Yeah about 80 entrants made it out to NEC. Which isn’t bad considering it wasn’t a very well advertised major.
There’s several people in the tech talk thread waiting for their sticks to come in so that’s halting part of things also. Once a few months roll around and people start getting their sticks we’ll really get a feel for where this game is going.
Honestly I think online tournaments for this game are going to be really big. I wouldn’t be surprised if they do an online tournament that brings numbers in the thousands possibly. A real online presence is something fighting games has been sorely missing to make that transition to offline tournaments and general play.
KI could sell $200 consoles back in '95 when fighting games were still really popular; even a game as bad as KI could line people up for he eye candy. KI selling an unpopular $500 console in 2013? Possibly to some diehards on SRK, but to a mass market? No way.
And honestly, aside from Glacius, the game does look pretty shitty. Dial-a-combos, paper/rock/scissors, and eye candy just isn’t enough in 2013.
KI is less popular than the system itself at this point I would say. The Xbox One gave Microsoft its best launch ever despite all of the hoopla so the Xbox One and “unpopular” can’t really go in the same sentence. 1 million sold in 24 hours. Last reports are saying they are near 2 million sales now. Which means a lot of potential for a lot of people who aren’t super jaded about fighting games to jump into the FGC. Which is exactly what we need and not more of convincing the same people to try each other’s games. New blood is the best way to grow any scene.
When the game gets big numbers at Evo and gets 3 seasons in, you’ll see that it will be enough. Everyone always wants their “honest, pure” fighting game that doesn’t sell to get big, but they never do. Double Helix is doing the right thing so far I say. The game gets time to become big overtime due to its distribution model rather than having to make or break it on store shelves for 60 bucks. League of Legends and other ecosystem type games have found success this way, so it’s time to show a fighting game can do it also.
I was one of those folks who was excited for KI for nostalgia reasons. it was the only game i had on SNES for a loooong while, so I played the ever living crap out of it as a kid. I started watching Max’s and Acidglow’s vids on it and it confirmed that I would have just as much fun as I did as a child. I havnt tooled around too much (waiting for stick to be delivered), but I can confirm, it’s everything i expected it to be. can’t wait to see where this goes in the FGC, as I know I’ll still be excited for it in a year’s time, Just like i was with Vampire.
I played the game for the first time today and honestly, it has been the most fun I’ve had in a while. Killer Instinct (SNES one) was the very first game I ever played as a kid and to see it back just makes me so damn happy.
I can safely say that I’m not disappointed at all, with this said, it is now time to hit training mode with Glacius!
If referring to footsie game than Ki still has that. Its one of the character strengths in fact. Thing I notice about Ki is that its mechanics keep things in check in both offense and defense.
He was just talking about combos. KI’s always had footsies since the first game so footsies is nothing new. It just had a really broken combo system that was finally fixed in the new game. Now you can break almost everything, yet now long combos are viable since they are more complicated to successfully break with the counter breaker mechanic and manuals system. You didn’t really have to worry about long or infinite combos that didn’t involve juggles in the old game because breaking them became so easy that people just didn’t do them.
Justin Wong shows how you can pretty much win in this game using footsies if you want to. He was using short, small combos like he was playing KI1 and won the whole thing doing that and spacing with different normals using Sabrewulf. In fact, he was using combos that were too short and technically invalid. Meaning CDjr could have broken the combos after they were finished since Justin Wong never added an auto double or manual in the combos like he was supposed to. Which means J.Wong was accidentally getting rewarded for doing the wrong thing in combos.
While I do love the game there are a few troubling elements that I could see from a outside perspective.
Incomplete: Game is incomplete so we can only have so many match-ups before people start feeling" restricted"by the lack of variety.
Combo system: Ive complained about this for awhile but the damage output is far too low in this game. Coupled with the overly generous combo breaker system which ruins momentum IMO, I think people will get bored watching this on stream because the combo system will just make every character and match sort of just"sync"into 1 big puddle.
Styles: The game doesn’t really reward high damage on stray hits because the expectation is that is every attack needs to convert to a combo. However with the combo breaker being as easy as it is, it could become troubling to some players who would like to play a more "traditional"style since their efforts won’t really be rewarded in damage output.
