Well yeah what they tried to do in AE was make more of the interesting offensive types better but it ended up shifting the tiers too hard. In console Super at least there was like legitimate counters to all the high tier characters and what not. Which at least made the counter aspect of the game interesting. In AE it’s just more characters that trump everybody else (Yun, Fei, Makoto) and the lower characters still with not that much that’s threatning to deal with them. Plus with the game’s low damage output a shitty matchup can drag especially if you’re using a character that doesn’t get huge damage per combo.
Ono would say something like this inspires competitive spirit. ~
It’s a flawed philosophy though. All it ‘inspires’ is for people to play the best characters and forget the rest.
I do believe if everyone is TOO balanced that the game gets stale. The tiers need to be defined but characters should NOT exist in a S or Godlike Tier. It gives excitement to underdogs, creates interesting counter picking and match-up situations.
On the other side of the coin, if you make everyone good or maintain some sort of balance to the point where there’s no major gulfs, everyone stands a chance to be played and the game has variety. People still pick characters they feel stand a good chance to win, but people are more comfortable picking characters that you don’t see often bec
By making a game around a tier ideal, you always end up with characters that are leaps and bounds better than everyone else. Competitive players almost always gravitate towards characters that are the “best” because they are more likely to score wins. Counter-picking is garbage. It’s a bad idea to force a situation where “if my opponent picks X I have to pick Y because that’s the only character who can beat X.” THAT is boring. That’s when the game gets repetitious and people stop caring, and when new players, or players who want to compete with characters they actually LIKE versus characters who actually WIN, are pushed away from the game.
You speak of “underdogs” - in a major tournament, you’re not going to see someone suddenly whip out a team composed of all low tier characters against someone who has a top tier team. When the tournament is on the line, who are you going to go with? The sure win, or the mountain climb to possible victory?
I think you’re confusing balance with something else. SSF4 wasn’t “boring” because it was balanced. It was “boring” because it was for the most part, a slow, defensive game. MvC3 is not like that. It’s a fast paced, much more offensive game where everyone fishes for that “magic hit” that will enable their one-shot combo. If they brought up the rest of the cast to compete with the top 5 characters, it’d still be an offense-oriented game. You’d just see more variety in the matches.
True, true. I guess I just believe that balance isn’t achievable. Just like sports or any competitive creation tiers are going to exist. Even SSFIV has a tier structure.
I disagree about counter picking being garbage. If you are playing Wesker and your team isn’t built to handle Wesker then adding Ammy/Wolvie/Zero to your team can be a strategic advantage. I am not saying having a character so dominate that you HAVE to counter pick is healthy, but counter picking to win is strategic and interesting.
And much more reasonable in a team based game where you can have teams designed to have interchangable characters for various roles depending on who you’re fighting.
I guess I would rather see “strategy” come from the player, not from the pick.
That’s the thing though - in MvC3, even if you’re just counter picking, you’re going to counter pick with characters you feel are “the best.” The pool of viable characters shrinks constantly. As players, most people just emulate what they see on streams. If all they see is Wolverine, Wesker, Dante, Amaterasu, Phoenix and Magneto backed by Doom, Tron and Sentinel sometimes, then they’re going to choose their counter picks from that pool of character that have been deemed acceptable.
Who would Arthur or Hsien-Ko be a counter pick to? Who can reasonably say that Viewtiful Joe, Morrigan or Haggar is a counter to anyone? And I don’t just mean Haggar’s assist, I mean the actual character, who you’ll be forced to play on point if you’re facing someone who is halfway decent.
Although i don’t agree with you all the time, this is fucking great there.
The game reminds me of my favorite crossover ever : Xmen vs SF. This game was so broken everywhere that even low tier (Cammy and stuffs) had the potential to win. That’s what made it a great game competitively.
Well pick and player go hand in hand. It’s strategic for the coach to pick the play and then strategic for the player to execute it. I know that is a really crude analogy but it is true. I guess it’s different for me because I don’t care how viable all the characters are. I just enjoy the synergy and strategy behind what picks are viable.
Some characters are going to suck no matter how designed. For several reasons. It may be that the more popular characters are excellent counters to them. It may be because the designers could not forsee the development of higher tier characters. Or it may just be because designers intended it that way.
Viewtiful Joe is actually not that bad, characters without a fast horizontal projectile can have issues with relatively safe voomerang spam. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXzxp5sgYnU
Though I agree there are stronger counters than him to those characters such as choosing Magneto/Viper/Taskmaster.
