I’m all for developers making some characters intentionally above average, so long as they also intentionally put in some counter to that character. Could be counter characters, or it could be a tactic that the character has a hard time countering.
Obviously, Phoenix was made with this in mind by having such a small amount of health. Unfortunately, having a small amount of health in a game where most the cast can do Touch-Of-Death combos is… well, it’s a weakness, but not enough of one to change anything.
As for Wright, I somehow get the feeling he’ll play like Doronjo. I think he’ll be based more around setting traps (restraining orders?) than fighting directly.
@ Mr.X I don’t personally feel that they are wrong in wanting “unpopular” characters to be viable competitive picks. I mean sure back in SF2 days I picked chun realized she was not top tier and when I really wanted to win I would switch to dhalsim. Do I think that is good design? hell no. But I grew to love chun li. So when third strike came out and chun li was top pick I was kind of sad to see how a character no one really picked before was suddenly “op”. Everyone likes having “their own” character.
There is also the whole playstyle choice. I will use Soul Calibur as my example. Sophitia has always been my main, she is actually a popular character. I grew to love her and want her specifically to be a viable pick. Not because I want to put less work into my character but because I want to use a character that I love. That I believe is the main thing with games today. We have character loyalists who want nothing more than their favorite character to be competitive. I can’t speak for everyone who prefers character balance but for me personally I don’t want capcom to give my character easy wins. I just want the game to be more player skill based and less based on who picked the top tier character. I feel any fighter game benefits from having a balanced cast.
I agree with the general sentiment, but within reason. However, when there are a couple characters who are better or worse than the rest by an absurd margin, they need changes to put them back on scale with the rest of the cast. They can still be better or worse, but not THAT much. Phoenix, Wolverine and Hsien-Ko are good examples. The first two are so good that there is no reason not to have at least one on the team if you want to win.
Hsien-Ko, on the other hand, is so bad she’s not only JUST an assist character, she’s an assist character that needs to come on point and use meter to even do that. On top of that, she’s not even that great at her assist role. Now sure, we can say “Don’t pick her”, but to Hsien-Ko fans, that’s a blow. On top of that, what’s the point of having 30-ish characters if we only use 5? I mean as it stands, MVC3 could have been released with 13 characters and have had the same effect.
I realize top tiers are top tiers for a reason, and that no matter what there WILL be top tiers, but the more you close the gap between characters, the more variety you have, the deeper the game becomes. On top of that, there are people like myself who will try to play with the characters they like (Sadly, I fail at that though. I just don’t have good enough tech skill to play Joe well yet…), regardless of the tiers. Now I don’t mind that my character is worse than most (I play Cap, Joe, Shuma, Morrigan and Chris after all.), but at least give the players a chance to outplay their opponents (Honestly Hsien-Ko seems to be the only character in this game this really applies to though.).
Actually, my usual BnB with him does 900k-ish (With DHC into Skrull’s Inferno) and leads into 4-6 different resets (Skrulls Inferno resets are pretty godly.).
By the way, I don’t use an OTG assist.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the Cap buffs and he did need something, but I think they went a little crazy. I just don’t think people realize how good he is going to be because nobody currently plays him and as such the people using him in UMVC3 didn’t seem like they really knew what they were doing with him.
I think most of the more popular characters are popular because they’re really good. Obviously there are exceptions, but you wouldn’t find as many people playing as characters like Sentinel if he wasn’t one of the better characters in the game. If you made some of the unpopular characters really good, they wouldn’t be unpopular anymore.
MvC3 Top 32 had a lot of variety among characters and I doubt many people play to that caliber so there is indeed balance in MvC3.
Games with small, distinguished top tiers usually had variety in playstyles and/or really tight balance between just the top tiers.
Just because there is a top tier doesn’t mean people are able to use them to the point that they are top tier, you dig?
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Balance doesn’t automatically make a game good or fun either.
Yeah, I kinda feel the same way. As far as I’m concerned, every character should be a good character. The only characters who should be ‘bad’ are the characters who even the uninitiated can tell is bad. Dan Hibiki. Servbot. Howard the Duck (if he were in). Characters who you know, without a doubt, are only put in the game so that the supremely cock-sure can embarrass others.
Now, obviously, when the game is already made - just pick the best characters and move on. I’m not saying it’s right for a player to pick low-tier characters and expect to be given a break. I’m not even saying that it’s possible to make a game with 50+ very different characters and have some characters (and character combinations) not end up better than others. I’m just saying that when some characters are intentionally made to be God Tier… that’s flat-out bad game design.
If Hsien-Ko were doomed to be bad no matter what you tweaked with her, I’d accept that, suck it up (which I already have done, but hey, we all want our characters to be viable), and either play with her to my own detriment or move on and pick someone else. My main gripe is that it feels like she’s so close to being at least decent, and that she could offer something unique to the game beyond her overrated assist, yet Capcom is just making stupid decisions like giving her more crap to throw instead of dealing with what she needs.
