James Chen thinks MK9 lacks depth

Well, you check out your opponent while in fighting, seeing how your opponent reacts, punishes etc. It is very hard to react to most individual moves, but you can react to situations you are familiar with and if you don’t manage to get any good reads you can often go for the simplest option, like blocking low vs Liu Kang because he has a great combo that starts with a low but none (as far as i remember) that start with a mid, and then react to his overheads, like the 3 in 2,1,3.

It is fully possible to poke people from afar with any character though some characters like Sub-Zero have better tools for the job than others. Sub-Zeros f4 is a good range overhead wich is fully hitconfirmable, and can net you a freeze into a combo.

I play Kitana among others myself, and i don’t have a problem hitconfirming with her. Neither should anyone who plays a character with longer strings like Reptile, Nightwolf or Kung Lao, as long as they start with 3 of the 4 hits of their poke strings.

This one must not understand the beauties of zoning. Also, zoning is not spam, and is not random.

MK9 is an up-close game for the most part. Your damage isn’t done by moves to keep the other guy out. It’s who can mixup and get their damage in first by reading the other player’s tendencies. It has little room for combo experimentation like SF4 or MvC3 do. You pick the most damaging dial-a-combo into special because that’s the better thing to do. Other than Kabal, I haven’t seen an example of dropping a combo early to go for a reset + pressure being worth it from any other character. It’s a different kind of depth, for the lack of an alternative word in a sense. Air juggles make it more interesting, but then I feel like I’m playing a 3D fighter.

Salty Chen show talking down on MK? Who cares? Enjoy the game or don’t play it.

Would it be fair to say the game does have footsies, but that’s not the main focus of gameplay? It seems like every characters relies more on special moves to get in.

MK, compared to other games, does lack variety. It isn’t a huge issue though. People are making it seem like because other people think it lacks depth that means they can’t have fun playing it or something.

Opinion pieces from bigger names in the community will always stir shit up. His opinion isn’t more relevant than your average joe’s opinion on the same topic, remember that. Just because he is a good commentator and popular doesn’t mean what he says holds more value.

You were supposed to laugh at the joke, not confuse C&C 3 Kane’s Wrath with C&C 3 Tiberium Wars. lol

They’re completely different games, tank spam and bo poker are both reduced, if not removed in Kane’s Wrath. The community patch 1.03 takes further steps to remove build order poker from the game.

Yeah! C&C RA2 is great stuff. YR sucked. RA2 is still tank spam though, but what RTS isn’t about spam?

Space Craft 2 is a whole lotta spam.
Marine/Marauder
Stalker/Walker
Lings/roaches/mutas

Spam spam spam - it’s just another name for “effective RTS player”.

Just seeing this, but I agree and I said the samething after about 2 weeks in.

The thing about mk is your not going to work on footies, cross ups, mixups or resets, and what that does is give no reason to do anything but you most damaging combo 100% of the time. Its along the lines of how people thought (and still think) mvc3 would just be 123 launch 123 knockdown super. Because it’s the most damaging combo and safest. But with mk this is true.

What i mentioned above about not having to worry about cross ups etc etc, takes alot of what I would call core depth from the game being that it’s 2d. It also makes it fall more into that 3d category.

If you learn, what moves you can punish, block strings and play aggressive you’ll do well in mk.

Another thing with mk is that the ceiling has to be lower in general because of the engine. A character with slightly more freedom than the next breaks the game if it’s allowed to keep that or grow. Why? Because essentially all of the mk cast has the same tools, so if character x dominates one he probably dominates most if not all. It’s a very fine line…

If you ran a stream of top mk players currently you probably couldn’t tell them apart if they didn’t put up there names to viewers. There is very little room to have a “style” in mk you have to play characters a certain way really.

With other games you can tell Rickys Rufus from Justins. Or Justins she hulk team from random other top players.

I like mk alot and I don’t think that the ceiling being low for it is a bad thing at all.

I just hate that people swear up and down it’s so much better than what we have out now.

Its not…

Edit:
Also the way meter works also plays a part in this. I’m typing from my phone so I’m not gonna go into it.

Edit: meter works very well for this game however.

Wrong. All of those things are still important in this MK.
Mind games like those are always going to be extremely effective, especially in the upper echelon of players.

I never said they aren’t important, there not as important as in other fighters. More so cross ups, and resets.

Spacing and punishing>> than everything else in the game.

Then why do the announcers always talk about how good and important the cross ups in MK are???
Resets aren’t as important IMHO. There are exceptions, such as Kabal.

