Right now Soul Calibur 5 is the best looking game, when it comes to the visuals. At least for me.
Tekken Tag 2 has beautiful stages. But is that enough to keep you occupied with the game?
When Injustice comes out it will surpass the named two games in terms of graphics and effects. Nice. But will it be enough? No, it has to surpass them and the other games on so many other levels to succeed as a fighting game in this age, where we have more fighting games than many people here can even count to.
But stage-transactions are neither aesthetics, nor have they do with gameplay. They’re simply an awfully long mechanic. I understand where you’re coming from, but you have to realize that there are probably more people going to hate the lenght of the stage-transactions than the few who will love to see them over and over again, just the way there are probably more people who hate the fact that they’re seeing the exact same episodes of “Two and a half men” in the television since few years.
Fighting games are there to stay. Imagine you will see one specific character over and over again in a animation that lasts for 10-15 seconds and you can’t do anything about it, just because the developers had the vision to create a “over the top sommer blockbuster movie” with all the pesky animations which DRAG you out of the pace of the combat, so just that you could watch someone rolling around and hitting icy shards. Thanks, but no thanks - at least for me.
You’re disregarding the fact that without international releases, MK games have competed with or outright defeated every other fighter release out there sales wise for years. Content wise, NRS has topped every japanese effort (including most Tekken / SCs) and that was before they had cart blanche support from a media juggernaut like WB. And most importantly, having Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman on the front of the box is going to essentially print money come next summer. The only people who actually don’t like and don’t support MK games are soccer moms (no longer relevant thanks to Activision) and the competitive FGC, which has essentially spent the last decade or so ragging on games that were never intended to be competitive for not being competitive. And this is all momentum, not a single bit of this guaranteed success considers how good the game will actually be. There is effectively no way this won’t be a sales hit. (although sadly, as this and most other forums prove, there is also no way this game won’t be competitively scrutinized for its entire life.)
As far as stage transitions go, they do have a role in battle. They do damage, they modify combo options, and they change the environment, the relevance of which is a dead horse they continue to beat with every presentation. Certainly, the animations will get old, but how is that different from any animation in any fighter ever? Stage transitions didn’t break Dead or Alive, multithrows didn’t break tekken, and people are still watching multiple ultra movie animations every SF4 match. Literally, every Ryu match has his ridiculous METSU face once, usually twice. And that’s disregarding the year people endured (and got hype for) Yun and Yang’s long ass ultras every single match. Are people not continually entertained by the same Spencer, Vergil, Doom, Dante, and Magneto combos and super’s we have been watching for a year now or are they only exciting because there is a potential for it to be dropped? I doubt it. Most people get unhype when a combo is dropped.
How you can beat the drum for fatalities, a thing that is entirely optional and literally played out the second time you see it, but then trash an actual gameplay mechanic for wearing out its welcome is ridiculous. I can only conclude, based on this and your utter lack of pre-release patience that you simple have a tiny attention span. I suspect you are the sort who buys a fighter, plays entirely alone or with a single local opponent long enough to experience every cinematic, ending and “cool move” the game has to offer, the promptly dumps it for the next big thing. Which is certainly a fine lifestyle to lead, but I don’t believe fighting games (a notoriously repetitive medium) is the genre for you to obsess over. I gotta imagine a game like Skullgirls literally bores you to tears.
I never said it would hurt the sales. I said it would hurt the game.
I don’t know if I would be that much into a game that takes me out of the pace of the combat over and over again and the stage-transactions are going to do exactly that, because they don’t do enough for too less effort and they’re an uncounterable mechanic (since there is no DHC or what so ever, but maybe the wager-mode, will help out against that) - speaking of the wager-mode … even more interruption of the fight, simply because they wanted to have it more animatic, while MK came up with short combo-breakers and it was just fine.
We will see man :-7
The stage-transactions isn’t comparable to the supers, ultras and ultra-long-ass combos, especially because the supers and ultras always require more than just pressing back and hard-attack and combos can always extend and go nuts with new tech for that game / that character. If you come up with new tech for Injustice, you will still see Wonder Woman getting attacked in the Phantom Zone over and over again, for nearly no effort at all - Fun to see the first 10 times, but then? We will se.
Fatalities don’t take you out of the pace of the combat. They happen in the end and are a neat bonus, if you want to see some blood. You don’t have to do them.
But you are kinda forced to do stage-transactions, if the stage-interactive objects turn out to be really valueable. If that is the case you will see the transactions over and over again and then you will remember my words and start realizing: “Oh damn, dem transaction bitches are nothing like fatalities or even ultras at all! Damn, gonna skip this game real soon, bro!”.
