Personally, I’ve always been fond of 2d fighting games with hand-drawn sprites to have fully 2d backgrounds as well, with elements of 3d. Like for instance King of Fighters XIII, the best looking 2d fighter ever, is more impressive visually IMO than games like BlazBlue and Persona which have higher res sprites but 3d backgrounds. Guilty Gear XX ACP which I just purchased on PSN reminded me how timelessly gorgeous games with creative vision can be be in 2d.
Hand-drawn backgrounds feel like they have more personality to me.
See Marvel vs. Capcom backgrounds to MVC2’s, or CVS1 to CVS2.
I don’t mind 3D backgrounds, they just need character specific stages again. There’s a kind of blandness to 3D/non character stages…
CVS1 had the best stages ever.
I was surprised when I saw 2D fighters using 3D backgrounds in arcades and consoles in early 2000.
But they were added in order to show the hardware’s capabilities (Naomi, Atomiswave) rather than add anything new to the games.
Also because of the rising popularity of 3D fighters.
I mean, the Neo Geo backgrounds in Last Blade and Samurai Spirits look amazing and make every 3D background pale in comparison.
In other genres like shmups they did a better job blending 3D with the environments, since a spaceship can move in (pseudo) 3D as well
I think I generally like both. I have no real preference for either. I did however really like the cvs2 level that had the boat speeding in and the camera crew coming out to watch the fight. Has to be one of my favorite backgrounds. Train stage in cvs1 and the daily bugle level in mvc3 were pretty wild too.
I’m leaning towards 2D backgrounds. I hated how the 3D backgrounds in MvC2 made the sprites look out of place.
2d backgrounds. It has a more artistic feel to it, and it just looks right compared to 2d sprites.
I feel that having 2d backgrounds makes the game look a lot better all around when the fighting characters themselves are Sprites. Even if you could pull something awesome off in 3d, It just makes the sprites look disjointed from the environment they’re in.
I like the parallax effect. In 3D fighters, it’s sort of taken for granted. The stages are designed with very little perspective in mind, though UMVC3 stages look cool. Of course, none of that matters when no one picks other stages due to lag or visual reasons.
2D of course. When done well, 2D backgrounds look infinitely better than 3D ones.
I hope if they ever make a next gen installment of Guilty Gear they keep it 98% 2D a la King of Fighters XIII [But they’d most likely go the BB route -_-;]
The 3d fighter with the best backgrounds IMO have to be Mortal Kombat, just awesome artistic direction and events perfectly suited for the dark atmosphere of the game.
2D sprites with 3D backgrounds look like hot garbage.
When I tried BB:CSE the fact that the backgrounds were so 2.5D-3D ish and everything else was sprites annoyed me to no end.
When I tried BB:CSE the fact that the backgrounds were so 2.5D-3D ish and everything else was sprites annoyed me to no end.
Pfft, 3D backgrounds all the way. They were so natural in Marvel 2…
Not even close, 2d backgrounds. It just fits much better, and ages much much better as well. Hell SF2 still looks awesome today, imagine if it had the backgrounds of Virtua Fighter 1?
MvC2’s combination of 3D elements into 2D backgrounds always looked gross to me. Some games did it kind of well, like Blazblue, but really I just prefer fully drawn 2D backgrounds. Games like MVC1 and Skullgirls come to mind as good examples.
IIRC Skullgirls has 3D backgrounds.
It does? :eek: It all looks like 2D artwork to me.
I want sprites, every time.
I want 3D backgrounds most of the time, pretty sure BB has been doing that, and it looks really pretty, same with SG.
We need more MvC2 clown house stages