So true. He probably counters Wesker in a sense XD
All the more reason to get a developer sit down and explanation. If they truly intended for some characters to be “great” and others to be “terrible,” why? Why bother even putting the terrible characters in if they meant for them to be crappy and unpopular from the start?
Good question mate.
For variety in casual play? I think designers focus on casual, not competitive.
Low damage + long stages + slow walk speed is such a pain in the ass. I wish they would make system changes.
In general I feel this game has a lot of potential to end up being a game where every character is a legitimate factor. Like any fighting game there will be counter matchups and what not but the high damage and powerful tools that pretty much every character has to offer with the right tweaks will ensure a game where a lot of things can happen. Especially when 80 percent of the cast has barely scratched their surface in potential. Even among the high tiers the only character that’s probably nearly reached their full potential already is Wolverine. There’s not really much to the character but he’s effective so he’ll just stay effective. Dante is more than effective and people are obviously not going to completely flesh him out for another year. Even Wesker’s open ended play style allows for a lot of mix ups and strategies that people probably aren’t employing yet.
Even characters like Morrigan and Deadpool who probably wont even see top 10 rankings in tiers have a lot of things they can do where someone who puts the work in could make some nasty things work.
Well, the way Morrigan is in this game, she’d actually be really good if it weren’t a team game. She’s advantaged or even with practically the entire cast 1v1. The problem arises in her potential team synergy - because of her legacy dash(only game she had a normal dash in was MvC1) she has issues using assists to extend her combos outside of the corner, if she has you in the corner, her potential DHC options become extremely limited. As an assist, Soul Fist is meh of the highest order, Shadow Blade is actively bad, and only a few teams have any use for Dark Harmonizer really. So we end up with a character that benefits very little from having assists, provides next to nothing to most characters as an assist, and because of poor damage scaling added to not benefiting much from your own assists functions best as a team anchor, which is a position that actually leaves her more likely to end up against one of the 3-5 bad match ups she really does have. Add to this if you want to put out comparatively good damage per touch she needs rather high level execution, and you end with a character that only fans are really even going to attempt to use at all.
This should answer most of people’s questions regarding balance. That’s not to say that the FGC is ignored, thanks Seth, but at the end of the day it’s about money and the money lies with the casuals.
I played Morrigan early on and for it seems like the developers tried to make her into a balanced version of Phoenix. Rather meter hungry but has the possibility to do some nasty things with the meter. Especially with the astral vision. Her strange movement and lack of high damage (at least for now) keep her from being really high tier but Morrigan is definitely one of those characters where even if something small is figured out about her it could change a lot. She has a lot of good tools it’s just none of them present themselves as very powerful yet. Her assists aren’t great but there’s definitely other good characters like Wesker or Wolverine who dont have great assists either. Morrigan has too many potentially good tools IMO to need good assists.
They wanted Morrigan to be a character you have to design your team around because she’s hungry for meter in the same way Phoenix is. She doesn’t have good assists because just like Wolverine or Wesker they want you to provide assits for her if you’re going to put her on point. Yet because of that they give you an assist that builds meter for her to make her more powerful which could also mean the developers feel that she’s a character that could change things if enough meter is presented for her. The fact that she has an assist that builds meter is still better than some other character’s assists. If enough things are figured out I could see some change in the strength of her. All the right things IMO are there it’s just because of her abstract nature it will take longer to put together than Derpverine.
This actually doesn’t really answer any questions regarding balance, at least in my opinion. Unless the question is, ‘Did you just throw these characters in, despite knowing they’d be poorly designed and bad just as fan service?’
I’d then have several follow up questions:
‘How do you think including a person’s favorite character but intentionally making them bad is a service to that character’s fans?’
(answer: “We didn’t include them as fan service. We included them to attract people who wouldn’t have otherwise purchased the game.”)
‘Why didn’t you simply put the same effort into designing this character as you obviously did for that character?’
(answer: “Because.”)
Edit: Specifically regarding Morrigan, if it weren’t for the fact that her damage scaling falls to the 10% minimum, she’d actually be a lot better, and Astral Vision would be useful for more than just confusion/fireball spam.
Bonus Edit: Wolverine and Wesker actually have decent assists. Wolverine’s Berserker Barrage will extend combos. Berserker Slash, if called somewhat close to the opponent, will cross them up. Wesker’s Ghost Butterfly can extend combos and grant a wall-bounce to characters that might not normally have one, and I don’t think we even need to mention how good Samurai Edge is.