Guilty Gear.
Hokuto no Ken & Arcana Heart
Odin Sphere, Muramasa: The Demon Blade too
The Rumble Fish is a 2D sprite based game, just that is not pixel art
I agree that alot of the 2.5d games feel a bit clunky. However, Tatsunoko vs Capcom definitely did it right and proved that 2d fighters with 3d models could play every bit as well as their pixel predecessors.
Not even the 2D games these days are fully 2D. Both BlazBlue and King of Fighters 12’s sprites were traced from 3D models. There was an article with developer interviews about it on Game Sutra, but I can’t be bothered to find it.
I believe that only applies to KoF12.
pixel artists are a dying breed. and it’s cheaper and quicker to simply develop in 3D and have the gameplay/camera on a fixed 2D plane.
i’m not keen on it, or 16:9 ratio either. mind you i listen to classic rock and have a mullet =)
Despite SFIV turning out well, I think 2.5D is in its infancy, and the technique would benefit from refined gameplay through more releases. It might just be Capcom fighters, but there’s something about their collision detection that doesn’t feel as solid as sprite 2D. I hope more titles are made to fix this in the future.
Visually, SFIV turned out extremely well, and I’m convinced KoFXII could be rendered in real time using current hardware, with only minor quality loss. If that is indeed possible, I think sprites are only limiting fighters, and they should take a back seat to polygons.
I do hate 3D camera angles in my 2.5D games. They should look as 2-dimensional as possible and leave the camera for 3D fighters (VF, Tekken et al)
I believe it’s one of the newer doujin games (demon bride?) that has 2D sprites assisted with flash animation. For those that don’t understand how flash works, motion and transformations are kinda programmed in, and it doesn’t require a brand new sprite for every image.
It doesn’t look particularly natural, as everything has that paper cutout feel, but I have no doubt that techniques like this are and will be employed to speed up the process of more traditional sprite art making.
2.5d is clearly still much easier to make though, but I wouldn’t say it’s going to take over. Street Fighter adapts well to many art styles because it’s style varies so much every game. A game like Guilty Gear though, is derived heavily from anime, and the art style wouldn’t translate to 3D very well. It’s not just the spites that I’m talking about here, much more so the animations. Try and imagine a 3D Faust doing a chain combo in 3D. :s
Nop, BlazBlue also did that, but they didn’t draw/color the shadows/shading from the 3D models. They did the shadows/shading themselves, since they try to emulate an Anime look on the characters unlike KOF12.
Yeah, I think you p much HAVE to trace for HD sprites. It’s hard to draw entire animations from scratch that will look good in HD. It’s easier to blow something up into 16:9 and trace it, bam you have a HD sprite. That’s p much what BB and KOF 12 did, and HDR more or less blew up the ST sprites into wide screen and traced them.
- Guilty Guilty isn’t recent
- Odin Sphere and Muramasa aren’t fighting games
- Rumble Fish is 2.5D. The 3D models are made to look like 2D sprites.
- Hokuto no Ken, Arcana Heart, Melty Blood, Sengoku Basara X etc are NOT major fighting games. Popular only in select groups and regions. Also not very expensive to produce.
as far as 2.5d goes i quite like the look of that rumble fish.
it looks like it might feel like proper 2d.
ps
bit further back - blazblue uses 3d BGs aswell.so not full 2d.
I don’t know which one of you idiots neg repped me (I’m looking at you Hectaxcom) saying “2D FOREVER!!!” Like I don’t love 2D games more then any other and don’t want them to stick around forever.
Learn not to assume shit.
Well then it seems like hand drawn characters will stick around but will become a sub genre of fighting games. But I know one thing when characters get blown up to the 16:9 and retraced ala Kof 12 .They look like they started injecting bull testosterone on some McGuire shit ha ha , no seriously when characters are upgraded to h.d they are turned into musclebound characters . I mean everybody looks like Raoh from Hokuto No Ken in SF4 you expect Gouken to do the North Star Hundred Crack Fist any minute and Vega ( Claw ) to yell out Nanto Seiken .
Oh by the way Yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuriaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.
Omae wa mo shinderu
Not after the release of tekken 6 2d wont be a standard
I think for 2D to stand a fighting chance, vector technology has to increase 10x. For those that don’t know vector can keep a 2d image smooth looking at any resolution and would look amazing on HD tv. The problem is it usually runs really slow or choppy with a lot of action. Using HD size sprites isn’t really an option as most consoles and systems can’t handle it.
3D is not necessarily “faster” to develop than 2D. There seems to be a misconception in the games-player market (definitely not the game-developer market) that 3D is a matter of merely “whipping up” a 3D character, and all the work is done.
Character rigging, inverse kinematics (google these terms if you don’t know what they mean), animation, and all the other things associated with 3D all take their time to do well (and it’s very easy even for a lay person to spot a poorly done 3D game).
I’ve spoken about this before in great depth, but it seems I make the same sorts of posts every 6 months or so. 3D is not “easier” than 2D (nor is it necessarily “harder”). What it is is the current trend, and thus much easier to find people skilled in that particular art right now. And that is generally the determining factor for most games currently (excluding indi games).
Back on topic… I prefer 2D. No matter how great 3D gets, or how many new features they add to Direct3D/OpenGL/GPUs or whatever, I still prefer 2D. Probably because I’m an old fart, and grew up in an era of 8 bit consoles and arcade games where cramming detail into 32 pixels was an art of it’s own. With that said, I do think 3D (2.5D) will be the future for fighting games. Simply because, as mentioned above, that’s where the skills lie currently, and that means finding staff to make these games will be ever so slightly less of a challenge for game companies writing the games. I don’t like it, but I can’t see it happening any other way.
I hope Capcom makes Street Fighter 5 2D.
Just imgaine being in HD with SFIII quality animation.
Kinda like the new king of fighters.
The 3D is ok, but I dunno all the EX games sucked and SF4 rules so I dunno.