The chess analogy is terrible as all pieces are a single part of a collective team. A rook or a knight is more comparable to a hadouken or a shoryuken than it is an entire character, and if any single piece was bad or not viable it wouldn’t matter because both players are playing Ryu anyways.
Casuals don’t care about how many characters are playable at the highest level, they care about content. That’s why every game reviewer and their mother says MK9 is the best fighter this generation, or maybe they say Injustice is, I don’t know. What do those games have over any other game? A movie-esque story mode, a good chunk of characters, and a million and a half hours of SINGLEPLAYER content. The casual consumer does not care about frame data or priority or effective ranges or god damn anything, they care about how much they are getting for their purchase. A big roster will always mean more than a viable roster. Unless your game completely jumps the shark like Smash Bros. Brawl or something, but that’s an established series. Remember how many people were complaining that MvC3’s roster was so small compared to MvC2’s roster and how all their favorite characters were missing? And we all know how viable MvC2’s roster was.
Doesn’t matter if the systems in competition are different or the same in all aspects - the ideal is that they’re all relevant. Replace ‘Rook’ with ‘Shoryuken’ for all I care. If ‘Shoryuken’ becomes outmoded the system it’s attached to (Ryu) faces the danger of becoming irrelevant when weighed against the integrity of the rest of the game’s design. Just like the chess pieces, character moves aren’t designed in a vacuum.
See my first post on this page. Most FG publishers simply don’t have the kind of bank WB does to make single-player content substantive and attractive in a FG. That’s partly why I feel the games should narrow their focus and become smaller.
But again, in the Chess analogy, both players are playing Ryu because that is the only character in the game. Ryu can never no matter what happens to him be irrelevant against Ryu. It is quite literally impossible.
So, instead of doing what they’re doing now that we all know they can do and add content in the form of characters, you suggest they add less characters and just have less content overall. Good idea. Maybe next they can start getting rid of that pesky online so they can cut costs and maintain the balance.
Didn’t someone claim that you could make top 8 in MvC2 with a low tier just as long as you had Sent on your team?
Because most casuals will never really get to the level where “relevance” will come into question. Look at MvC2, the game had a massive casual following that wasn’t really affected by the competitive scene. People who had no idea about, nor never really cared that we had the 4 gods and only 12-16 viable characters. Heck, more often than not, these people simply wanted to see their favorite Marvel or Capcom characters in the game.
The same thing could be said for Alpha 3, CvS2 and even the SFIV series. Heck, there’s a large contingent on Unity who wants an Alpha 4 specifically catered towards casual play (obviously based on low level A2/A3 play without all the high level shenanigans like CCs, V-ISM, etc.).
I feel like character diversity and balance is probably the most important aspect in fg development, but i dont think it should be the only focus. Looking at sf4 ive loved the addition of new characters and i feel like for the most part theyve done a good job with it, but with this being said i feel like other aspects of the game have just sort of stayed lame.
Take the opening and closing cutscenes of characters arcade modes, or the absolutely atrocious dubbing. The animation is awful (Even when changed in super) and the game is literally without a story. Its not game breaking, its not without its charm, but i think after 4 years seeing the same shit it stops being cute. Why not focus on making a cohesive story with good writing or on fleshing out the characters who are already in the game? Just adding new characters does not automatically make a game have a more fleshed out story and personality, it also does not automatically make the game better. If anything just adding a bunch of new characters with the same cut and paste persona from other games takes away from any personality the game had.
Yes, gameplay is king, but it bothers me that fighting games can sort of get away with the same shit for so long. If getting more things than just characters before updates means waiting longer than id happily wait longer. What about new levels? new music other than just character and stage themes? Also screw just adding characters that have been in other games in the same generation. What about Q fans? Still stuck in 1999, its kind of annoying.
Forget the chess analogy. What’s your problem with this:
Yes, an appeal to tradition seems to be the most logical MO. FGs and their publishers are completely happy with the current revenue streams being generated by the genre. That’s why FGs seem to be trending towards being FTP.
