It’s the opposite of Capcom’s on-disc DLC character skins. It appears that the DLC costumes are completely missing from the game unless you buy them yourself. If you don’t buy a character’s customisation pack, then you will only ever see that character with default type A or default type B costumes. Unlike both console VF4s and vanilla VF5, the Customize option is completely disabled unless you buy a character’s costumes. The other costumes and costume parts are actually missing from the game until you buy one and download something. This causes a unique problem.
I bought the Sarah Customisation Pack for $5. If I play an online match using Sarah with a Type E Ulala costume:
[LIST]
[]Versus screen shows both players that I’m using costume Type E
[]I see my own Ulala costume
[]Opponent just sees Sarah’s default Type A unless they also bought Sarah’s customisation pack or Bundle 1
[/LIST]
How lame! I paid $5 for my character to have a costume, and it’s only visible to me and other people that own Sarah’s customization pack. If my opponent is using someone other than Sarah, I can’t see their costume, either. This happens even though I downloaded every costume in the game (2GB) and they’re now on my drive. So now I’ve got some questions:
[LIST=1]
[]Do you think $5 is fair for costumes that are only visible to you and other players with that spent their own $30 to see my character’s costumes?
[]Is it a good idea to just drop $30 and buy both Customisation Pack Bundles just to see the costumes my opponents make?
[]Is there a going to be a title update or free DLC to see other character’s costumes?
[]Would a custom Type B result in a default Type B for my opponent that doesn’t own my character’s costumes? (Answer: no, they get default Type A anyway)
[]If I win and get the special Ulala win pose, what does the opponent see? (Answer: they get one of the default win poses)
[/LIST]
My apologies if this has already been brought up in the console version thread, but I think this calls for its own discussion.
Edit: VFDC’s FAQ confirms some of this too. Since the base game also approaches XBLA’s 2GB limit, all the extra costumes and parts had to be removed and sold separately as DLC. No problem there.
Edit again: When you buy a customisation pack on 360, you get a 2GB download of all characters and only unlock the stuff you paid for. On the PS3, though, you buy a customisation pack, get a 100-300MB download of just the character or presumably a 1GB bundle, then whatever you downloaded unlocks. It seems that Sega wanted the buying and unlocking parts to be the same for both platforms, even though changes had to be made to downloading to accommodate each platform. I made changes to the post above to remove some complaining about this.
Edit 3rd time: So I found out that non-paying opponents always see default Type A when I use any custom at all. In online matches, not only can you not manually do an item win pose, but when one happens randomly, non-paying opponents just see a random default win pose anyway. Updated the OP with these answers.
Fair? Well, it’s the set price, personally I won’t complain because the game itself is just 1200msp, so I felt like spending some more money for the costume pack bundle that included my character.
It depends on how much you play and how much you care… sure, there’re SO MANY options that being able to see what the other players create is nice for me!
VF5FS is an amazing game. It’s easily worth as much to me as any other game I’d buy for $45. I’m really considering buying the bundles because I like the game so much. I really want to see other people’s costumes too. It’s just sad that the only way people can see the costume I’m using is to buy Sarah’s customization pack, if I understand this right.
I bought the 10 character pack and it was 2gigs. Is the 9 character pack around the same file size? (so a total of 6 gigs for the full game + dlc).
I think more fair solution would be if both 10 & 9 packs actually referenced the same “full costume pack” file, so that even if you can only customize half the cast on your machine, by purchasing one of the bulk DLC packs you could still see all costumes that other people have made online.
That could leave the door open for hackers to get half the costumes for free though.
(editing my edit):
actually i just looked at the file size for the sarah DLC and it’s 1.93 GB. This suggests that maybe my idea is already the case? I thought you might be able to see costumes for the other 8 characters that should be part of that download.
Anyway it’s unfortunate that some others can’t see your costume, but it’s nice that you can see it
It makes sense for technical reasons. That being said, the two gigs is actually every custom for all characters. I first downloaded Eileen’s which took forever. El Blaze took three seconds.
Thank you for confirming this. It’s worth noting that El Blaze is from Bundle 1 and Eileen is from Bundle 2. We can guess from here that the Eileen pack actually includes every character in the game, and your El Blaze purchase simply unlocked El Blaze in the files you already downloaded.
I downloaded Sarah’s pack, so I should have every costume in the game on my drive now. Why can’t I see them on other players?