@TheDarkPhoenix

Kabal, Johnny Cage, Sonya and Ermac can reset the opponent. There are probably more, but these are known and are useful for various reasons. LIJoe (Ermac) does a f4 to reset a falling PL (Kung Lao) to bait a spin in their first game in top 8 during pdp. Also, if you listen to Tom Brady talk about Johnny Cage, he says that Johnny should always end combos in nutpunch for a advantageous reset so he can keep the pressure without having to worry about invincible wakeup attacks. Doing that he sacrifices anything up to 5% (or so) of damage in some cases.

How does mixups not matter in MK9? It’s pretty much the same as in capcoms 2d fighters except you can’t safely opt to crouch block untill an unusually slow move comes out.

It isn’t as footsies oriented as ssf4, instead it is more offensive, and in this case atleast, i think that’s a good thing.

It also doesn’t have the sf4 series dumber shit like dp-fadc-whatever wich is a no risk high reward setup that if failed just gives you another mixup. Not to belittle the sf4 series, but some shit there is just plain stupid.

Crossups that aren’t ambiguous isn’t what i would call “core depth”. Really, in most cases you should see just by the spacing before the jump how you will need to block so that is bogus. In the cases where they are ambiguous, it generally just comes down to educated guesses. Good riddance in my oppinion. Anyways, crossups other uses, such as generally being safe etc are present in MK9 aswell, so no loss there.

Saying that you can’t see peoples style of play in MK is 1 dumb 2 unfair. The game hasn’t been out for very long, most players may not have developed a distinct style yet, and even if they have, viewers have probably not learned to recognize it yet.

Cross ups switch your opponent’s controls (very few moves autocorrect), making it hard to anti-air them. They also lead to a lot of frame advantage on block, which pretty much gives you a free mixup. It’s one of the best offensive options available.

They’re important. We’re seeing more and more of them. They just usually take a little bit more time to come out.

See, I played Kane’s Wrath till 1.01, which somehow broke the automatching even moreso, so I gave up. Besides, any game that relies on the community to patch the game = piss poor management from the devs. I’m looking at you, DoW.

Also, your example of spam in SC2 doesn’t make sense. If you are making three to four unit types, you are no longer spamming. For mass Marine/Marauder to work, you need medivacs plus siege tanks for cover, or vikings to take on Colossi. For stalkers/Colossi (lolwalkers), you need sentries for force fields and guardian shields to stay alive long enough. Also, Zealots are needed for meat shields to absorb damage from the opposing army as Colossi AoE everything down. For Zerg, to go mass ling/roaches/mutas is a huge mismanagement in gas spending. Who goes that route for anything but harass? Mutas aren’t good for anything but ZvZ. And I’m not even going to go into positioning and how insanely important drops are to standard SC2 play.

So yeah, lets not play around here. You know very little to comment on how SC2 plays. In CnC, the game’s flat map design as well as unit mobility keeps the game from being very position heavy, especially when everything dies in that game ridiculously fast. It becomes an issue of spam since the way the game handles encounters pretty one dimensionally. Even elements like garrisoned buildings are undermined by the fact that there are tons of unit types that negate any significance a garrisoned building may bring. Standard CnC play ends up looking like this; Scout, try to get towers, attempt to kill harvesters. If that doesn’t end the match, spam unit with the least hard counters and expand. Repeat until you get a superunit/superbuilding that unlocks super ability X.

Now, I don’t hate CnC. RA2, Tiberium Sun and Generals: Zero Hour are amazing games. However, there is a reason why CnC is stunted in its competitive scene, and its found solely in its pretty flat take on the RTS genre. It is like they couldn’t move away from the Dune 2 model, and when they did, they made CnC4. Yuck.

Very relative, I’ll come off as the enemy here and say that I feel that about both SF and MK(since that is what’s being compared). As a matter of opinion, I think VF, Tekken, and Marvel are three of the only fighters where I feel there’s room and viability for style and identity(VF and Tekken even more so). But it’s still relatively speaking because all fighting games have room for that, to very much include MK.

This thread just comes off as trying to put something into the same schema to which you’re used to, and if it doesn’t match up then everyone wants to say it’s lacking.

Quan Chi can also reset. At the moment, it’s one of the few things he has going for him.

I think resets are very important in this game. Frame advantage is ridiculously powerful as you’re often left with a quick crouching attack (that does next to no damage) or a very quick but vulnerable special attack as options to break block strings. Then add block damage (which can equal to 5% or more per string) and meter gain for blocked offense, and you can see how resets are a powerful tool.

Sure, using a combo to maximize damage is important, but you could sacrifice spacing and/or have to deal with the threat of a wake-up attack for 5-10% more damage.

true, but this is exactly what makes this thread or a gamefaq thread on MK great for the lols.