Did you even read or consider anything in that post?
More and more publishers are starting to FINALLY come to the conclusion that not every title has to have AAA budget and content to be profitable as long as the product is focused in terms of reaching its demographic. The current rise in indie publishing is not for nothing. FGs should have been there yesterday.
I forget who exactly, but I remember a top MvC2 player saying something along the lines of “you could play Servbot backed up with Sent/Commando and get pretty far in a tournament”.
I think as a whole, balance is severely overrated.
What I want is a game that’s fun. Balance can be fun, but it can also be frustrating.
Examples:
Tekken’s very balanced, so you have a LOT to learn, dissuading newcomers.
SSF4 is balanced, but only because every character is mediocre as shit.
@D3v, that’s true, so long as you have a good Sentinel. He has no bad matchups… I mean, Cable’s hard, but just block…
I agree with the bolded. That’s partly why I feel smaller rosters profits the game. You can make your characters more diverse while making the balancing more manageable. Balancing a large roster of characters requires a lot of resources in regards to time and money. While I disagree that the SSF4 cast is “mediocre” I agree that a large and balanced roster can be troublesome and I see where you’re coming from in regards to that game, specifically.
I don’t believe that you truly think the idea of a balanced game is “overrated”. I think you’re just making damning associations with ideas of games you consider balanced and unbalanced.
Someone’s obviously never seen all the Capcom-Unity threads complaining about why MvC3 didn’t have “100 characters with all the veterans plus so-and-so current fan favorite in?”
And before you reply, the same sort of threads exist in the SF discussion as well.
I think it’s certainly unreasonable to expect that every character will be viable, but it sure makes it nice to see some diversity in tournaments. At a casual level it doesn’t matter, but at a more competitive level, every character that isn’t viable is basically just a wasted space on the character select screen.
My problem is that no game will ever be 100% balanced and there will always be characters who are better than other characters. Why does that matter? Let’s go back to my previous example of the 100 character game vs the 15 character game. You know what the 100 character game is doing that the 15 character game ISN’T even though both games have the same number of viable characters? The 100 character game is trying. There is POTENTIAL for more than 15 characters to be viable, there is potential that there are more characters to sit down and learn, there is the potential that you will spend more than a week playing the game because of how much stuff is in the game. The 15 character game might be perfectly fine and balanced, but it isn’t trying. It’s not doing anything other than bare minimum. There’s nothing wrong with that, but there’s also nothing wrong with wanting to have as much awesome stuff in your game as you can cram in it.
Just because a character isn’t viable in competitive play doesn’t mean they were DESIGNED to be that way. A developer can never know what will happen to their game when it goes out into the wild, the most you can do is playtest as much as possible and make the game you think people will enjoy. If one thing is certain you know that with a game with 100 characters you’re at least going to take the time to find out which characters are good and which characters are bad and that is getting some bang for your buck.
What I don’t understand is why you feel that if you add X number of characters every single one of those characters NEEDS to be viable or they might as well be in the game. I said it before in this thread but I’ll say it a again, more choices is always better than less choices, even if some of those choices are bad ones.
There’s a lot of overbloated games coming out, but I don’t believe fighting games are part of that problem. When SNK of all people can come out and make a game with a 36 character roster with the most convoluted, time wasting, inefficient spriteing process and STILL make enough profit to eventually decide to port the game to the PC and give it a networking overhaul, I think fighting games are doing just fine. All of the major players are meeting their sales expectations and getting profit for their releases. That’s not to say that there aren’t ways that fighting games could save money, but the concept that devs should dial back and cut costs and content just because is silly to me. There’s been nothing to indicate that any of the current gen fighters were unsuccessful or their devs being strapped for cash.
And this is not me saying all devs need to make games with gigantic rosters, this is me saying what the developers are doing RIGHT NOW is clearly working out and doing just fine. If you think the current games have too many characters okay fine whatever that is your personal preference and opinion, but let’s not throw in these silly arguments about cost and resources when there’s nothing pointing to the cost of games being too high for fighters or developers NEEDING to scale things back. Other publishers can’t afford to do the same single player experience that WB games can do. Okay fine and dandy. You know what they can do? What they’ve shown and what has been proven that they can do instead? Make characters. However many characters they are making right now is clearly what they are capable of doing and costs are clearly just fine.