I’m not that kind of a person. I don’t mind cinematics, as long as there is more up to them. I like the UMVC3 cinematics. They tend to be quite long and as I already said it, we spend more time watching cinematics in UMVC3 than we will during a match of Injustice. Doesn’t change the fact that there is more up to the UMVC3 cinematics, as I already said it before as well.
And I can imagine what kind of a person you are.
You turn the TV on, watch the same episode of Scrubs … again … then go to the store, buy the Scrubs DVD and watch the same episode 3-4 times after that as well. During the next day they show the same episode again on the TV, because they suck and you enjoy it.
I do not.
The site is so fucking self-referential it’s disgusting. I swear they just make shit up to keep people locked in an infinite loop, reading the same shit over and over because each trope ties into 12 others.
I’m not “anti-clash”, I’m just worried about how it will play out. It’s the one thing about the game I don’t quite understand entirely. I’m not gonna knock it 'til I try it though.
aww, don’t be like that, I’m dyin here. My choices are try and rustle up legit debate about clash or. . (shudder) continue the debate on whether cinematics and staggered reveals are the death of fighting games.
You’re barking up the wrong tree. I love NRS and MK9. I don’t know enough about the clash system to discuss it. I’m just worried it won’t have enough of an effect on the fighting to justify its presence and may just interrupt the flow of the combat. From what I’ve heard, there’s no way for me to determine how it actually plays. I mean, what happens during the clash? Do we do something to “wager” certain amount of meter or something? I just have no idea what the hell it is.
ABC fights XYZ.
ABC does a good combo on XYZ and inflicts some serious damage, but XYZ decides to enter the clash, so he does it with the usage of two bars.
They they both have to spend meter, if they want … The guy who spends more meter during the clash wins. If XYZ spends more meter the combo-damage gets negated (or reduced by a large margin). If ABC spends more meter the damage gets through, and XYZ maybe suffers from additional damage.
That’s it, if I’m not all too wrong.
By looking at it you would think that the clash-mode would be different than the combo-breakers in MK9. Where the combo-breakers happen instant in competetive play, since you know that the opponent is going to inflict a lot of damage, now you can let him do that damage - and maybe wait to see if he will drop the combo. If he doesn’t, use the clash-system to either negate the damage, of take away a huge part of the meter from the opponent, if he uses his meter to get the combo-damage through.
Therefore it always gives you a slightly advantage, if you’re not as good as your opponent, since you will always be able to force him to do something. Either lose meter, or lose the prior combo.
But the mindgames don’t stop there.
What if your opponent starts dropping combos, just for the sake of getting a decent amount of damage, but not giving you the opportunity to use the clash during a longer combo, where you would think it’s worth it?
Or will the people use the clash immediately at the beginning of the combo, simply to break it? Which would be totally nonsens, since the guy who used it would lose 2 meters.
And will he always have an disadvantage if ABC and XYZ have both 3 meters at the beginning, but XYZ uses the clash, loses 2/3 of the bar and then they have to wage, where ABC would have 2 more meters to use?
It’s pretty messy and that’s why NRS is considering to drop the waging, if they can’t make it work.
Then we would have simple 2 bar combo-breakers again, but this time they would be more cinematic … As I already said it before … I like cinematics, but too much is too much.
Listen man.
I’m not the only person on the world wide web who says that the long stage-transactions and the stage-interactions could hurt the game in the long run, because they would break the pace of the combat and so on. There are a lot more people saying it.
BUT.
I’m pretty sure that I’m one of the few people who care more about this game than the others, who simply see it as a fighting game that is in the production. They will give the game a shot and if they don’t like what they see, they will drop it and you won’t be able to find any more opponents online, since they simply dislike the game. It tends to happen to fighting games.
My concernes are much more intense. I grew up with superheroes. When everyone was dickriding the Anime-train I was the only outsider, who still read superhero comic books, watched cartoons, movies, played games and so on.
I don’t care if this turns out to be a great, competetive fighting game, that will be played at the EVO and come up with more hype than SSF4: AE.
I want this game to be good simply because it’s a game that features superheroes and supervillains and even though they tend to have over the top, larger than life moments in comics, too much can still become too much pretty quick and it probably and unfortunately will.
The easiest solution to this is to play in the stages with less to none stage transitions, they already said that they have those type of stages for the people who don’t want that
That still leaves a mess of questions. How exactly do you determine precisely how much meter you want to spend? Is it hidden from the other player? There’s just not enough explained to me for me to feel comfortable about it or discuss it. But yea, it does sound messy.
As for transition cut-scenes. They’re no worse than cinematic combo scenes, so I really have no problem with them. Strategically someone may pull one off to give them a chance to reset themselves mentally.
