In my opinion, a diverse roster of characters is a major factor in a fighting game being enjoyable. However, sometimes I wonder if it can be taken too far. The main draw of having a ton of characters is that there are that many more matchups to learn. Take Street Fighter, for example. I’ve always felt that the main SF games (ST, 3S, A2, A3) have always had a solid number of characters that gave the player variety while not overwhelming them. On the other hand, you look at Street Fighter 4 which has a whopping 39 characters, and they’re still adding more. While it gives a potential player a plethora of options to choose from, it also raises the barrier for entry into the game considerably.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that learning matchups is a fundamental aspect in picking up a new game, but sometimes I wonder if the learning curve is too skewed in that direction. Shoot, this is the primary reason that Tekken is so hard to get into; with all of the knowledge you need to know on each character and there being so many of them, you have a game with an immensely high entry barrier. I guess looking back at it this is why I always enjoyed games with more modest rosters; the less time you spend having to learn the basics of what each character can potentially do to you, the more time you can spend applying that knowledge to other areas of your game that need improving.
Also, I’m fully aware that it’s possible to go too far in the opposite direction (too little characters) as well. The current console build of Skullgirls suffers from this, especially with it being a team game. In team-based fighters like Marvel and Skullgirls it’s more about building an effective until rather than individual character matchups (not to say that those aren’t important), so the more options you have, the more flexible and creative you can be in crafting a team.
Roster size isn’t important; playstyle variety is. And even so, there is already a rather sizable number of modern fighting games that have diverse playable rosters of 30 characters or less.
Well it depends on how you look at it. For recent games pushing over 40+ characters, if you have to learn every matchup it’s a pain in the ass imo. However, most games tend to steer toward only the best characters/teams getting played by the majority of the playerbase and you usually only have to worry about much less matchups than the roster has to offer on a regular basis. Then the characters that don’t get played as much will pop up from time to time and it’s up to you whether you wanna just adapt to that in the moment or decide to prepare for it as much as you can beforehand.
I think so. Especially in the case of SF4, not only is it an annoying amount of matchups to have to learn, I think it makes the 4 series the least distinct of all the SF games. It’s just borrowed its identity from all the previous versions + viper and seth
This is one situation where I think there’s an advantage to imbalanced casts.
I don’t have any problem with lots of characters. What I do have problem with is people complaining about fighters like SG and the upcoming KI only having 8 characters, even though those characters are all very different from each other. I don’t know if people do this because they are used to having a large roster from the Capcom and MK games, or if they really do need more characters to enjoy a game, but it seems unfair to new titles.
IMO, we’re at the point where I believe we’re hitting the upper limit on how many characters we can put in fighters without suffering negative consequences.
As long as all the characters are viable, I have no problem with large rosters. I only have problems when there are characters that are false options, as it’s time and resources that could have been spent on the viable ones.
Yeah, I haven’t really gotten much into SF4, but just from watching/observing the game I’ve noticed that it doesn’t really have its own identity in terms of characters. Alpha, SF3, SF2, heck even EX all have their own set of characters that distinguish it from being ‘just another Street Fighter’. With every new iteration of SF4 I felt like they were just shoveling in characters from old titles. Now in Ultra they want to toss in the rest of the SFxT dudes (and their stages), which just further drives that feeling home. SF4 reminds me of that kid in school who tries to fit in to different cliques by copying their respective styles (unsuccessfully), but fails to realize that there’s more to gain by being himself.
I can’t really speak for KI, but with Skullgirls you have only 8 characters in a team-based game. When the game allows you to run 3v3 matches and you only have a selection of 8 to build your team with, there’s definitely going to be a want for more options.
SFxT’s roster of 50+ is really pushing that boundary IMO. I hope this isn’t becoming a trend…
I think IV would have been better even if they had most of the old cast if they had more original characters for the series. 9 out of 30+ doesn’t really cut it, IMO.
This is like asking if it’s possible to have too many characters in MUGEN. The answer is no…until you have more than 2 versions of the same character glares at every DBZ game ever
yes. fighting games should strive to greatly limit the number of similar moves/playstyles in a game. the way rosters are expanded in most popular fighting games does not really follow this tenet.
I feel like you really don’t ever need a roster of more than like… 30 to see all possible interesting playstyles/characters in a franchise. you can definitely see more than 30 different ones of those, but will they be meaningfully different or just marginally? I’d say it’s usually the latter.
as a game designer, I always get bugged by redundancies. FGs are no exception.
I personally don’t believe that there is any such thing as too big of a roster. I don’t care, more choices are fun even if they are bad choices. Everyone doesn’t need to be viable, what games need is viable diverse playstyles, so as long as say 10 or 12 characters are viable and have different varying playstyles that support any function of meta, the game could have 500 characters for all I care.
I think Guilty Gear does it really well. There are about 25 characters and for the most part, they’re all unique. I really feel like any more than 25 characters and the game gets convoluted, especially when you have characters that are just shittier versions of the top tiers.
The larger the roster, the more I hope the tiers are skewed to like 5-10 characters favor.
SF4 lost its chance to stand out from Day 1 when they went with more returning characters than new. Not to say it’s a bad thing, a dream match for SF characters is a pretty good idea after Street Fighter series vanished for a decade.
