I’d still rather get a confirmation on whether or not the patches save to the hard drive offline before really saying much more. I will say that Evo is Xbox run and this will be the most tournament/FGC accommodated fighting game on the market so whatever we’re looking for, they’re already providing or will provide. I’ve never seen a fighting game company go so far out to work with the community as Double Helix outside of Lab Zero themselves. I’m sure they’re working on something.
The having to be connected to online would get tedious, but I really don’t see why that would be the case. There’s gotta be a way for something as simple as cloud patches to translate offline. Long as you can keep the cloud patches offline, I believe it’s a lot of unnecessary worrying. Especially for people who aren’t even going to buy the game.
This is what one of the guys in the KI thread mentioned
*It seems like it works the exact same way as MK, Injustice, and all those EA sports games, it just uses the cloud to be fancy.
Basically when it connects to the internet(cloud), it checks to see if the game is up to date, if not, it downloads and replaces the balance variables stored on the HDD.
So yes, you should be able to use the updates offline.*
Sounds simple enough to me. Don’t see why that would cause a catastrophe at Evo, but yeah. Double Helix said they also want to stay away from superfluous balance patches that are done often and not real meaningful or skew the meta of the game too much.
mk9 and injustice patching isn’t something most people like. in fact, i know people deliberately not playing the game because of how bad the experience has been.
working with the community is where mk9 and injustice are running into most of their problems. fuck the community: make a good game. there’s a field called game design that you can get degrees for and make way too much money to do. you have tons of resources and people working with you to follow a philosophy that should be in line with how you mean the game should be played. trust me: these guys make a solid 6 figures, and game design and balance is literally all they do. yet, games like mk9 and injustice have infinites found in the first hour of them releasing a new character every time. being able to release patches has just given these highly paid professionals an excuse to be lazy, and i see this every day.
at least before, you had to go through sony and microsofts certification process when you wanted to make changes, so you had to be semi confident in your abilities as a designer, because you cost your company money every time you fuck up. now, there’s 0 reason to give a shit. just change it on the cloud. i’m sure its just on a spreadsheet and you just bump values around… sure nothing can go wrong there (from experience: it always goes wrong).
Gamestop is running a promo. Kinda similar for XBO. You buy current gen release. You have the option to trade in for the next gen copy and pay $10. You are given a coupon thats used when you bring the old version in that bumps the trade in value to $50 bucks. Games include COD, BF4, Madden, Fifa, and Ass Creed.
I don’t understand why you’re throwing NRS games’ situation into the same thing with KI. Different company, different game engine. They could have just made the game in a way like most Arc Sys games, Skullgirls etc. where you just throw in a ton of things to keep infinites from being possible to begin with.
Killer Instinct specifically has a meterless combo breaker system (can only guess once though or get locked out for 3 to 4 seconds) and a knockdown value (KV) system which is essentially an MVC2 style spin out bar. If the opponent doesn’t break your combo at some point you will eventually just rack up so many hits to the KV bar that they will fly out of the combo. The game also forces you to end your combos with specific ending special moves and if you don’t do that, the damage is stored and the opponent can gain most of that health back.
I understand you or others have had issues with NRS in the past, but that shouldn’t dictate what will happen with Double Helix and Killer Instinct. Gamers have shown in general that they like fighting games where the devs are actually working hand in hand with the community ala League of Legends. Can’t make that go away and that’s the way things are going. Don’t have to be a part of it, but I can do all but guarantee you that people will find it works better for them in the long run. Especially as stronger devs go for this philosophy also.
well, you can’t use nrs games in your argument as to why its a good thing and that its also irrelevant to the conversation. i get the point that you’re saying that if it saves cloud data to they system, its much better than cloud necessity… but it still poses a ton of problems even without knowing the full extent.
its also worth noting that double helix isn’t exactly an established company. its a foundation 9 funded subsidiary, and is budding company that handled fairly mediocre titles before and has had little experience with competitive games, and even less with cloud based tech… i’m know they have some good people behind balance, but you are putting a lot of faith in a company that hasn’t really made a dent with their games before to use fancy new tech efficiently.
this isn’t really an argument about infinites or bad experiences. i’m neither an nrs game player or a ki player. but as with a ton of things with sf4 and nrs patching, i feel as if this sets a horrible precedence for games going forward. if there are infinites or huge imbalances, i’m fine with them admitting their mistakes and patching them out. but the flexibility to change any value of your game whenever you want is not only scary from a competitive standpoint, its just lazy from a game design perspective and opens the door for so many things to go wrong. this isn’t a knock on double helix, but its a worry for all fighting games going forward.
looks accurate but I’m not sure about some things like xbox mandatory disc installs I thought they removed that. Also it doesn’t talk about xbox tv features that nobody seems to care anyway but still.