The real painful stilt in the action could come from the clashes. Being mid-combo and then going into a long cinematic would be much more jarring than someone doing a single move that sets off a cinematic. But like I said, it’s all too unclear right now. I trust NRS, but I’m still a little “meh” about the concept. We’ll see when the game comes out, which is becoming an agonizing wait for me as a D.C lover.
Straight up. I recall having heard that you can even turn off the stage interactables, like the car and whatnot. They seem to have made those out to be very important and integral parts of the game, instead of just shoehorning them in, though. If only Capcom had embraced the same practices with SFxT… I’d still be playing it today.
Stage-transactions will be doable out of combos.
I’m not 100% sure if that applies for the regular stage-transactions as well, but I think it does - uhm … but yeah, there will be stange-transactions like the one, where Batman did a combo on Solomon Grundy during the EVO presentation I think, where they were on the stage: Future City and then Batman rammed Grundy into the ground, who they fell through few underground-layers.
@August, Mendis’ appraisal is pretty accurate, save that (in its current incarnation) you have to have 2 bars to start it but that doesn’t “auto bet” those 2 bars. I believe that is just an accomodation to keep people from troll-clashing every combo when they little or no meter. It appears you can still have 2 bars, clash, and then bet nothing and come out of it with two bars. You’d probably lose the clash, but the strategy behind that would be you can convince your opponent to burn his meters trying to retain his combo damage.
The reality is the combo ends either way, so even if you lose you still broke the combo and probably your opponents train of thought. I think the questions they are asking themselves in the design meetings are;
a) are “free” breakers fair? Because potentially after you have two bars, you could still troll-clash after any hit, and odds are neither person would bet a thing and it would be a titanic waste of time. Similar to how the old Fatal Fury games devolved into who can super who first when the life bars started flashing.
b) is 2 bars enough? Even if people play by the “rules”, if the ratio of combo damage to meter gain isn’t right, we still might never actually see a combo of real length because again, if you have 2 bars there’d be no reason to let your opponent hit you more than once unless they have more meter than you.
c) Is it competitive? Because lets face it, scrubs won’t care. They’ll just do it cause it looks cool or they like what the characters say to each other, or whatever and that’s that. But in a competitive environment, is betting meter actually interesting or is this another Pandora?
One of MKvDCs biggest faults (besides the horrible online code, braindead infinites, glitches, and general stupidity involving frame data) was that Free Fall Kombat, which was totally unavoidable, allowed the victim to potentially score like 15% damage for guessing right and countering you. You couldn’t even just not hit a button because the game would AUTO COUNTER and punish you for not indulging the sick guessing game. TYM and Klose Kombat were pretty dumb competitively as well, but they still didn’t just punish you just for trying.
My personal thought is it should be a once a match type of thing, like Xfactor, and then maybe you bet the amount of super you have to the amount of damage the combo has done, or something. I don’t know. The betting is a novel concept, but I hate the idea of being punished for attacking. Especially if its meter on the line. Especially if its multiple times a match. If it were just once a match, or I could avoid it entirely by just doing smaller more succinct combos or even if I could bait it like a bb burst.
@Mendis, I ain’t gonna argue with you bro. If you say the sky is falling, the sky is falling. Just keep in mind, you’re but the latest in a long line of doomsayers who have attempted to predict what feature will be the death of a game that otherwise looks completely fantastic. Walls / Bound / Rage / Slopes were going to destroy Tekken, FADC / Ultras / No Parrying was going to destroy Street Fighter, holding a button to raw tag / TACs / Xfactor / Long cinematics were going to destroy Marvel, “fighting entertainment” was going to destroy Dead or Alive, everything was going to destroy SFxT (irony), the list goes on. And yet, not one person has come away from an Injustice booth with a complaint other than “I want more” certainly not, “boy did I get tired of smashing people through buildings”.
Edit: They’ve said you can’t turn them off, but they may do a Final Destination esque stage with no frills. And unfortunately, it looks like moves besides the F/B+Heavy will be able to cause transitions. Batman’s wire smash did it in that demo.
well, a breaker is one thing. You don’t “lose” anything from a breaker. But clash has the potential to cost you your entire meter. And if you just don’t bet (See the MKvDC FF example) your opponent can just wait til the last hit of your combo and fuck you, for free, as long as he has two bars.
At first, I thought it was strategically interesting. But its really only interesting from a defensive standpoint, since in MK9 you don’t get good meter from hits only blocks, while your opponent gets meter no matter what. From an offensive standpoint, its just a perennial risk of being fucked, with the victim essentially holding your meter or your damage hostage any time you hit him. Any time you’re at risk for winning (I’m looking at you, Ultras) its stupid.
So, Injustice is not listed as one of the Wii U launch titles that will be coming out from November 'til March and we know that Ed Boon loves the EVO guys and that they should come up with the game pre EVO, so does that mean that we will get Injustice on April / May 2013? I think so!