I think it’s a side effect of porting the game to 360 from PS3. On the PS3 (which, by the way, was the initial console vanilla VF5 was ported to), when you buy the two DLC compilation packs, you actually still have to download and install each individual character separately. Also, each DLC costume set was a different filesize, between 100 and 300 mb each.
I think what happened was, the code that says “I bought a customization pack” and “I have a customization pack” are the same on the PS3, which makes sense for that platform. But when the code was ported to Xbox, the logic in that case wasn’t changed, even though they’re handling DLC in a totally different way. I’m sure it’s something that came up when they were testing the game, and they likely just didn’t have time to make it work properly.
Or maybe they just don’t want people to see the DLC costumes at all without paying for them.
Unlike most fg these days, it’s nice that you’re not forced to see all those stupid custom characters online. Thank you Sega, you really did great with vf5fs.
It’s nice that SEGA isn’t forcing you to pay extra for what you don’t want. And is not conning you by selling you a product with content you won’t have acces too. It might not be what you expected but at least it’s honest.
Thank you for this. So, it seems that the 360 is the only version where you buy one pack, download all of them, and unlock just the one you paid for. Microsoft’s policies for downloads probably make it cheaper for Sega to do it this way. On the PS3, Sega decided to make each character pack work just as you expect. Buy the pack, download just that character’s costumes and unlock it, and that’s all you have. At this point, Sega just had to make sure the buying and unlocking parts worked the same way on both platforms.
I’m seeing a lot of that in this thread. It seems the best feature of the costume system is that you can ignore it completely and only see the defaults. That’s a good idea, come to think of it.
So, let’s recap. You have to pay $30 if you want to see other people’s costumes. You can pay just $5 to get a costume, but only you and your $30-paying opponents are really going to see it, so I’m not sure it’s worth it. Or, you can pay nothing extra and play with default costumes only, which is a nice option to have. Whatever amount you pay is justified because VF5FS is just that good. The pay-to-unlock stuff happens in VF5FS, but only on the 360 version after you’ve already paid for and downloaded something else. This doesn’t seem so bad now, but it’d be nice if this was better explained from the purchase screen. I still don’t know what my non-paying opponents see.
Edit: I finally gave in and dropped $30 to buy both bundles. If this were a lesser game, I’d complain, but this is VF5FS. The game itself ought to be worth $60. Besides, I get Special Sparring mode now. Nice bonus!
its sad that i bought El Blaze’s customisation only, for 400msp on XBL but I have >1.5gb of useless customisation data (of other characters) which I can’t see in my hdd
OP is right. The fact that there is no compatibility pack, which pretty much every other game has, is just silly. Especially when you have to take the time to download everybody’s costume; the groundwork for a compatibility pack is already there. No one would like it if there was a new character, but it was just a dural skin every time you played against it online and the only way to unlock the character model was by purchasing the character.
Costumes are actually good. I prefer looking at pretty characters than plain ones. We do need some compatibility packs. Then people can see everyone elses’ pretty customisations.
Now that I’ve thought about it, a compatibility pack would be nice, but I don’t think Microsoft and Sony would let us get a 2GB download for free. It would likely cost them $2 in bandwidth charges for each download, which is enough to prevent it from being free. The compatibility pack would cost $5 at least.
Also, I found out that if you use ANY custom costume, even one for Type B, opponents without the costumes downloaded still see default Type A. Also, if you get an item win pose, your opponent will just see a random default win pose in its place. I updated the OP to reflect this.
Well, there is a way for your friends to see your custom costumes, even if they didn’t bought anything.
Play LOCAL CO-OP!! with a bunch of friends in the same living room… Remember that mode?..
Off-topic: I’m really fed up with the Microsoft restrictions somehow affecting the games on PSN.
Sega actually had to downgrade the sound quality in FS, just to fit the stupid 2gb cap that M$ imposes…
And I love the music in this game. In case anyone hasn’t noticed it yet, in the sound options you can select music from VF1,2,3,4,5 Vannila,5R…
music is mostly average imo. FS tracks are ok but mediocre, so i tried R and it seemed even worse. char select is good. sounds like monster truck madness. matchmaking sounds like i’m browsing dress shirts on the clearance rack at macy’s.
i’d happily buy some individual characters packs but $5 a piece is ridiculous. i understand that they’re trying to add value by selling 9 or 10 characters for $15, but that doesn’t mean one character should cost a third of that, especially when there are so many restrictions on what people can see.
