https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-ObB_S_qZo&ab_channel=BrisonVids
star wars is hilariously overrated, but that has nothing to do with mvc
I was not around for the giants of TvC, but I think I have a comparable game source to draw from. (Wall of Text approaching)
Without going into too much detail about the game itself, Giants also likely suffer from is a lack of bodies/options: When playing as a giant you play a 2v1 and you need to hope your limited movepool and matchup chart is powerful enough to overcome the inherant flaw of missing another person. If, for example, you are fighting a team of two zoners, your own team may have a hard rushdown to tag into and get around those fireballs/limbs. A giant does not have the option to do so, nor would he have the multitude of combinations available granted via having a teammate AND an infinity stone. Lets say for the sake of argument, there are…30 normal characters, 5 Infinity Stones, and 5 Giants. Any combination of two characters, with one Infinity stone. There are 435 different combinations of characters, meaning with one choice of stone per team, 2175 different combinations of normal characters and stones. Giants, for the lack of having another character, only have 25 different combination, and have to hope that the tools afforded them are able to overcome/compete with the severe options gap based on mathematics alone.
Of the options cut off from having a second teammate include:
-Team Tag Combos
-Diverse movepool
-Second health bar
-Matchup Adaptation Potential
In it’s place, the giant instead has
-More health
-Overwhelming effectiveness in toolset
Lets start with health first. One big health bar worth 7000 is not the same as having two health bars 3500, which has both positives and negatives.In a game where one touch means death, an argument could be made that Phoenix with 5 bars is the tankiest character as she HAS to be hit at least twice. And this is the problem here, as many giants are especially vulnerable to one touch death scenarios. They invested all their stock into a big health bar, with poor dividends being returned. To make this work, I recommend segmenting Giant health bars into two to match the opponents. Developers can move that divider where needed for balance.
As for the overwhelming effectiveness, their options need to be better than a large chunk of the cast. Due to the nature of fighting games, if something works against an opponent 100% of the time, it will be picked every time. A giant is more likely to have this sort of thing happen to it given it’s lack of unique size and lack of tools. Mathematically, if one touch of death or uber lockdown strat or overpowered move or universally potent strategy is discovered, it is more likely to be in one of the 2175 combinations as opposed to the 25. At which point the opponent can simply pick that combination to overcome a giant 100% of the time. The giant, for it’s part, is unlikely to have several of these due to it’s singular nature. Since this is dependent on the game, there’s no easy answer and a lot of factors can attribute to this.
Anyways, that’s all I got without getting into any specific game engine, existent or otherwise.
If I recall correctly, giants were hilariously free to Saki/Tekkaman because the team could zone them out for days.
Not once did Capcom or Marvel say what types of characters were or weren’t going to be on the roster. If you’re still hung up on the teamwork thing, I already mentioned that they only spoke of how the system mechanics were changed to promote teamwork. They never tied it to anything character related. And again, just because something didn’t work in a past game doesn’t mean it can’t be tweaked to work in this one. Zero’s Buster was overpowered in UMVC3, so should MMX not have Buster? Should they not bring back She-Hulk based on how bad and unpopular she was last iteration?
Giants were also free to Alex as they could still be command grabbed. Powerbomb and stungun headbutt destroyed them.
The image of Alex power bombing a mech should justify the inclusion of giants by itself.
And you were wrong, because it’s something even the Marvel guys talked about in their interviews.
Apples and Oranges. Especially since Giant characters are a gimmick, not a matter of buffing or nerfing characters, which is something they would do in either of those situations you mentioned.
And you forget, there has been several different crossover fighters since TvC and none of them brought back giant characters. Clearly, it’s not something they think is worth bringing back.
And a Marvel game would not be the best place for them to try that failed gimmick again, certainly not this Marvel game.
Especially since Infinite already has a unique mechanic, the Infinity Stones. In case you forgot.
Pretty sure the would have all six.
A good amount of people played She-Hulk in vanilla. She became unpopular when Ultimate nerfed her best tools. The new move didn’t make up for it.
And i don’t think people would actually mind She-Hulk to return, she is still a popular character among the comics crowd.
She-Hulk is a character, Giants re a concept, one that TvC showed was highly flawed (for the reasons already stated).
I guess the real question I’m asking is: why is 2 characters + 1 assist a bad thing? I don’t see how it goes against “teamwork” at all tbh. If anything it promotes more teamwork because you are putting more thought into what will make your team strong, and therefore have to focus on synergy, what will work in what situation, etc. I get that they are trying to simplify the game, so it makes sense from that perspective, but it doesn’t really make sense to me at all from a “teamwork” perspective. In fact it comes off as kind of a buzzword…
2v2 means you aren’t just picking a character as an assist. 3v3 means you can lose 1 character and still not have to use the assist.
She-Hulk or Gamoora, I need green boobs on my screen
A classic example is doom where people just pick him for the assist. Most doom players are ass and thus it doesn’t really make it seem like teamwork. Hence most people play doom beam or jam sess rather than the actual character
With 3v3 if they used the MvC:I system (as we know so far), you could still end up with characters who’s only purpose is to end combos for the other two.
How do you guys feel about the possibility of giant characters being a level 3 hyper combo?
The beauty of 2v2 with no assists is that it forces the developers to give each character a more complete kit. With the previous system, some balance choices were made with assist types in mind. They could justify the number of otgs/wall/groundbounces they gave characters based on the presence of assists that could compensate, as well as damage numbers based on the 2 other characters to compensate (x factor also played a role). This made teambuilding a little too dependent on certain assists/dhcs, while the hitstun decay system made it too dependent on combo damage.
That reminds me, how do you think they should handle combo length in this game? Should they go back to fixed hitstun with undizzy? Should they keep hsd and just tweak it? Should they introduce a Skullgirls-style system to prevent infinites? Im not sure which would be best for this system, but I’m leaning towards some kind of system with fixed hitstun since hsd just created a gap between the characters who had ways of working around it and those who didn’t.
Undizzy with no scaling/proration.
You mean like Ant-Man turning into a giant for a duration?