I definitely enjoy actually playing the game despite my early feelings towards it, but holy fuck is it boring to watch even at high level. Casuals, forget about it. I’m not sure a bigger roster will remedy this issue either.
This is something I hear a lot and I can see why. However, I loved seeing all the mindgames at NEC (Shoutouts to DevilJin, you got em next time bro!). However, I feel this game is like Tekken or VF, where if you don’t know why people are getting hit by stuff, the game looks boring to watch.
There’s two major factors as to why people don’t like watching the game.
The game touts itself as being all about combos, and yet the combos are boring. Most combos require both characters to be on the ground, and they’re visually repetitive due to Doubles and Shadow Moves doing the same animation 2-5 times in a row. And not many characters have attack properties that make for interesting combos. I think it says something that the showcases for “stylish” combos in this game are almost always for Ultras, which are basically just glorified dead body juggles.
Breakers provide too many shifts in momentum. But this one at least goes back and forth depending on players’ breaker tendencies.
This is fair, the while the game’s moves actually have different animations (This is how top players know what people are going for within a combo), they’re pretty minute unless you study them.
I think this will be less of a problem as people get more comfortable with the game and the Breaker system in general.
Seems a lot of people like it from the ratings from the youtube videos. That’s usually a good indication of whether or not people like watching something. Of course we dedicate ourselves to fighting games so we’ll have our opinions, but if people didn’t like watching there wouldn’t be a large amount of likes for every big video for the game so far.
As far as the breaker system is concerned, as people learn to use manual combos and counter breakers more that will fix itself IMO.
I never played either of the old games a ton (and I may not be 100 percent on what I’m about to post), but from what I remember hearing it’s…
KI1: You could only break certain parts of a combo. Shadow moves were supposedly unbreakable, you had to break auto doubles by hitting the opposite strength of what the opponent pressed, manuals were also unbreakable. Which basically led to people just doing short sweet combos that were unbreakable and Cinder of course had unbreakable juggle infinites (that were supposedly patched out in a later version). Which means one of the main features of the game was basically useless at the highest level of play and long combos didn’t exist in tournament play outside of Cinder who IIRC was eventually banned from tourney play. Doing long combos with the basic grounded auto double/manual, linker combo flow was basically impossible at the highest level.
KI2: They allowed you to break manuals. The actual breaking system was dumbed down and made it so you didn’t need to know the strength of the attack. All you needed to guess was punch or kick. If they did a punch and you did a motion + punch, you got out. If they did a kick and you did motion + kick you got out… Which was said to make manuals useless strategically (I’m assuming manual breaking timing wasn’t very difficult unlike the new game) and generally made the breaker system too easy. That was on top of the issue of everyone basically having the exact same combo structure.
Which means you had a compounded issue of the first game. Can’t do long combos cuz you would eventually do something that was easily breakable. Except now everything is breakable without any real strict timing or any counter options.
In the new KI there’s already ways to force it so the opponent can only break on the 3rd hit or more. They always can’t break until the 2nd hit of a combo no matter what you do since you have to do an opener first and the opener is unbreakable. If you do a stand or crouch normal (which doesn’t count as an opener), then do a special move (which counts as an opener), then go into auto double or linker they can’t break until the 3rd, 4th hit or more depending on how many light attacks or if you added in a shadow move beforehand.
The entire point of the new KI combo breaker system is it finally allows long combos to be possible while still allowing you to break at any point during the combo. Meaning the game is based around forcing the opponent to respect your combos so you can land that long combo. Basically the way it should have been. The old KI games were always ridiculed for ironically not being able to have their flagship feature be useful in competition. I’ve talked to old KI heads I met at the MS stores before the game launch and some of them said that was the exact reason they stopped playing the old games. Once you played a certain level of player you couldn’t do long combos anymore and everything got broken. The higher level play after that was just doing short, unbreakable combos.
In the end you just have to learn your options. Learn manuals (faster than any auto double and have to be guessed on to be broken), counter break, add in shadow moves (great set ups for counter breakers since you can catch them during the white flashes with the counter), activate instinct (screws their timing) and sometimes just drop the combo short and go for a reset.
I dunno, I enjoy watching this game a lot actually. I’ve watched the PR Rog stream quite a bit while he’s just leveling up. I don’t find it boring at all to watch.