There’s a lot of truth to what James has said in his posts. I feel the game could benefit greatly from characters having more differentiating crouching, standing and air moves. Why not have command normals in the air? Maybe Noob Saibot’s backwards dash covers more ground than Cage’s because of him being a more zoning character. It’s not just about combos. It’s the reason why I feel Blazblue is the best fighter currently. EVERY character has an absolutely completely different learning curve(while still being balanced to the point any character can win any match-up). You can’t jump from one character to the next and expect any type of similarities. A grab character’s total move arsenal should feel completely different from a zoning character’s for example.
It would’ve been awesome to have a totally different set of moves for each character’s stance position. Depending on which stance you were in, it would limit what you could do at that time. Even X-ray moves could’ve been deeper like instead of the generic high damage one-hit moves there were mini, low damage X-rays that would hit specific limbs that caused specials and normals to be less effective(slower and less damaging). Mini x-rays would take a bar of meter to use. Each limb has three levels of damage status(low, medium and critical) like say Sub-zero’s slide is used with both his left and right legs. To injure that move you have to at least get a low damage status on both legs. They could also add counters to these x-rays, but you would have to know which limb was being targeted as well as having at least one block of meter to activate the counter.
Really, I just think James is saying the game will last longer with the more things you’d have to know about each character if EVERYTHING about a character was different from the others. Maybe only some characters had chain combos, others had links and some had neither. Can you HONESTLY say that wouldn’t make for a better game?
Just because netherrealms went back to the first three games for inspiration doesn’t mean they HAVE to do EVERYTHING the same. Uppercuts and Sweeps are a mainstay to the series, but they don’t have to have the SAME properties for every character. Some uppercuts and sweeps could juggle and some may not. maybe some uppercuts stagger instead of knocking you down and some sweeps put you in a ground unrecoverable position.
Depth in a game isn’t solely about trying to find out new combos or how a character plays, that’s just one facet or one slice of the pie, with discovery. And quite frankly that type of stuff can also be a time sink, or pseudo depth if that’s what some games are based on, with a barrier to entry that prevents those that don’t have that kind of time for discovery, from getting to the meat of a game. That type of thing should be kept at certain minimums when it comes to video games themselves, if the games aren’t meaning to have something as that as it’s main focus or goal. It should only be worth the actual slice, not the entire pie… unless that’s the flavor.
Depth of fighters, at least to me, comes more from viable options and the layers of gameplay in applicable choices, in a given situation, turn, or phase. This would be a larger slice of the pie. It actually includes combos, it’s all encompassing.
Also just because some games aren’t following archetypes one is used to, doesn’t remove depth: Grapplers having more health, pixies having lower health, etc. Grappler and pixie, are certain archetypes that work for the games they were designed to be in. All fighting games don’t need to follow these archetypes to a T or the game is shallow, it just has it’s own archetypes that aren’t cliches or derivatives of things that one is used to, doesn’t put those games on a lower scale or even a higher one, just it’s own.
If anything many fighters that are confined into “set play”(where in certain situations you’re limited to only 1 option or choice, or you’re doing it wrong and it’s obvious when someone is doing it wrong) is shallow in comparison because it’s more confined.
As far as MK goes, MK is not trying to be SF. MK is trying to be MK. For MK to try and be SF, it will fail. SF would also fail if it were trying to be MK.
they did this in either MK:D, MK:DA, or both, and it was not fun at all to have to be in certain stances to do certain moves. and each player had 3 stances, and you had to traverse them go get to the next ones. so you couldn’t just go from 3rd stance to 2nd. you had to go 3rd to 1st to 2nd.
it wasn’t fun at all trying to figure that crap out.
How can you guys be so closed-minded? if you “don’t have time to devote to learning about a really deep game” then it’s obvious you’re not looking for a game with great depth. If this is how people really feel I don’t see a long future for this brand. As time goes by we’ll see how much more you can get out of this game’s characters with everyone having so many similarities.
That’s a bad thing? Makes think more when using projectiles. You can also say SF is more advance but I’m pretty sure MK characters have almost double the moves.
I know this is changed in CSII (The third revision I might add) but Noel main fighting Iron Tager in CSI is only a winnable matchup if you stretch the term winning to mean, “I can win if he walks away from the stick and/or has a seizure.”
And if he has that seizure holding the stick and a 360 plus mashing on the A button happens, you’ll still probably lose.
Devoted to learning a deep game? What’s there to learn besides how to use a move and how to use a combo. It’s when idiots make it overall compliacted for no reason to the point it’s as if your learning another language I just say screw it.
