I would normally agree with you. But a fighting game is completely about the balance. You’re assuming the team under crunch, aiming for a financially-beneficial release date magically got it 100% right the first time, under pressure. In reality, they’re responsible for balance. They got it wrong, but it sounds like they’ll fix it.
Game seasons are not really the same thing as live service games though.
I’m really not into Tekken but there are games I play that have setup. Of course probably the most famous of all been Foxhole.
Anyway the point is that without “seasons” (simply called that because it harkens back to TV not because there are necessarily four in a year) there isn’t really any natural conclusion to the game, so you have short tournaments and people rank up within those tournaments, but obviously you don’t want the tournaments to go on for too long because otherwise there’s no way in for new players as they’ll start way down the rankings and not be able to compete. The solution for this is to reset everything every season, but then you’ve got the problem that people learn the meta and are able to rank up to high ranks almost immediately, whereas newer players don’t stand a chance so you haven’t really fixed the problem, the solution to that is to change the meta every season. That way everyone has an equal chance of working it out for themselves and ranking up.
I’m pretty sure they even did this with OverWatch back in the day.
There has been one constantly updated game that I loved, I think because it wasn’t actually live service.
Dead Cells! They were always putting out balance passes but also included a new weapon occasionally, then would release a true DLC that added new levels, new enemies and new weapons. Would spend some time balancing that drop and eventually release a new one.
I miss games like that, I’m happy to buy an expansion of a game I love, not going to buy a new battlepass or skins or whatever though.
This is exactly what fighting games do though. A season is an expansion (new characters) and there typically is a balance patch after a new character drops, then they move on to a new season.
IDK what people who don’t play fighting games think a season is, but judging by some comments in this thread, not every one seems to know.
As I typed that I kinda forgot this post was about a Fighting game. I was speaking more generally about GaaS. It’s good fighters still have something akin to old school DLC!
Yeah, this is not applicable to fighting games, not in the past, not now.
In the past: they didn’t do live updates because the technology didn’t allow it, but they re-released the same game 100 times (See how many versions of Street Fighter 2 exist as an example)
Now: we get one version + balance patches and DLCs, and decent publishers do repackages after every season to make sure the price of the base game + DLC doesn’t exceed the initial price mark: typically $60.
Game balance is so easy, you fonit once and then it’s perfect forever. No new characters, just buy a new game, just like in the street fighter 2 days. What a braindead take.
I get the nostalgia for simpler times, but fighting games have benefited so much from the fact that they can now be patched and updated over the internet.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had 56 characters, but ~6 of them were so strong that they rendered the rest of the roster nearly unplayable in comparison. And this is one of the games that was most fondly remembered! For every hit like that there were a dozen more that were so much worse they were quickly abandoned and forgotten.
For all the backlash to season 2, Tekken 8 is arguably still in a better place than the vast majority of pre-online fighting games. People are mad because standards have gotten so much higher, now that games do get patched we expect those patches to be better.
It’s not like I’m saying I hate classic fighters, or that there aren’t any I still enjoy today. I’ve got plenty of hours on FightCade just dicking around in various random kusoge. I’m traveling to Combo Breaker in two weeks, and I signed up for six different brackets, two of which are retro titles (Waku Waku 7 and Twinkle Star Sprites) (you could also count Mystery Bracket, but the point of Mystery is to play trash that doesn’t hold up).
But the games that have stood the test of time are few and far between. They’re the exception, not the rule. If you think your game is too good for patches because it worked for Vampire Savior, you’re a lot more likely to end up like SVC Chaos.
From a developer’s perspective, they have to adapt to a changing market. All your competitors are iterating and improving their games, you need to keep up.
And hell, some of the most popular classics are patches in a sense. People play Super Turbo and Third Strike, but no one’s playing World Warrior or New Generation. At least now players don’t have to buy those kinds of ‘patches’ for full price.
A game can be fun in spite of balance. MvC2 is a beloved game even with its six character meta. But when there’s room for improvement, and the internet now makes improvement possible, devs should take the opportunity to improve as much as they can.
Also, speaking of Tekken 5 - are you talking about the initial arcade release, the rebalanced console port, the “5.1” arcade rerelease, or Dark Resurrection? Because those totally count as patches.
That’s the thing, there really was never a better time for fighting games 😂 I know it sounds preposterous, but back then if your main was in a re-release, you had to buy the whole game again to play, now you can just pay for a character DLC, or a season pass, and both are significantly cheaper.
Balance changes can be an issue, I agree, but in terms of how much the average player needs to spend on a game, things have improved.
