Look, I understand that not everyone likes this structure, and that’s cool, but statements like that are just goofy. There are lots of multiplayer games based on the mechanic of building up your abilities and then using those abilities to compete with other people online. There’s no reason it couldn’t work in a fighting game, aside from the fact that people–when they aren’t bitching about how little innovation there is in gaming–bitch whenever developers deviate from a familiar formula by even a tiny iota.
Developers must find that maddening.
And any thought at all to “multiplayer balance” and such ruins the idea’s core, which is that your dude doesn’t become balanced, he eventually becomes awesome.
Like I said, plenty of other games find ways to deal with this. It wouldn’t be hard to rank characters and pair up matches accordingly.
I would go so far as to favor a Fallout Tactics style multiplayer mode, where you set the number of points each player is allowed to spend on making a character before the match, and you each just make multiplayer characters all at once right then, if you want. No game tax.
Ben- Yes, like Forza. Would you play it if you weren’t unlocking things, earning money, etc.?
The gold standard here is classic 4X. I didn’t beat Master of Orion 2 40 or 50 times because I was trying to unlock a new costume for the Psilons, I played it because the core gameplay was engaging enough to hold my attention without dangling a carrot in front of me.
Also, extarbags has the right idea of how to handle multiplayer for this alleged game. That would actually be really, really sweet. Magic:The Gathering meets Tekken. I could pitch that.
I’m glad you like the idea, but I want to make it known right now that this is not something I would like to see replace current fighting games. I love fighting games as they are, and advancement is just not what they’re about. No, this is something that I’d like to see in addition to what we have now.
And it just occurred to me that One Must Fall: 2097 was a 2d fighter that offered exactly the kind of gameplay that the OP described, right down to qualifying for higher level tournaments.
How would you feel about multiplayer unlockables that are available through playing multiplayer? I mean, that would be the natural way to go with this sort of game. Let players build up their fighter online or off.
Sounds to me like you want a cRPG with fighting game mechanics, like Shenmue or something.
As for multiplayer unlockables, I’m fine with it provided that there’s enough content already available for new players. For example, I’m okay with something like Soul Calibur, where half of the characters and many arenas are initially available. Contrast this with something like Metropolis Street Racer, which starts out with something like two cars and two tracks available. (Long live the Dreamcast!)
Not really. More like a fighting game with a few RPG mechanics. Or one, at least (the “building up your character” mechanic). You could have all the characters available to play from the start, but whatever character you choose, you start with only a few basic fighting moves and then build up your repetoir from there. You’d develop your character by winning matches (online or off); that would give you training points, which you could spend to train new moves. Your cumulative training point total would dictate what tier of matches in which you are eligible to fight.
I’d play a game like that; it adds an overall sense of progress to the game that would be more interesting, at least for me, than playing pickup matches with a stable of premade characters.
This is what I was talking about when I said that Soul Calibur III will be moving in the direction of your dream game. While they focus on the physical aspects in the video, you can clearly see how you have some access to creating a character with your own movesets, with the different classes and their different styles. I like how personality reflects too. In any case, there you go. I mean, one step at a time, right? :)
I am complete agreement with you about shitty fans who can’t accept change and put the developers in a tricky situation. I also tend to get upset when people dismiss a sequel outright before playing it just because its different than what they expected, oooooh that makes me mad.
As for game tax, it makes sense if you’ve got a healthy degree content already at the beginning, because then you can help the gamer pace themselves and give them rewards for increasing their skills. Its a good carrot-stick situation for increasing high level play in competitive games.
Yeah, exactly. Done right, I think it could have the same sort of appeal that you get from building up a character in an RPG. You don’t hear anyone bitching that RPGs don’t let you start your character at level 40 with all the possible skills available, yet it’s essentially the same mechanic. Character development is fun, I don’t why it couldn’t be fun in a fighting game.
See, it makes sense to me if boss characters, or “wacky” stages, or cheat codes are locked. Sure.