I don’t see strategic games like starcraft 2 having a problem with MORE to figure out. That game has probably 15x more people playing it. depth doesn’t mean difficult. it means multiple options. People enjoy SC2 more because of how much is hidden in the game’s mechanic. It’s what separates play-styles.
You should read James’ post again. That’s exactly what he’s talking about. lol!
I understand your desire for diversity, it’s one of the reasons I love King of Fighters. However, you are neglecting that not all normals are identical. Some sweeps are faster, slower or longer ranged than others, some uppercuts are longer ranged than others (Baraka’s being king), and all characters have unique normals aside from jump punches/kicks and crouch punches/kicks (which are actually unique in some cases, like Kitana’s crouch knife jab, or Sheeva’s long range crouch kicks). So really there’s like 4-5 moves characters share with each other, but that’s about it. The rest of the normals and links are character specific with their own properties (speed, range, damage, connectivity, etc)…
I can’t argue that having identical moves (air punches/kicks) removes some options, but I think the game makes up for it by allowing freeform combos. I’m not the best KOF2K2 player but I understand already that my combo options in that game, while still impressive especially at high tier levels, will never be as open and creative as MK9. I might have more options to attack someone in the air in KOF2K2 but what does it matter if I’m always busting the same combos? I can watch high tier tournament Kula players and say to myself, “Hey, I’m a medium grade player and I can do those moves/combos… that’s nothing new…” So while having diversity is cool, what good is it if it devolves to the same shit over and over? Note that I’m not talking shit about KOF, it’s like my favourite fighter, but I’m just trying to make the example that diversity in movesets doesn’t always lead to diversity on the battlefield.
SC2 is a different genre. That still doesn’t take away the time sink notion. When it’s all said and done, at end game, it’s just about the depth of the game with it’s choice layers not discovery. SC2 probably has plenty of layers that’s why it continues to be played.
James brought up combo options as a part of his argument and that’s what I commented on. As for the choice layers in a given situation, turn, phase, etc he’s new to MK so he doesn’t know what’s available so it’s naive.
People talking about wanting certain things from games, but games like Virtua Fighter has something for everyone, but none of YOU guys are playing it.
There is a vast fundamental difference between a real-time strategy game and a fighting game. Simply put, if I wanted to play StarCraft I’d go play StarCraft.
I’m not going to say there’s no room for depth in fighting games, because there are plenty of good fighting games with varying levels of depth. The problem is, for a genre where actual matches are so short, so condensed, there gets to be a point where depth is no longer adding to the game, but starts taking away from the experience. In this case your idea of micromanagement (mini X-Rays, limb damage, move degradation, etc) is a hindrance to the experience.
At the same time, what is it about a game like Super IV or Marvel 3 that qualifies it as having enough depth that Mortal Kombat doesn’t have? And why, by your logic, shouldn’t these other games benefit from playing more like StarCraft?
I’m not going to argue the point about whether or not Mortal Kombat is the deepest fighting game in the world. imo It’s as deep as it needs to be, and I’m definitely going to have fun with it for a good long time coming. All I’m saying is that if you really, truly believe Mortal Kombat would serve itself better as a Harvest Moon game, you’re clinically insane.
You haven’t played the last gen MKs have you? It had three unique stances for each character and it added nothing to those games. switching between stances weren’t fun, there were only two or three combos that allowed you to switch between them and were set in stone. Some of the different stances didn’t expand a character’s options. The depth the stance system had was artificial
That limb idea, have you played Tao Fang? If you have you’ll know just how fucking terrible that would be.
Lets correct the record here since I am a huge SC2 fan with 3000 matches and a rank peak of diamond; Very little hidden in the game’s mechanics. Everything is pretty much self explanatory. The only thing that has changed over the months that is keeping the game competitive is mindset. People 1Aing their way to victory is extremely rare the higher you go in SC2 while certain ignored units saw more play.
Have you ever played with Gen in Streetfighter? So you’re saying just because it didn’t work in that game it can’t be improved on? In those recent games they purposely limit what you could do with them(really don’t know why though). What if there was no limit and you could change stances on the fly? Even games like Tekken and Virtua Fighter had smooth transitions from one stance to the next. Blame that on how it was implemented.
Who says a NEW game has to stick to tradition? A MK9 match could be like one long match(like Samurai Showdown iv or even MvC) where you and you’re opponent have the time to improvise and figure each other out. I mean, the rounds in this game don’t cut to a new screen anyway. The loser of a round just gets up and they start all over again(in a new +/- position). Why not just cut those rounds out and have one round to the death(with the damage outputs being change to balance it)?