Tag 2 is gonna be big for a month before people start dropping the game because people are waiting instead of picking T6 up now and learning the game. People are overstating how big its gonna be. Its gonna be bigger than Soul Calibur but its not gonna be as big as people say.
lol, a bunch of amateur game reviewers trying to act like seasoned industry-analysts.
That happens before every single fighting game that comes out. People are gonna drop all the old games, and the new one is gonna be the salvation of Fighting Games!!!
Or as Haunts put it once ‘everybody’s gonna be really excited about this game, until they realize they still suck’.
Ono is going to get all the shit because the latest release of fighters has been his direction. He wants your grandma to be able to play SF, not joking, against pros and have a solid shot. He wants players to be able to buy their way to a win with gems rather than earning it through practice mode. His whole philosophy for fighting games is ass. He honestly doesn’t know what he’s doing when it comes to fighters. I believe it was even his idea for gems and then to eventually have those gems cost money to buy so players can buy their way to a victory rather than train. That shit doesn’t belong in fighting games along with his shit for brain comeback mechanic theories.
sf4\umvc3 being good games was said well by aztec soldier. Those games sold well because of the back hype of the previous versions. sf4 is super bland, slow, out dated and did nothing for the genre. No innovation and terrible online play. umvc3 is mehhh. The game is good, the mechanics are bad espeically XF. The whole goal is to beat your opponent but in that process, you give the XF3 the strongest tool in the game. I played in a tournament this weekend and every time I was the last person to activate XF I won lol. I even let my 2nd spot character die on purpose so I can gain XF. What was once a bad strategy in older versus games like xvsf, mvc2 are now viable strategies to win games because of that shit comeback mechanic.
lets not forget about the steady, steady lying about the net-code whenever a game gets dropped. Not only can they not get the games right but something as simple as net-code can’t even be done properly on Capcoms end. its 2012 going onto 2013 and sf4\umvc3 are bad games online lol. Bad games online should have been gone in 2k2\2k3. while sfxt is a vast improvement, they were willing to increase the input delay so the casual market can have a sound glitch trigger less? what? the quality of the sound takes precedence over the quality of the game being played? Thanks Capcom, I’ve always wanted MORE lag when I play online if it was possible. I’m going for the high lag score, turn it up more!!
they need to listen to the tournament community more. Tournament community doesn’t want to exclude new players in fact we welcome them. We just want a good game and have players earn their skill rather than this catering bullshit that fucks the game up between 2 pro’s. If someone doesn’t want to put the work in to be good, then fuck them.
Simple reason why it didn’t sell:
Casuals weren’t excited. Strekken was not something they wanted to see. Playing as Marvel characters in a fighting game? Casuals will get excited over that no question. But a cross between SF and Tekken… not so much. It’s like a cross between Yu Gi Oh and Magic the Gathering. They’re both card games but the audience couldn’t be more different. I don’t play either one but I have co-workers that talk about Magic all the time.
If Capcom made Marvel vs DC or SF vs MK or something like that. You better fucking believe it would sell. Broken gameplay or not. Just look at MK vs DC.
That’s probably the biggest reason why it didn’t sell but Capcom’s business practices were the icing on the cake and consumers got smart. They’re going to wait until a Super Ultimate AE 2012 edition to come out for $40. Capcom needs to stop selling a re-vamped version of the same game over and over.
Hell, back in the day the general public was getting annoyed with the constant releases of SF2.
I do think you’re underselling the name recognition of the titles involved a bit, I can totally see why it looked good on paper, especially for capcom.
Tekken games always sell well, its the most consistently successful series in fighting games (at least as far as home systems go)
It’s really just that simple. Great points
It may actually be better if they run into one disaster so quality will appear in the future. I don’t know if there was anything like this before as far as being considered a failure, but interest waning for endless SF2 games caused other companies to really take off. Capcom introduced variety and made cool licensed games and played it safe with the Alpha series until they felt they had a worthy successor to SF2.
I would hope that this gives other developers more credit and Capcom learns during this bounce back - which is something it does about every five years. Also I don’t want them to stop making crossover games.
This isnt new to Capcom by any means though, it’s just that now they are getting exposure and SFXT is the biggest game they’ve ever made to fall short. It means room for improvement though. Remember how MegaMan games got progressively worse after 2? They had to sort of reboot the series with Megaman X and then fell into the same problem. Now there’s an internet and their fans know what’s up.
but Tekken looks and sounds great, is easy to get into, and always has tons of value for casuals. None of this is true about SFxT, and I actually like the game.
I suspect they’ll learn the lesson they learned last time this happened and go away from fighting games entirely for a while, ala 2002, again… although I guess a lot of people would be okay with that ><
I always call that ‘series creep’, you see it in books and movies too, after the first burst of creativity a series tends to get progressively weaker. Fighting games have been pretty resistant to that usually though, the capcom series essentially got better through the SF2 and SFA series.
I think that’s more botched execution than anything else, maybe because (afaik) they didn’t really invest in the engine the way they should have. On paper it looks like marketing heaven (as long as you don’t actually play any of the games). You look at SFxT and they somehow managed to make a game that has almost zero casual appeal, even though it arguably should have a lot.