This will happen in every game regardless of how many characters are in it. Skullgirls has 8 god damn characters and everyone plays some combination of Parasoul, Double, and Fortune. Fighters at the highest level are about maximizing your chances to win which means playing the best characters, even if the best characters are only 10% better than the other characters.
This reminds me of when Maj postulated an absolute minimum number of viable top tiers and then stated that it didn’t matter how large or small the cast was.
Magneto was designed to be a runaway and defensive character (e.g. command counter, 3 projectiles, flight mode)
Just sayin…
I think emphasizing it is certainly overrated. I don’t mind when it’s there… But as SF4 as a series became more balanced, I think it became less fun. I still play Vanilla for that reason alone.
Mind you, games I play: 3S, MvC2, ST, SFxT - and I tier-whore in all games, (Akuma/Chun, MSP/Santhrax, Claw, Chun/Cammy). And I have fun.
So yes, focusing too much on balance? I think it’s really overrated. I also think that the amount of emphasis put on balance to create a “good game” is overrated. Most of the so-called balanced games out there - I don’t have fun playing. I think VF5FS and TTT2 might be exceptions, and I have some fun playing Guilty Gear, only because to me, Venom is the perfect fighting game character. Other “balanced” games? Yeah… yawn
Good Lord, 90 notifications, 75 of which came from this thread. SRK really needs to optimize how notifications work. I don’t need to see a thousand dudes replying to the same thread. A simple “Thread X has new replies” should suffice. Un-bookmarking this shit asap.
@JohnGrimm has already expressed a lot of what i wanted to say about this subject.
Many of you complaining about games with large rosters seem to be forgetting that those games are sequels/revisions to games that started with less characters.
Actually is very rare for a fighting game to start with over 15 characters in its 1st iteration.
By the time where this games end with large rosters is because they progressively have been adding new options to it.
Also keep in mind that we the [semi]competitive part of the fighting game enthusiasts are not the only ones who those games are marketed and even then, it sucks when your main gets shafted :shake:
You are also seem to forget how high level plays works, yes at the begining there would be a lot of experimentation and we could end seeing a lot of characters being represented, but as the game evolves we will see this being trimed out.
SSF4AE2012 has 38 characters but not all of them are being represented and this is despite the game been considered well balanced.
MK9 has 34 characters but the high level play consist only of what? 5?
Don’t get me wrong, i still think that balance should be something that the game developers should thrive to, since more viable options allow to a more dynamic metagame (plus as i always say balanced game =/= boring game), but when it comes to high level, what matters most is to maximize the chances of winning, and large rosters rarely end being a problem because the metagame balance itself by weeding those options who don’t maximizes the chance of winning either because there are options that work similar but bit better or because they are simple superior.
Another thing is that i find funny that many of you complain about learning the matchups, unless there is a clear umbalance on the matchup by being adaptable and finding the key aspects of your oponent’s character you should be able to start your own strategy. After all an important quality for being a top player is being adaptable.
Also i love when stuff like Inflitration vs PR Balrog happens
Finally, games where the majority (or all) of the cast is viable are very rare, but man how do i love when it happens
When you really get down to it, the two example games I listed are the same. Both have 15 viable characters. End of discussion. One isn’t any better or worse than the other. Being mad at characters not being playable at the highest level of play is like going to McDonalds and ordering the chicken nuggets, and then when you get your order they accidentally gave you your nuggets and a Filet o Fish. Even if you don’t eat the god damn fish you still have your nuggets. What is there to be mad about? That they didn’t accidentally give you MORE nuggets instead?
I can think of 16 or so in terms of character strengths, assist value, and actual tournament usage.
EDIT: Holy shit, right when I posted this the thread exploded with numerous replies to that same quote that I’ve never seen but were apparently “an hour ago”.