It doesn’t make any sense at all that Soul Calibur 2 forces me to unlock Seung Mina for use in multiplayer. What the hell. She’s a totally ordinary character in terms of power. All you do when you lock her is limit the amount of fun my friends and I can have playing against each other, because here’s a perfectly-balanced character who we inexplicably cannot use. Same with Yoshimitsu and… bah, whomever else was locked aside from the final boss.
As far as disliking change - uh, I don’t. At least not without thinking about how certain changes might play out first. I’ve liked plenty of games that deviated from established formulas. I’ve also strongly disliked games that do the same thing but only wind up demonstrating why the formula in question became a formula in the first place - because established formulas tend to be very difficult to improve upon.
So when someone says “RPG + fighting game = rawk!”, I’m simply not convinced. And that’s not just me yammering that it’ll suck without having thought about it, either. I won’t write off the idea, since I’m not a big fan of RPG/FPS hybrids, yet they enjoy some popularity. It’s hard to argue against that, and I’m sure the same thing would happen here. I probably wouldn’t “get it”, but others would. I’m just saying, the idea of limiting my fighter’s abilities in the beginning and making me develop them sounds like an idea I would hate. I prefer the current crop of fighting games’ method, which gives me all the tools in the world and then says “here, you figure out how best to use these”. That carrot you talk about dangling in front of the player - it’s present in stuff like VF4 even though there’s no RPG stuff at all, no unlockables, nothing of the sort. The carrot takes the form of me becoming a better player as I learn the intricacies of the game and each individual character.
I’m absolutely all about a create-a-fighter mode, though. Absolutely. Having played a few wrestling games, I’m not a big fan of the genre in terms of pure gameplay, but the create-a-wrestler modes add an insane amount of appeal. It’s similar to The Sims, except that instead of hugging people, I can put myself in the game for the purpose of bashing in Hulk Hogan’s head with a chair. Yeah, that’s pretty awesome. Likewise, who doesn’t want to be a ninja? If VF4 had a create-a-fighter mode, then you would have been able to put yourself in that game with Kage’s moveset. The end result: KICKASS. To me, this is the next big evolution in fighting games. Much more so than any RPG stuff.
Then again, there are certain things about the create-a-character modes of various games that I like, and other things I dislike, so it’s not like just throwing something in there haphazardly will instantly make your game better.
Dude, curst, the people unwilling to accept change comment wasn’t aimed at you at all or even this discussion at all. :P I’m talking about people who refuse to even entertain the idea that fighters can or should change, among other genres.
A good example is Sigma Star Saga. There’s no guarantee that its going to be good, for sure, however, I saw people immediately dismiss it because shmups aren’t supposed to have RPG elements or random stages. Now I’d agree that has a chance to unseat the quality of the game. But every change does. Its simply unfair to claim they don’t have a grasp on making a good shmup just because they are trying something new outside of the current conventions that don’t sound like they’d be a good fit for the current conventions. That’s exactly why change is good sometimes.
As for Seung Mina, the point is not that she’s an advanced character (though Yoshimitsu sure as hell is). The point is that it takes a little knowledge of Soul Calibur’s mechanics to unlock her, that’s insuring that there’s a reward for learning the game and hopefully providing an incentive to do more than mash buttons so players don’t get bored at their own ineptness.
I’m not particularly passionate about it either way, as I could see why Soul Calibur II’s characters might be good to be unlocked from the beginning too. shrugs Soul Calibur’s noway near as bad as say, Burnout II, for example.
Make all characters and stages unlockable, so that guys like me can earn experience that old-fashioned way: By playing the game, learning the game’s mechanics, and picking apart the AI.
If you want loads of unlockables and a sense of progress handed to you on a stick, then by all means have a “Quest Mode”.
VF4 Evo works because it allows you to play one-on-one fights btween whatever characters at whatever difficulty level you choose. I’m not much of a VF4 guru (especially with Vanessa), but it took me nearly 70 Quest Mode matches before I came close to losing, since I had been practicing at the above-average difficulty level for quite some time beforehand.
IF VF4 forced you to play through hours of low-level matchups with a artifically limited moveset, just to have some canned sense of progress, I’d have tossed it out fo the window.