I’m quickly arriving at the desire to at least have these games lock in at the end of a season. They typically don’t make big changes during a season anyway. For as much as people were tired of buying Super, Ultra, Arcade, and Revelator releases of a game they already have, surely in the DLC era we can just treat them as expansion packs and still go back and play the old versions if we want to. However, due to skins and such, there’s an incentive for them to not keep the old version around. I really liked Guilty Gear Strive season 1 and didn’t care much for season 2. I would have loved to keep playing season 1 instead at the time, but it was gone. A lot of Dragon Ball FighterZ fans are mourning the game that they loved that isn’t accessible anymore.
Edition Select like in USF4 would be rad. But I think I’d just like to see a universal way for platforms to let you roll back to any version of any game. Wouldn’t even require any extra work on developers’ part, platform holders would just maintain an archive of patches.
Supporting it can be extra work; hosting the old versions costs the platform holder more money. It’s not automatic, but I really want them to figure it out. USF4 definitely required a ton of work for their edition select, but what I’m asking for is much closer to the boot menu of StarCraft/Brood War rather than picking the exact balance patch from a list of dozens, lol.
Don’t know about other platforms, but it’s worth noting that Steam already does keep old versions and there’s some command line method that can force download an older depot. Valve could offer UI to officially support this.
Something that you may not be considering is that a big part of live service updates is stopping cheaters. Whether the game is balanced or not doesn’t matter at all if other players are flying through the map and insta-killing everybody else.
Allowing the use of old versions of your game will consequentially allow cheaters to continue having access to known, exploitable files. Even if those files are no longer in use in the “live” version of the game, giving cheaters a sandbox to experiment in inevitably allows for further exploits to be discovered in the live version.
Normally games shouldn’t allow players on different versions to connect to each other. Version checks may be something devs need to explicitly implement, but surely most games should already have them or else I have questions for the developers.
Also, in the context of fighting games specifically, this is largely a nonissue. Fighting game netcode works by sending button inputs only, and the other client will play back those inputs to independently verify the outcome. There’s very little cheaters can try to do that won’t just result in a desync. To my knowledge there’s only ever been one cheating scandal in the FGC, and the accused turned out to be innocent in the end.
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deleted by creator
I would normally agree with you. But a fighting game is completely about the balance. You’re assuming the team under crunch, aiming for a financially-beneficial release date magically got it 100% right the first time, under pressure. In reality, they’re responsible for balance. They got it wrong, but it sounds like they’ll fix it.
Even if they got it right the first time if they introduce new characters later on they have to rebalance everything.
I can’t imagine how many times I saw one new character breaking the meta especially in MOBAs.
Game seasons are not really the same thing as live service games though.
I’m really not into Tekken but there are games I play that have setup. Of course probably the most famous of all been Foxhole.
Anyway the point is that without “seasons” (simply called that because it harkens back to TV not because there are necessarily four in a year) there isn’t really any natural conclusion to the game, so you have short tournaments and people rank up within those tournaments, but obviously you don’t want the tournaments to go on for too long because otherwise there’s no way in for new players as they’ll start way down the rankings and not be able to compete. The solution for this is to reset everything every season, but then you’ve got the problem that people learn the meta and are able to rank up to high ranks almost immediately, whereas newer players don’t stand a chance so you haven’t really fixed the problem, the solution to that is to change the meta every season. That way everyone has an equal chance of working it out for themselves and ranking up.
I’m pretty sure they even did this with OverWatch back in the day.
There has been one constantly updated game that I loved, I think because it wasn’t actually live service.
Dead Cells! They were always putting out balance passes but also included a new weapon occasionally, then would release a true DLC that added new levels, new enemies and new weapons. Would spend some time balancing that drop and eventually release a new one.
I miss games like that, I’m happy to buy an expansion of a game I love, not going to buy a new battlepass or skins or whatever though.
This is exactly what fighting games do though. A season is an expansion (new characters) and there typically is a balance patch after a new character drops, then they move on to a new season.
IDK what people who don’t play fighting games think a season is, but judging by some comments in this thread, not every one seems to know.
As I typed that I kinda forgot this post was about a Fighting game. I was speaking more generally about GaaS. It’s good fighters still have something akin to old school DLC!
Yeah, this is not applicable to fighting games, not in the past, not now.
In the past: they didn’t do live updates because the technology didn’t allow it, but they re-released the same game 100 times (See how many versions of Street Fighter 2 exist as an example)
Now: we get one version + balance patches and DLCs, and decent publishers do repackages after every season to make sure the price of the base game + DLC doesn’t exceed the initial price mark: typically $60.
