I was thinking about it for a while and realized that “Yup” it’s still annoying when they do these showcase trailers of all this cool stuff without mentioning which cool things are and are not useful. -_-
Every…single…character…
Also, Black Lightnings super looks kinda dumb.
Well the trailers are for the general audience. It can be annoying, but knowing we will eventually get a stream for it, I’m not too annoyed.
It’s not like they added an icon to the game specifically to let people know if competitive mode was on or not…oh wait…they totally did. -_-
At least with Raiden I imagine that the casual audience was sold on him on his super alone. No need to include gear crap here. 
A little disappointed in the October release date as that just means a longer wait for Hellboy who, IMO, would have been a better Halloween-ish timed release.
Well they might have done that, but still, the audience is the 5 million + who bought the game, which includes people that play with gear and all that junk.
Patch today added Raiden, so my guess is next week or the week after is when he drops. Expect a stream announcement soon as well.
Speaking of MK characters, Sub Zero has been showing up a little more, and I wonder where he truly finds himself in the scheme of the game. Initially I thought he was not that good, but aside from getting decent buffs, his gameplan is probably a little bit better than I gave it credit for. J3 is an amazing jump normal and commands respect along with his air hammer, and he has pretty good close and mid range normals. Seems like only his full screen game is truly lacking.
If TYM, a forum ostensibly dedicated to competitive play, is anything to go by there are a large number of people out there who are really invested in the cosmetic elements of the game and that’s a good thing for the games longevity as that sort of skinner box can, when done “right”, keep people going for a long time.
I saw that. I’m curious what bug fixes they’re still finding that actually occur often enough to affect shit. I would imagine a Watchtower later this week with the character being released the week after next.
Got me. I haven’t really given Sub-Zero much thought since he dropped as Scarecrow has, depending on the spacing, 4-5 moves that flat out say “fuck your trait”. Combine that with a move db2/Fear-ferno that completely shuts lackluster full screen game and I’m never upset when someone picks the character against me. I don’t think he’s complete ass but I’m not really seeing why you’d pick him over 6+ other characters who do similar shit as him but better.
As far as I understand it, a lot of stuff is found through extensive cruising of forums like Reddit and their own WB forums, combined with a lot of bugs being known but just pushed back to be fixed in the next patches. I know that I, looking at it today, had no clue many of those were even a thing
Klone is a pretty unique move, and I would imagine that against certain characters it’s a real game changer. Sort of like Captain Cold, but I’ll bet there are chars Sub does good against that Captain doesn’t like Superman or Dr. Fate.
So, through hook or crook, Raiden appears to be out on Xbox. First things to notice:
[list]
[] His gear WAYYYY improves his look, including what appears to be a Tengu mask and full sleeves. Praise be.
[] Fast walkspeed, big backdash. Very similar to Sub-Zero
[] Unlike in MKX, his former 112(hold)2 electricity move is now an overhead
[] His overhead b2 now appears to be a double hitting F3
[] His trait appears to activate the electricity extensions he had in his Thunder God variation in MKX and change the properties of some of his moves. Ex. EN Vicinity Blast has a different hit animation when in trait and when in not; traited version looks like you can connect b3, while non trait just launches
[] Damage looks to be about average
[*] Shaders appear to change the tint of his electricity
[/list]
That’s all I could see so far.
Interesting. It, at the very least, shows that NRS is being very proactive when it comes to fixing issues that arise with the game.
Yeah, if you don’t have a projectile that’s better than Ice Ball (i.e. if you have a projectile and aren’t Sub-Zero then you have a projectile that’s better than Ice Ball) and/or have attacks that are basically projectiles (e.g. Scarecrow and maybe Starfire and Catwoman) then I imagine that Ice Clone is going to give you some problems. It’s also a bit disappointing how shit MB Ice Clone seems to be. Oooh, I have another slow-ass projectile to throw at you. Woooooooooooooooooo…-_-
There’s this sort of strange conception that NRS is full of, like, dipshits who don’t know how to make video games, but their funds and ability are top tier. You could argue that they kind of just stick with what works as far as a fighting engine goes, but they seek and destroy almost all the little bugs ever since MK9 was a massive hit.
Raiden, at least in this strange XB1 pre-release, can cancel the first hit of his double hitting F3. That would make him the only character who could do that, which is a pretty unique thing. I wonder how it would affect scaling.
My perception of them up until Injustice 2 (so far) was that they tend to make stuff that you pay actual money for (i.e. DLC characters) overpowered and that that trend was significant enough to be suspicious. So far Injustice 2 isn’t too bad in that regard. Oh, also apparently there was just a PS4 update that just kind of fucks things up. -_-
I think it was just a side effect of time and staff. I know in MK9 and IGAU, they had very few full time QA people to help with balance, and back then they did not have the former top players they do now. Even into MKX, I had heard that the crunch to QA a lot of those characters was like, a week.
It’s not an excuse, but if I only had a week to not only make sure the character functioned on the screen AND THEN had to learn the ins and outs to prevent something wacky happening in tournament…good luck.
Them being proactive enough to ban DLC for a month was also a great step in the right direction during the IPS tour.
I think that the month ban is the right call. The CPT policy on DLC characters doesn’t quit work for me. Just because we haven’t had another SFxT knife glitch doesn’t mean it can’t happen. That said, Injustice 2 is the first NRS game in a while to ship without issues that could be solved by looking at a spreadsheet of the frame data.
Is it? I felt that most of the top tier nonsense was a result of obnoxious tools and not frame data for most of the characters since MK9. MK9 frame data literally is like…
Pokes are punishable on block, and like +1 on hit. They grant you nothing, and the game has a very strict window for inputs so defense is literally the worst it has ever been.
I believe that between MK9, Injustice 1 and MKX there have been some situational block infinites along with some good old fashioned infinites.
I know of Aquaman being able to do f12 in the corner in IGAU as one that was a close block infinite, and in MKX some characters could do blockstrings 'til they ran out of stamina, but I don’t think those count as true blue infinites.
Those are, IMO, still pretty basic ‘solve at the spreadsheet’ phase of development that you shouldn’t really need elite testers to catch. The Aquaman one especially probably would have been a block infinite against Bane and Grundy due to their fastest normal being insufficiently fast to stop that nonsense.
My guess is that, with build after build of a complicated game going through, having a spreadsheet of that data that is constantly updated is a minor thing they probably wrote off for a while. Probably not a great idea, but they typically rely on day 1 patch for a lot of that kind of stuff. I’m sure increasing budget/time helps give the people time to snag a lot of those in that testing time.
Having done more QA/QC work in my life than I’d have liked to (note: not video game related) I can attest to the fact that there are definitely priorities with that sort of thing and that if you’re pressed for time and/or money documentation of an in-progress product isn’t particularly close to the top of the list. Now, if you’ve got the time and budget at your disposal and you don’t properly document changes from one version to the next you end up with the situation that Capcom did with one of their USFIV patches or the situation that we have right now with Injustice 2 (the borked 1.10 update). That said, in terms of kinda dumb shit Injustice 2 has only really had one or two things that stuck out as both potentially useful AND pretty hard to imagine being discovered during playtesting. The most amusing one to me was where Scarecrow could Fear-ferno certain MB projectiles while his trait was active and it would instant fill the entire gauge.
Lol I remember the Scarecrow thing. I want to say one of the very early tournaments it actually happened but no one pointed it out in commentary.
It was not, in the heat of battle, an easy glitch to spot AND it was not immediately clear what caused it; i.e. why do some projectiles trigger it and not others.