Yeah I know of that promo. Thats why the article about the PS4 letting you keep both versions for just $10 more caught my attention. If the Xbox One can’t do it as well thats going to be a bummer on me deciding which console to get CoD Ghost for if any at all now
Where are you pulling these “facts” from? I’ve never heard of a degree in game design being relevant to any FG developer.
Also regarding them doing shitty balancing work- 1st of all you only judge what went under the radar. You have no idea what they DID find and fix along the way. They can find and fix 99 problems and you’ll shit on them for missing the 100th. Also considering that almost any 1st iteration of a game is pretty shitty, I’d say it mainly comes down to sheer luck. Even the best developers tend to fuck up when trying new things. It’s unavoidable, but the solution is already present in the form of later iterations.
a UC computer science degree with an emphasis on game design. out of college, you will usually enter into a an entry level or junior level game designer position. this is usually a mid to high 5 figure job, and you’re usually working under people who have 3-5 years on the job, who are lead designers, associate designers, and your average run of the mill game designers. so while your college degree will not have an emphasis on whatever said genre you take part in, you’ll be working under plenty of people who have cut their teeth in the industry. most of whom you can assume have experience in the genre.
i’ve worked in the industry for a long time now, and have had responsibility in balancing myself. i have tons of game design contacts and work with game designers on a daily basis. i know exactly how balancing works and missing key balancing issues… but what you quoted is from me talking about not listening to the community when it comes to your game design philosophy. out of context, you assume that i just expect perfection, even though i said later in that same post i welcome patches and admitting mistakes.
nothing is perfect. while with the cloud, you can fix any major glaring issues immediately, which is cost effective and good. but now with that freedom, balancing can now be knee jerk and reactionary, which is not good… before, you needed to be a good designer: get data on the situation, see how your game plays out, and make an educated analysis of what needs to be changed… because when you submit your patch, the quality of your game better be much better because you only had a few shots to nail it before you started costing your company too much money…
but then you look at how nrs advanced its balancing outlook, nerfing and buffing stuff that people had 0 opinion on while leaving fairly strong characters untouched. changing move properties for very little reason and making a ton of non-sensical knee jerk reactions instead of waiting to see how their game developed and making educated, well thought out changes because they could cloud change whatever later on if it didn’t work. characters dropped from top to bottom. combos came and went. people invested time in characters only to have them be made irrelevant. and it went on for months and months and months with the game being very unstable and skill not translating into victories because of rampant, needless changes.
i understand the pros of having a cloud based system to fine tune your game, but i believe that the lack of oversight of a cloud based system is scary and off putting. depending on their post release balance philosophy, you may never get the stability that a fighting game needs if the ability to kneejerk unnecessarily is always there.
Double Helix already confirmed that they know of NRS’ knee jerk balancing and don’t want to go down the same road. They have a lot of old, vested fighting gamers like Mike Z working on the game that aren’t big fans of tons of patches. They want the game to play out and just fix stuff that locks the game up from playing the way they intended to.
Just because they have the power to change does not mean they want to go down that road. Different companies. I trust these guys since being fighting gamers themselves (including the guy who more or less helped create Super Turbo), that they are thinking about what makes sense for tournament players first. I understand your burns with NRS games in the past, but this is a new time.
I’m convinced when it comes to balancing that these guys will be far and above NRS.
i’ve heard the same thing on other games, but when you’re ear is to the community and you fear if X problem will immediately hurt you more than giving in and nerfing it before seeing how people deal wth it… you’ll be surprised how easy it is to change philosophies when the option is right there in front of you.
*You are on the money with this post. There will be no ninja updates. To be honest, we don’t really want to tweak often, but it’s nice to know we have it there as a option.
To clarify: All Xbox One games have 3 types dedicated storage in the cloud.
Global Storage - every one with the game has access to, it’s read-only data. It’s just matter of making the game look for and use it. This is where balance stuff / fixes would go.
User Storage - every user has dedicated storage for every game. It can be read or written to by the game. We’re putting stuff here. What will it be? How much can/will go here? MWAHAHAHA
SaveData Storage - every user will save games here, not too much different from the x360 Cloud save game option.
Each of these types are cached on your Xbox One whenever you may be offline.
*
Hopefully they give you a code to play day one since that collector’s version of the game doesn’t release till a week after launch. I think buying the 20 or 40 dollar pack already gives you access to the last 2 characters early any ways. I’ll look into it though as time goes on since the whole pin thing seems pretty cool. As long as the ways to get the rest of the pins aren’t super contrived.
So long as there are no strings attached, this is huge imo. Xbox Live just got the competitive advantage it needed against PS Plus. I highly doubt Sony will be able to match this.
Very much so. FlyingVe was talking about it for a while in the KI thread how strong dedicated servers would be for Xbox One. Looking good so far. KI won’t even really need it since GGPO should be enough.
Games like Titanfall and Sunset Overdrive making it big with the multiplayer with dedicated servers could call for something big down the road.