I know there will always be a low, a mid, and a high tier, but to intentionally make a character bad just for the sake of being bad seems silly. I have no qualms with SF2-style Dhalsim characters, where with enough work you could be effective, not “I’ll work as hard as I can to barely be passable.” Just look at GG. For a very technical game with a roster that size, it’s known for being pretty balanced while offering some unique choices for those that want to challenge themselves (i.e., Johnny and Zappa) and technical, top characters like Eddie. Then again, this is a 3v3 game, where characters can cover each others’ weaknesses, so I can see why Capcom may be having a harder time balancing here.
Also, I’m sorry for blowing this debate up earlier. I can tell we need some new reveals or info lol.
That brings up another good reason for Capcom to purposefully make top tiers. If they tried to make everything as balanced as possible, top tiers would show up. By purposefully making top tier characters, Capcom can try to make some variation in between them so people looking to play competitively have some options to suit their play style.
And you are right, if all characters are homogenized then yes the game becomes boring ::coughWOWcough:: But trying to balance all characters while keeping what makes them unique WILL make a game good and fun. Obviously they aren’t going to get balance 100% in a 3v3 fighter, but close is good.
I just don’t follow this. You make a whole bunch of characters, and then decide that 20% will be superior to the rest.
That’s just a waste of time, energy and resources. Just give us the intentionally OP characters, or leave the intentionally OP characters out.
Making top tiers from the get-go only does one thing - it makes a lot of people put time in with characters who have very little chance in a competitive setting. Then, after putting months into these characters, they find out that all their work was for jack fucking squat. Congratulations! Even though you’ve been with the game since day one, you’re practically going to have to start from scratch - either that or your going to have to put in FAR more work than all the people who got lucky and decided to main the intentionally OP character when the game came out.
So, it’s not just a waste of time, energy and resources for the devs, it’s also just as much a waste of those three things for the players who were attracted to low-tier characters from the get-go.
It must be a fucking ball for the people who liked the top-tier characters from the beginning, though.
I am not saying anything bad about patches unless it’s the Super to AE patch that made defensive characters like Sim, Honda and Guile near useless when they weren’t beating rush/mixup characters (same characters winning in AE lol) because the whining was loud enough.
Condensing tiers is good. Every iteration should strive to lessen the gap.
You can use your favorite character, whether they are good or bad. Itabashi Zangeif picks Geif no matter what game and makes it work to the best of his abilities. Saying I want to pick my favorite character and have them be competitive is wishful thinking. When they aren’t as good as you hoped, will you put in work and continue to be a character loyalist or switch characters? Pouting and whining isn’t going to make them better, you grind that shit out.
Yeh I just figured that out. Such a bummer, I was so pumped for Spidey to get his Spidey-sense repped. Strider’s body was in the perfect position to fool me. It looks like it’s coming from Spidey.
Ono said in a interview 2 years ago around SFIV’s console release, and of all things, I can’t remember where the hell I found the article…but he mention’d his point of view on powerful characters. He said Capcom would openly make certain characters powerful (Ryu and Sagat) and easy to pick up and play for beginning players. After enough time, where the player would adjust to the system, the player was supposed to move on to the “not-so” powerful characters. To branch out and discovery who they liked using.
My only real gripe with Hsien Ko/Lei Lei is she was my favorite character in Vampire Savior, a game I played the fuck out of with a Saturn pad in the 90s and I was beyond hype to see her in a new game. Unfortunately this isn’t the same character.
If her toolset and gameplay flowed with even remote mimicry of what she was in VS I wouldn’t mind if she was low-mid tier or whatever. If my favorite VS character was Felicia, I’d rock her happily and grin and not bitch about knowing Wolverine is a better version of her. I just wanted to play the same character again, but slow as fuck wonky zoning character with giant gaps in her zoning game is not the mixup heavy rushdown jiang-shi I was excited for.
Nevermind the overly cutsey voice they saw fit to give her that gets a little grating on the ears when you get opened up repeatedly worse than a can of Redbull in Poongko’s hands.
I haven’t played MvC3 in a couple months but am pretty hype as fuck about Ultimate regardless of which characters may be ass or god like in the final build. With 50 characters I don’t really have an excuse not to find a team combination I can have fun with, and this time I don’t have rose colored nostalgia glasses clouding my expectations about a character I haven’t seen in a new game since Gem Fighter.
I really hope my main character, Super Skrull, who is bottom 10, gets more buffs other than a follow up from his level 3 and an air meteor smash. He really needs a lot more. He should have flight and a projectile based on the canon. He needs to be able to deal way more damage, especially if his resets aren’t safe. He needs a good assist, etc.
