Battle Hub adds some (optional!) personality to competing with strangers online which I think is close to a necessity in online fighting game multiplayer since otherwise its pretty easy for that kind of thing to slip into a depressing slog.
Obviously there are some people who prefer to cultivate that sense of community in external platforms like Discord or whereever else and there’s benefits to that obviously but i think those things already self-select to a degree & personally, anything that makes a competitive game potentially less hostile to newcomers is a gift.
Hm yeah maybe the player avatar thing does feel like a necessity to modern online gaming. Heck I worked on an MMO, where the only playable characters WERE avatars, and customization parts ended up being a huge part of what I tried to crank out for each update. (I happily avoid such things in my own gaming life though so I’m not really up on this aspect of things gaming-wide.)
ALTHOUGH… I still think in regards to appealing to a wider audience, SF would be better off sticking to a more basic approach to gameplay–like, no more complicated than Super Turbo, at most–rather than continuing to make the gameplay more and more complicated.
i personally love when competitive games i like have a lot of chill modes so the online scene isn’t a ghost town where i wait 20 minutes for a match against a fiend who hasn’t played another game since this one released
Tekken 7 is almost ten years old and the console release came almost 3 years after it first appeared in arcades. They added parts over that time and you had to really grind to unlock them. It was a large part of the game’s monetization and locking pieces behind season passes was a part of that. So yeah, examining what they’re doing with 8, which is console-first as far as I can tell, is more useful when discussing this sort of thing.
The biggest games in the world are stuff like League of Legends and Fortnite so I don’t think the masses want simple games. Mechanical depth is a huge draw and helps foster communities, which leads to making more money. Street Fighter’s biggest obstacles to renewed success were largely cleared away with 6 and I don’t see how making it even more basic is possible or even desirable for Capcom or the majority of players. It’s great seeing new players giving updates on their progress! And that there are new players to begin with! And that so many have stuck with the game! And they’ve stuck with it largely cuz the basics are easy to grasp – everyone instantly understands Drive Impact!! with Modern controls all you gotta do is hit a button to chuck a fireball!! – but there’s still so much to learn and there are so many clear markers on the road to improvement. This wouldn’t be happening if the game was limited to like 2 hit combos or whatever, as there would still be a class of player that dominates but to most folks getting really good at spacing pokes is a much less interesting or obvious skill than learning a cool Drive Rush combo.
Fair. I don’t know if SFII is “simple” exactly, though. And there is a huge amount of mechanical depth in its brokeness (this is also apparently why KOF '97 is still huge in China?). (Heck I just came from playing the ST port in Capcom Classics Collection Vol. 2 on PS2, which has EIGHTEEN PAGES of tips to unlock on all kinds of ridiculous shenanigans to go try.)
If SF6 does end up garnering a much bigger following than previous versions, that’d be great. I get the sense that it’s doing pretty decently in that regard, but from Twitch viewer numbers and so forth it doesn’t seem like it’s gone like mega mega huge.
Didn’t Tekken beat VF because it was way more button-masher, big explosions friendly? (Edit: Oh whoops, also because it had more story stuff.)
I’m not really sure I understand Drive Impact–like, sometimes it stuns, but sometimes it doesn’t? And there’s a good deal of critical detail to get down in terms of how operates against opponents depending on their status, and how it interacts with blocks, parries, counter DIs, and so on. And I also find it confusing to watch, because it can be hard to make out what went on exactly if there’s a fast exchange of counters around a Drive Impact; now that I’ve watched more matches, I kind of know what MUST have happened, but I’m not really able to see it clearly in the moment. When I first saw it in matches, I found those exchanges intensely baffling.
RE: single player and battle hub, I’ve been thinking maybe most people who play fighting games approach them as just another kind of single player action game whether they realize it not (even when playing multiplayer), not unlike a Streets of Rage or a Devil May Cry. People find the combat system cool but the 2-player aspect of isn’t really internalized. So giving people that SF story mode gives people the action game “campaign mode” experience, complete with running around in 3D (this is something an abstraction like MK’s Invasion isn’t able to do), and the Battle Hub is like an extension of that with lots of more wacky enemies to fight.
It stuns if you counter hit your opponent- that is, you hit them during the startup or recovery of one of their own attacks. If you hit them normally, as in they just don’t block it, drive impact just causes knockdown. If they block it, drive impact is blocked just like any old regular attack (despite the really exaggerated blocking animation).
damn, no posts here in over a month. did fighting games die again!?!?!?
I’ve been playing a little of MK1, which is my first MK game since, like, MK trilogy. I’m bad, but it’s fun. people in MK like to one and done, which doubly sucks when the loading times are garbage on the PC version. getting used to MK cancel windows is a struggle. I play ashrah. she has a sword and a hat, which is a pretty good start for a fighting game character.
also going back to third strike again, which I always seem to do. somehow I’m not too bad at this game, finally. you gotta know what you’re doing to beat me! usually! sometimes!
Huh! That’s interesting. Are these people who just got crushed, or is that even when they win handily?
In my head they kind of did because I played through SF IV and 6 and now I’m done with them. ^ _^ I’ve now narrowed down my game playing–of all games…oh except maybe occasional Angband sessions for a change of pace–to pretty much just KOF 2000, CvS Pro, SSFIIX–those three in Flycast with just 1 frame of input delay–and VF4 Evo. Still having loads of fun with those. : ) Playing Goh’s Quest mode (on Beginner 'cause Normal gets prohibitively hard around 7th or 8th dan, like it just starts stopping most moves from working on it at all for me ; D) in Evo and that’s surprisingly fun 'cause he actually just plain kicks and punches lots, with the occasional hefty judo WHUMP thrown in.
I could add my not-so-hot take, which is that the engine is so old now it almost looks adorably janky. They sure keep on doing what they’ve been doing! I suppose this is what comes of having no real competition in their subgenre.
Somewhat old news but I’d missed it: Arika is handling rollback netcode for Tekken 8. Apparently the rollback they eventually added to FEXL (like three netcodes in or so, and the one they added to FEXL:AD) is well thought of.
usually they’ll stick around if they win, one loss and they’re out. and fatality every win, of course. people really have, like, the opposite desires of me when it comes to these games. I really don’t like playing short sets, which is one of the main reasons I don’t like playing ranked in any of these modern games. I just want to grind out long sets with people, that’s way more fun than playing two or three games.