Game balance is so easy, you fonit once and then it’s perfect forever. No new characters, just buy a new game, just like in the street fighter 2 days. What a braindead take.
I get the nostalgia for simpler times, but fighting games have benefited so much from the fact that they can now be patched and updated over the internet.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 had 56 characters, but ~6 of them were so strong that they rendered the rest of the roster nearly unplayable in comparison. And this is one of the games that was most fondly remembered! For every hit like that there were a dozen more that were so much worse they were quickly abandoned and forgotten.
For all the backlash to season 2, Tekken 8 is arguably still in a better place than the vast majority of pre-online fighting games. People are mad because standards have gotten so much higher, now that games do get patched we expect those patches to be better.
deleted by creator
It’s not like I’m saying I hate classic fighters, or that there aren’t any I still enjoy today. I’ve got plenty of hours on FightCade just dicking around in various random kusoge. I’m traveling to Combo Breaker in two weeks, and I signed up for six different brackets, two of which are retro titles (Waku Waku 7 and Twinkle Star Sprites) (you could also count Mystery Bracket, but the point of Mystery is to play trash that doesn’t hold up).
But the games that have stood the test of time are few and far between. They’re the exception, not the rule. If you think your game is too good for patches because it worked for Vampire Savior, you’re a lot more likely to end up like SVC Chaos.
From a developer’s perspective, they have to adapt to a changing market. All your competitors are iterating and improving their games, you need to keep up.
And hell, some of the most popular classics are patches in a sense. People play Super Turbo and Third Strike, but no one’s playing World Warrior or New Generation. At least now players don’t have to buy those kinds of ‘patches’ for full price.
deleted by creator
A game can be fun in spite of balance. MvC2 is a beloved game even with its six character meta. But when there’s room for improvement, and the internet now makes improvement possible, devs should take the opportunity to improve as much as they can.
Also, speaking of Tekken 5 - are you talking about the initial arcade release, the rebalanced console port, the “5.1” arcade rerelease, or Dark Resurrection? Because those totally count as patches.
That’s the thing, there really was never a better time for fighting games 😂 I know it sounds preposterous, but back then if your main was in a re-release, you had to buy the whole game again to play, now you can just pay for a character DLC, or a season pass, and both are significantly cheaper.
Balance changes can be an issue, I agree, but in terms of how much the average player needs to spend on a game, things have improved.
I’m quickly arriving at the desire to at least have these games lock in at the end of a season. They typically don’t make big changes during a season anyway. For as much as people were tired of buying Super, Ultra, Arcade, and Revelator releases of a game they already have, surely in the DLC era we can just treat them as expansion packs and still go back and play the old versions if we want to. However, due to skins and such, there’s an incentive for them to not keep the old version around. I really liked Guilty Gear Strive season 1 and didn’t care much for season 2. I would have loved to keep playing season 1 instead at the time, but it was gone. A lot of Dragon Ball FighterZ fans are mourning the game that they loved that isn’t accessible anymore.
Edition Select like in USF4 would be rad. But I think I’d just like to see a universal way for platforms to let you roll back to any version of any game. Wouldn’t even require any extra work on developers’ part, platform holders would just maintain an archive of patches.
Supporting it can be extra work; hosting the old versions costs the platform holder more money. It’s not automatic, but I really want them to figure it out. USF4 definitely required a ton of work for their edition select, but what I’m asking for is much closer to the boot menu of StarCraft/Brood War rather than picking the exact balance patch from a list of dozens, lol.
Don’t know about other platforms, but it’s worth noting that Steam already does keep old versions and there’s some command line method that can force download an older depot. Valve could offer UI to officially support this.
Something that you may not be considering is that a big part of live service updates is stopping cheaters. Whether the game is balanced or not doesn’t matter at all if other players are flying through the map and insta-killing everybody else.
Allowing the use of old versions of your game will consequentially allow cheaters to continue having access to known, exploitable files. Even if those files are no longer in use in the “live” version of the game, giving cheaters a sandbox to experiment in inevitably allows for further exploits to be discovered in the live version.
Normally games shouldn’t allow players on different versions to connect to each other. Version checks may be something devs need to explicitly implement, but surely most games should already have them or else I have questions for the developers.
Also, in the context of fighting games specifically, this is largely a nonissue. Fighting game netcode works by sending button inputs only, and the other client will play back those inputs to independently verify the outcome. There’s very little cheaters can try to do that won’t just result in a desync. To my knowledge there’s only ever been one cheating scandal in the FGC, and the accused turned out to be innocent in the end.
Investors demand recurring revenue.
Fighting games have been doing this since the beginning in one sense or another though.