Take everything capcom has done in the last 5 years and do the exact opposite
Found an interesting quote, I’ll let you guys guess who it is, and why I didn’t give it a new thread:
You’ll always find a group of people who hate change and want an iteration to be more of the same. As a designer, you should listen to them, filter the valid concerns from the invalid ones, and try to create something that still appeals to the fan base while moving the ball forward. The important thing to remember is that you are the designer, and allowing the loudest people in the forum to dictate your design is a recipe for disaster.
I think THAT PERSON is right when he criticizes those who flip out whenever a designer mentions iterating a product, but shutting down debate is not necessary. In that specific case, we’re talking about board game fans, who aren’t exactly the nastiest kids on the block.
Everyone with a grain of intelligence accepts that ST has flaws. That doesn’t mean that everyone should stand behind some dude fiddling around with the game.
Basically, everyone knows that something can be improved, but noone can agree on what the improvement should be.
If a FG was a service, like an MMO, where people would be “forced” to play the latest version (and continue to pay money) regardless of whether they like it or not (the only alternative being to quit), then it’s a simple matter to make some balance changes, get the playerbase to work it out and break the game, then make some more balance changes, repeat and rinse.
But in the current model of FGs, where new versions of the game are competing with the old ones, and even patches are optional, there’s no real way to “test” and “prove” that a new balance is better. Even if you hire 10 top players and give them 6 months to test out the new version, it probably wouldn’t be as conclusive as an actual release to the public. Which means people will just tend to stick with what they know, unless you sweeten the deal with new characters/moves/etc, which just breaks the balance again. So it’s a bit of a catch-22.
iirc, the Nesica system has all the arcade machines networked and able to be patched whenever the developers decide, right? It would be interesting to see if they start taking advantage of this to do more “live” balance tweaking. Although from all that I’ve seen and heard, Japanese FG devs don’t seem to think that “perfect” balance is a desirable goal anyways. (and neither do many players, it seems.)
It’s interesting. Let’s say you start with a fun but terribly unbalanced game, (eg. BBCT) but you have the ability to force balance changes across the entire playerbase whenever you want. (ie. patched via Nesica system, and on console it has to be always online.) So every 6 months or so you make a balance update to improve the balance. If you make a mistake, you can roll back and do something else. So let’s assume over time the balance will always improve.
I wonder if there’s a certain point where you need to stop, or further improvements to the balance will make the game less fun.
David Sirloin
Too bad economics says if there is no demand for it, it won’t sell.
You don’t give people asking for ST/3S a game that isn’t ST/3S and call them terrible people for not wanting it. Sirloin wouldn’t be mad if the market who wanted an HDR was actually big enough, but it wasn’t so he wants to blame people who didn’t want it.
dont assume that the crap that ono said is the general mentality of the fg designers, thank you
It is said that one of the reasons Daigo stuck with SFIV in the arcades was because of the ranking system. If someone invented a piece of kit that you could use to mod existing cabs to allow them to join a national ranking system I reckon many people will start playing older arcade titles again. Shouldn’t be too hard either. A working naive implementation can just copy the image sent to the screen and scan it for certain information that will tell it who won/lost etc. It would be pretty easy to overlay player info onto the image as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if this is how the original hacked PS3 arcade SFIV machines worked.
[media=youtube]DtCs8Pi–io[/media]
A better implementation would be to hack into the memory and access different variables etc and get the information from there. I knew the emulator ArcLive tracks your wins and losses so it’s definitely possible.
well he’s one of those guys that’s kind of absurdly touchy, I don’t want anybody to think I’m endorsing the ‘I’m taking my ball and going home’ part of his post… But still, there was a loud segment of the population that assumed ahead of time that any change would be for the worse. THose games have been pretty effectively mapped out at this point, its easy to pinpoint issues that can be fixed.
And if the cure is worse than the disease? The old game totally still exists!
There’s a severe reactionary faction in the FGC, and at their worst, they’re doing a lot to hold the whole genre back.
Except it’s completely ignoring the context of the situation.
I think that was the thing he wrote after he quoted Haunts for saying something about how he’s happy Iron Galaxy didn’t try to rebalance 3S.
3S didn’t have a home port close to the arcade version. The DC/PS2 versions were faster than arcade and had different damage on moves. 3SOE is the closest arcade perfect port thus (emu is faster than arcade). Finally, after 11-12 years. And then Sirloin shows up with “you idiots, why didn’t you want 3S rebalance? All you have is that Chun Yun Ken no zoning fest. You’re terrible people and holding fighting games back.”
If someone wanted to make a new iteration, go ahead, just make sure everyone has access to it like GGXXAC+R instead of trying to split the community.
The quote was in response to concerns over potential changes in the next version of Yomi, his card game.
It’s a great game, by the way. The graphic design is poor, but the gameplay is interesting and fairly innovative. If you’re interested in fighting games represented through an abstract approach, I recommend you check it out.
dunno why i think that in the same situation, the 3s community would react in the opposite way that the ggac community reacted to the announce of a new revision
Except the community will inevitably split anyways, because plenty of people (probably a majority) will opt to play the new version whether a perfect version is accessible or not.
The GG community is used to change, the 3S community is used to hunkering down and resisting outside influences (as far as I can tell anwyays)
Sirlin’s only mistake was not adding a true classic mode to HDR with all of the old character and background sprites intact and unfiltered. I never had a problem with HDR because I’m not an ST fetishist, but it really fucking sucked when the few people who still played it regularly on XBox Live went back to ST on GGPO and Supercade. The fracture would have been less damaging if both versions were available in one package and everyone continued to play on Xbox Live.
At risk of getting myself in serious trouble, the ST/HDR debacle is a good case of people sticking with an inferior form simply because it was more familiar and they don’t like change.
Does everything needs to be improved though? I mean if people are content with something for the most part they’re not gonna want it to change. Especially if its a majority of people.
Subjective.
It took quite a few pages, but that’s the points to hit way back here in the topic its getting there now.
“Better for who?”
Better for content providers / avoid patches that are said to cost tons of money.
Some new era things were certainly not better for new players, veteran players of games from the same company and games just as good from others, or possibly even for the lifespan of their games.
How about this then; it never had a chance, whether it was better or worse. That it was different (combined with the designers charming personality) was more than enough to assure that the fetishists (to use Data Beasts term) wouldn’t embrace it.
I think if it had a global release (I think an arcade release too) and came out on time instead of delayed close to SF4, it would’ve been better received.