Fighting games aren’t going away any time soon. They didn’t go away during the ‘drought’ of 2002-09. Actually they had hit peak in a lot of ways. Third Strike has been rereleased and we had it that whole time. Guilty Gear XX was great, and even it sold enough to warrant pointless sequels. Now we’re talking about seeing CvS2 again. Those were what we played during that time and they were great games. It’s DLC and a lack of value that is the big issue to most gamers now. The 15th Anniversary Collection didn’t have any crazy gameplay modes but it had two complete games with extra modes for a low price. CvS2’s 1v1 gameplay was better than buying a whole new game for some kind of dream match.
Thankfully, EA and Microsoft’s dream hasn’t come true yet, and it’s still legal to rent games. Imagine that MK and SFxT were your first fighting games. One is a lot easier to get into even though both have the capacity for expert level play. One has a lot of stuff for your money while another has almost nothing that you don’t buy on the side. Easy to see which would succeed.
It looks to me more like a company went too far and got called on it. Good stuff. It’s not death for the genre.
Another thing: Tekken players who don’t like Street Fighter are definitely not going to like this game. Also what is there for Tekken only fans to want to get the game for? It has no guarantee of its fans buying it like CvS did.
I really hope Darkstalkers 4 comes out pretty clean and is as interesting and creative as I hope it will be. I don’t doubt they’re working hard to make sure Darkstalkers 4 is what SFxT couldn’t be and hopefully they find a way to market it so the Joe Shmoe’s buy it up that doesn’t involve pissing off hardcores and casuals alike.
I’m still in shock over the reaction. I assumed that everyone was going to swallow Capcom’s load. I’m glad I was wrong.
Welcome to ‘arcades are dead’.
More seriously, the community is reaping what it sowed. Once there were ‘top players’ and scene celebrities the kind of player/fan breakdown you’re talking about was just about inevitable. When you have a community, especially an internet community (which is definitely what the FGC is), it becomes about being a part of the community rather than playing the games. Playing fighting games was at its best back when it was just people playing fighting games.
That’s the player side though, the companies most likely don’t give a fuck about the community, except insofar as they’re useful for sales and PR. Getting your game played at Evo or on the SRK front page is a ton of good advertising.
It’s kind of like the thing I posted from “that guy” in the future thread; he’s kind of a jerk, but it sometimes feels like the games really would be better if they were developed in the old pre-internet way… essentially putting the design team in a dark cave and letting them make the best game they can, without any of that outside pressure from anyone.
Ed Boon and the MK guys are like the best when it comes to giving a fuck about their fans. I don’t know what the story is over in Japan - I’d never heard of Ono until SFxT came out and I started paying attention to anything more than a couple of games again, but I don’t get the impression that these are the same kinds of creative teams that started SF2 and its rivals.
Ono was a sound engineer on 3rd Strike.
He later was pinned with the task of salvaging Capcom Fighting All Stars which became Capcom Fighting Jam.
I think he worked on an Onimusha game too.
In my mind I put it to two things;
First of all, Capcom is much bigger now, and seems to be run more like a multinational corporation (insert ‘occupy’ screed here), which means less risktaking in design and more efforts to maximize income while minimizing costs.
Then, there’s just so much more scrutiny on the games now. There weren’t 10,000 people watching the game online and jumping on every single thing they don’t like (yeah I do it too, we all do it, its the way of the world now ><), and so they could get away with a lot more than they could now (I’ve said it before, but if MvC2 were released with its engine as-is now but without its history it would be an embarrassing disasterous failure. The fact that the internet wasn’t slobbering all over it gave it a chance to develop into what it is now)
Not having any thought even of the competitive community, or all the people constantly searching for glitches, the games had room to breathe, and they could just kind of throw them out there… and the games I think were much more fun for that lack of pressure.
Now you have to worry about competitive types (and their nuthuggers) torpedoing your PR efforts while making a game that people will actually buy enough of to make a profit, at the same time that there’s more retard managers than ever breathing down your ass to keep costs at a minimum. No wonder it’s a mess.
Edit: I’ve gotta be a big fan of what NRS is doing too. I think its because they’re a small company financed by a huge company (WB), and the MK brand is just worth so much, that they were given a much freer hand than say the SFxT team was.
From what I’ve read, he pretty much is a PR tool. He’s there to take the flak for whatever stupid decisions his design teams might make. One comparison I’ve heard is that it’s similar to the whole Daikatana/John Romero debacle.
Regarding the narutoforums link, it seems a little consipracy-y, but it’s believable. Capcom can’t be excused for some of the decisions they’ve made, but I feel the influence of console companies and their power is disproportionately seen compared to the Capcom hate.
Ya I’d love to see a modern game developed that way just for kicks. It’s laughable seeing all the ‘veteran’ players on this forum scramble to make thoughtful judgments and feedback on new games. Most predictions turn out wrong, so its worrisome to think a lot of the alarmist ramblings of players who think they understand game development is affecting the direction of games.
I hope that Naruto Forums link is bogus because I don’t want Ono or Dimps anywhere near DarkStalkers.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
…
Still that’s why I tend to rant against the whole ‘they need to listen to pro players’ and ‘quit catering to casuals’ thing so much. The following is probably stating the obvious and pursuing animpossible dream, but **games should get good designers and then make the best game they can, without catering to anyone. **
Excepting maybe catering to the people saying ‘make sure your game actually runs goddamn right’. I think its okay to listen to that ><
Here’s what I posted on Gamasutra:
[LEFT] [/LEFT]
And if Capcom wants to blame cannibalism for SFxT’s performance, then it’s because they’re eating their own head.