You’re just taking the other side of what’s being said. “It doesn’t have the vortex” essentially just means “I like that SFxT rewards a strong ground game over anything else.”, which is a very valid reason to like the game.
I was going to add another line in there, but didn’t. Though now I see I should have.
The ground game being rewarded doesn’t mean that SFxT is offering something that other fighters don’t. That’s why I take the other side because again if I ask the question what does SFxT offer that other games don’t, the answer that the ground game gets rewarded (Which I prefer to say fundamentals since ground game doesn’t necessarily describe every fighting game) isn’t really an answer to that question. Ok there are other titles where fundamentals are rewarded just as well or better. So the next question is of course what’s so special about SFxT’s fundamentals?
I’ve played so many other games in addition to SFxT and basically my answer is, nothing. I’ve yet to find anything in SFxT’s neutral game that makes it any more interesting that any of the games competing with it. It’s about as bare bones a neutral game as you can get.
When I think of games with strong ground game, I think of 3s or CVS2, not xT. I definitely don’t remember xT having a super interesting ground game as much as people claim it has.
What I remember of xT is fish with low short, convert into super damaging combo, then sit on that lead.
If you have footage examples that showcase the ground game I’d be interested in watching.
Wolfkrone vs. Jibbo[details=Spoiler]https://youtu.be/yJnEO0hZLtk [/details]
Infiltration vs. Cool kid [details=Spoiler]https://youtu.be/BVbvB58n86Q[/details]
Kelvin vs. Cool kid [details=Spoiler]https://youtu.be/ZJ0EUeRUtrs[/details]
Some of the more notable sfxt matches.
The ultimate problem with SFxT outside of the initial impression is…it isn’t special. I believe the game is VERY solid and pretty fun to play. But there’s nothing ultimately special about it other than the premise which no one was enamored with in the first place.
I still think it’d be accepted and played to this day if it was released as it is now, but it wouldn’t be stealing any thunder.
Yeah while SfXt does not come close to matching 3s, ST, etc. it is actually a street fighter game with a valid ground game unlike SF4. Despite being a tag game it is also closer to the older street fighters, than SF4. However when talking about special…what is special about SF4? It’s failed attempt at parries (Focus attacks)? It’s failed attempt at comeback mechanics (Ultras)? It offers nothing special and is also not solid or fundamentally sound. Only reason it took off and is popular is cause when it was released and banking on SF2 nostalgia.
That’s enough though. Even if it’s something so petty as capitalizing on a market that was desperate for anything, it’s still something that sets it apart along with the constant stream of support both patch wise and tournament support from Capcom.
So anything new for SFV? It has been a month and haven’t heard anything 
I hear ya.
Don’t expect anything until at least the MKX hype train passes. Once that game is released you will see more of SF5. We’re allegedly getting some at the NicoNico expo later this month (around the 25th).
The tekken chars were far more interesting than the SF4 chars in terms of SFxT IMO. Very little was done to A LOT of the SF4 chars coming into SFxT beyond just adapting them to the new system mechanics(rolls/tags/intro and outro animations/pandora/boost chains) and giving them a new super. As I’ve pointed out before, many of the bugs in SF4 and pieces of miss-set data still exist in SFxT because they did just a port + tweak job on the majority of the cast. Probably the best example is that Cody’s crouching knife normals are still considered standing, and that the level 2/3 HP Badstone bug from SF4 still exists in SFxT (two numbers are transposed on his move speed settings causing the release animation for L2/L3 HP badstone to take 2x as long but recover 2x faster). I’m sure there are bugs like that for many other chars.
The big work went into a handful of chars and changing how a bunch of the core system stuff worked under the hood. Things that actually are good and would be nice to see in SF4 but 90% of players don’t even realize is there. Like how animations were handled was changed and tweaked how reeling worked (though I felt that COULD have been improved, it is what causes a lot of chars to have lost reach on combos from SF4 as well as what allows characters to stand significantly closer than before due to smaller pushboxes). They added things like a true crush system, modified the counter system, and completely tweaked how stances were handled under the hood. All stuff the average player would never even realize was there because it’s not only not obvious to most scenarios. It’s mostly important to either modders or combovid makers who would notice that sort of stuff, especially those who use tool assistance to try and break the game.
Because ST never had a vortex, 3S never had dive kick characters with genejin, CvS2 didn’t have roll canceling, Alpha 2 didn’t have unblockables, Alpha 3 didn’t have infinites from V-Ism right? SF4 might be closer to the older games than you might think.
That said why I thoroughly dislike SFxT is that the ground game is a watered down version of SF4’s. I love SF4’s ground game though I’ll be the first to say I hate characters like El Furete, but when you do get to play the ground game it is thoroughly enjoyable. If anything SF4’s sin is that the mechanics aren’t consistent. It’s not to say there are no fundamentals, just that they don’t always match.
