So.
I shared a lot of your same concerns. Simplified inputs, auto-combos (which don’t scale lower, they have the same damage as regular combos), lack of Happy Birthday scaling, etc. Combofiend walked me through the changes and played with me in a few matches.
I can’t give a definitive review on MvCI, because I only played it after the interview for about 45 minutes. I can say I walked away from it having enjoyed what I played, after initially turning my nose up at the changes. I do not necessarily think they are good, but they are different, and not bad.
To start with, yeah, no assists. You choose your two characters, choose a gem (in the demo, we only had Space, Time, and Power), then choose a stage. At first I assumed this massively dumbed down the game because it made it so you no longer had creative cover for dangerous moves. Once I understood that the tag button now functions differently, however, I started to get where they wanted it to go. Let’s say there’s two very small beats between when you hit that tag button and when your partner comes out, but it’s a lot faster than MvC3. In those beats, I can let loose a move by the character tagging out and use a move by the character tagging in (though doing both was difficult, I usually only managed one).
This means characters don’t tag in with an attack and then pose briefly. When you hit that tag button, you are controlling that new character. If you want to tag out with a Hyper, you can. If you want to tag in with a Tatsumaki, you can. If you want to tag during an air combo, or in the middle of a gem use, or while getting hypered by someone else, you can. As long as your tag cooldown is up, you can basically do insane and creative things with your tags.
In one example, I was playing as Ultron and Chun Li. I got someone up in an air combo, used a drone, and then tagged in Chun Li. The drone hit the opponent down to the ground where Chun Li was, right into my super, and then I activated the time stone’s ultra power (I forget exactly what they called the infinity gem supers), which reset the tag cooldown and just kept changing out between Ultron and Chun Li combos.
I kind of danced around the subject, but the producer and I talked about avoiding SFxT issues with the game. He said there’s no chance of DLC gems, and internally they don’t even call them gems. The six stones you have at the beginning are all you will have, ever.
They are actually really fun modifiers to the game. I played against the producer, who was a fan of rushing at me in the air with Hulk. With the space stone, if I activated it when he had momentum in the air, the extra momentum carried him over and past me, where I could catch him by surprise and attack him out of the air. The only one I wasn’t a huge fan of was Power, but it didn’t really fit my fighting style.
I was told they have hit 1080p/60 on all versions, but they’re still in the optimization process. No answers on whether Pro/Scorpio will look better or different. Kind of laughed off a Switch version but said there’s nothing to announce at this time (don’t get any hopes up, it seemed pretty clearly to be a no.) The producer told me the number one thing they want to avoid is another Moridoom scenario where the game stagnates because of issues they didn’t foresee but players found immediately.
All in all, yes, it is significantly less complex second-to-second from MvC3. But I also found it a lot more fun. You can still get bodied, but you also feel a lot less helpless if you do. Additionally, I think the options for creativity and yomi-based strategies on figuring out what your opponent is going to do are going to be huge. I was creating mix-ups with tags against defensive enemies and using tags and stones to defend myself against really aggressive ones. I had fun and never thought “I wish the Shoryuken was a more complicated Z movement.”
Oh, final note: I was told story mode is about two hours. Which seemed short, but SFV dragged, so maybe that’s for the best. I forgot who they told me was writing it when I asked, but I know it’s not Tieri.
