even close to the same game that season 3 is. I completely dropped it because I couldn’t keep up
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i used to really enjoy playing Marvel 2 a lot with my friends. i was never great at the game, and i never tried to play competitively, but i had considered myself “pretty good.” when the XBLA release came out on 360, i played a match against someone from SB1.0 (sorry, i forget who) and they were like “i’m gonna show you how Marvel is played” and then they did and they just absolutely destroyed me with the competitive-level strats lmao.
never played MvC2 again
edit: to clarify, it felt freeing to be owned so hard and realize i didn’t care enough about the game to learn that stuff
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I’m by no means a metagame analysis expert, especially not for Strive which I stopped playing very quickly as I realized it wasn’t for me, but as a people observer, the high amount of Sol complaints seems to come down to:
- everyone was already saying during beta 2 that Sol feels like he’s playing a different game in terms of how good his options are compared to the rest of the cast
- ArcSys came out and said they intentionally made Sol stand out because he’s the main character and beginners will choose him, so he needs to be effective
- buffing Sol to make him an effective beginner character unfortunately does not also buff beginners’ ability to determine what options are effective counters to Sol, so the end effect is that Sol feels even more dominating in lower ranks than in higher ranks
- (and I guess there are a lot of first-time FG players playing Strive too so they may have completely different expectations for how metas evolve over time)
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see, with a regular update schedule they can afford to make aggressive moves and fuck up like this and i think that’s fine? less pressure on your poor studio grunts to get everything right first time
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no one is calling for weekly balance patches, these aren’t mobas. just saying “lol get gid” isn’t really a great argument. like, sure, but the sol players are gonna git gud too and their character is just better, he has things that are otherwise not allowed in the game. the game is better if you aren’t fighting him in 50% of your matches, it’s better without a character that has natural frame traps that are plus on block while also having the highest damage in the game, the best defense, and a 3f move that also anti airs and leads to full combos. no one else gets those things, sol doesn’t die if he loses 2 of them, everything is fine.
but that’s just…something else entirely. doesn’t have anything to do with balance. I’d love if they got rid of it, but it’s an argument you have to make outside of balance concerns. if anything they can use it to justify a deliberate unbalanced design if they want.
I’m not talking about the games people play, I’m talking about the games they don’t. fightcade is great, I suck balls at everything so I only use it to play against people I know. it will keep games like kof 02, 3S, ST, A2 etc. around for all eternity, but there are a lot of games no one plays, fightcade or no, and maybe in a world where developers could be more hands on that wouldn’t be the case. we have the ability to do that now, and I think that’s useful
The first time I fought a good Magneto in Marvel 2 I honestly thought the netcode was bugging out.
(I am not naming the other members of their team because I didn’t even get to fight them.)
I hate this, especially since these games tend to be awful at documenting what’s changed. Going back to SFV after a break was maddening; they’d changed my character in all these seemingly arbitrary ways and I had to consult external resources to figure out what was up.
It’s also a huge issue when the updates are bad and you can’t just go back and play the previous version. Everyone I know who was into Tekken dropped it with season 3. Maybe it was just in my circle, maybe it wasn’t that widespread, but I can’t recall enthusiasm for a FG cratering like that. And this predated the pandemic forcing everyone to play using that crummy netcode. They addressed some of the issues with a patch but the game still seems in a worse spot than it was and now I have no interest in ever going back to it.
The whole regular update/season pass thing could work of course but so far I don’t know of a game that’s pulled it off* and I’m not sure Strive will be the one. My enthusiasm for the game has nose-dived since Goldlewis update. They didn’t fix any of the online issues, they didn’t add any of the new features they’d advertised, and they delivered a character who was instantly recognizable as possibly the worst in the game. And maybe that’s better than another Leroy situation, where Namco released a blatant pay2win character, but when a game is as Designed as Strive it’s very hard to imagine a situation where some tech is discovered that will make playing Goldlewis worth the effort. Having these characters who feel like real crummy losers is a way bigger issue than the top tier being so strong.
Also the rank resets fuckin suck, having to pummel all these folks who are not on my level so I can rank up again is really, really not fun for me and I can’t imagine it’s enjoyable for them either.
So now I’m waiting for an update that may address things, may not, coming on a date they may not actually hit and I dunno, I feel like I’ve been through this with every post-SFV FG and it sucks. Drip feeding content in an FG just feels more unsatisfying than in other genres, and in my experience these incremental balance updates tend to be mixed bags at best. Just…real hard to maintain enthusiasms for a game or character that may be totally different in a month.
*if MK has I wouldn’t know because I hate how that game feels
I think a lot about Vanilla Marvel 3 Sentinel, where everyone was freaking out about how OP super armored 2h and 5h, 2h were. And Capcom nerfed the character almost immediately, which fucking sucked cuz Sent was quickly revealed to be Not a Problem.
(Phoenix was.)
I don’t think Sol is another Sentinel, or Wesker, or any of the other allegedly OP-at-launch characters that folks have cried about since online FGs became a thing. I think much of the whining over him is pathetic but he is also clearly the best character in the game, I don’t think there’s much to learn in regards to countering him, and that is unlikely to change. I don’t want to see him tweaked much though, I think just messing with RISC a bit or something like that would help. I actually expect they’ll show some restraint with him.
I do expect some stupid nerf to Nago though and if that happens I’m uninstalling the fucking game 
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Also nowadays “external resources” tend to be Discords and that is just the fucking worst thing, thank goodness Dustloop is still around
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Also keep in mind that online means way way more matches get played in a game today than in other eras. So when you say there was “time” to figure stuff out and come up with new tech back in the day… that shit would just get grinded out in a month today, because 500k people all with access to videos and discussion in real time, all with the ability to play 100 matches a day whenever they want, is a meteoric increase in the ability of the community to figure stuff out
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