Yeah… that’s why I love watching high level shoto matches, or most vanilla matches in general. But I guess with Super, they decided to go away from what they tried to do in the beginning.
yeah this is my perception too. I hear people say “oh xT has really fundamentals-based play” or “the ground game is really strong in xT” then I watch footage like what Thancruz just posted and I’m not seeing that. I’m sure there’s a lot to like about xT but the ground game does not look like a strong point of the game.
Didn’t mention vortex or divekicks, or even roll cancelling. I’m also not claiming the older games didn’t have flaws but they had a great core. SF4’s core is garbage. SF4’s ground game? Yeah focus really helps that out, as well as the generally crappy hitboxes/hurtboxes and slow as molasses walkspeeds. (Sarcasm)
You’ve also ignored the other part of my post. What makes SF4 special?
Are you really criticizing a game you’ve never played? Try it out, the ground game is better than SF4 (though that is not saying much). I understood a lot more about KOF XIII when I started playing it…that it was more than HD combos of doom. Anyways 3s is much better than either game so you are better off sticking with that.
Except those things never overwhelmed the ground game in the way that they do in IV.
In 3S, Yun was unique in that he was the only one who had that combo (dive kick, genei-jin). Yes, Yang has something similar, but it wasn’t exactly the same. And every character still had to face the brick wall that was Chun who made everyone have to play a solid ground game.
CvS2 had a core that was built around really good normals, and prior to RCs, the game was about abusing them. Even with RCs, you still had to take them into consideration.
Valle CC in A2 was never a true unblockable. You had to activate CC while your opponent was standing to get an unblockable low attack. If they were already crouching and holding back, it wouldn’t be unblockable.
Even with xT’s “watered down” ground game, you still focused more on it because you had less shenanigans.
I definitely played my fair share of xT in the first few months. I didn’t like it much and stopped playing. I just ask people to show me examples of xT being really focused on ground game because that definitely doesn’t match my experience when I was playing nor does it match any tourney footage I’ve seen. and it’s something that is claimed often.
it’s a vague topic anyway and doesn’t mean much in a bubble. xT could have a simplistic and completely uninteresting neutral game and still be a good game overall.
Again, it’s nothing special. And as it was said, the game is boring to watch. I’ll admit to it myself. Unless I need to study up on something I prefer to tune out. It’s a lot more fun to play than watch (though that goes for most games). What the game brings doesn’t translate well to viewing though, which is another strike against it.
I will say that while playing though, especially against great competition, I do feel a pressure similar to what I felt against a good 3S Chun with SA2 locked and loaded. The pressure of needing to know my spacing perfectly or risk being taken for a ride off of a strong poke.
SF4 I never felt much danger outside of vortex characters and maybe Gief (admittedly haven’t played Ultra so Evil Ryu may very well inspire it as well). You know you’re never taking that much damage and you’ll tend to have plenty of time to get back into the game. No pressure, no anxiety early. The damage is that low and even when it gets higher it usually costs a bunch of resources.
No but you did mention SF4 was fundamentally unsound and mention the lack of a ground game.
At this time? Not much. When it first came out, there wasn’t a huge list of competitors. It was special by virtue of being the only thing out there that got people’s attention. KOF 12 was trash and everything else that wasn’t anime was 10 years old by that point. For better or for worse when it came out it was the defining game of this generation. In the company of the older games I’ll agree SF4 is not the absolute best, but after 5 years I can still say its been a solid enough fighter.
But the thing is SF4 didn’t need to be “special” when it first came out. The previous games were already past their shelf life for casual gamers. SF4 just needed to reasonably good for the most part it was. And most of the issues people have with the game weren’t discovered until much later into the game’s life cycle or were introduced by newer iterations of the game. So in the starting days the game was generally liked.
The problem SFxT ran into was that we already had SF4, KOF 13, MvC3, MK9, Anime, etc. by then or that we were already loaded down with a large range of fighters. This alone would have been a problem by itself, but when you add on the fact that SFxT largely took mechanics from SF4 and the first iteration was a lot more boring to play and watch because of the mechanics they did change it created a game that was just uninteresting. It was a defensive game that was even more defensive than SF4.
This. People underestimate this factor a lot (it killed us before in the mainstream). Fighting games aren’t like other games, it takes a lot of dedication to get good at them, and there’s only so much time you have to add another one to your schedule. This is why I don’t mind SF5 coming in even later than 2016, we’re near saturation and the market needs to get hungry and SF5 needs to bring something new to the table as well.
I love how everyone that doesn’t like sfxt says all you do is buffer normals all the time. Cause you never buffer specials from normals in sf4…right? And now people are complaining that it feels like everyone in xT gets damage the same way and combos feel the sameish? This shit doesn’t even make sense.
Frame traps, mixups, and footsies. Pretty sure that’s how you get damage in sf4 also right lol?
Hmmm… Sf4: Bnb’s, one meter combos, fadc combos, and comboing into supers…
Sfxt: bnb’s, one meter combos, tag in combos, supers, cross assaults, and boost combos…
How does sfxt combos feel the sameish to people and not sf4? People are just making up shit now lol