Forum - View topicThis Week in Games - Space Snakes, Samurai Dates, and Tekken Patch Woes
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b-dragon
Posts: 534 |
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I'm not gonna downplay how miserable an FGC community can be. There are elements in those communities that are miserable. But I definitely think the devs didn't help their case. Labelling it as a "Defensive Patch" and then delivering something that doesn't work that way at all didn't help (and this is after a swell of the influential members of the community decrying the offensive nature of the game already- this isn't a blow-up from nowhere.) And while Harada's tweet there is good, especially since it is coming from someone who has been a bit unfiltered with tweets, his colleague Michael Murray (the other big face for the devs,) has been blocking tweets left, right, and center. Inflammatory ones, yes, but also non-inflammatory questions. Which, as you might imagine, isn't great optics either.
Devs whiffed with this one, even by their own stated goals. Fans are right to be upset. But absolutely need to be better about how they express that. |
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CreativelyFwrd
Posts: 21 |
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I think the last Tekken I played was 5. 3 will always be my favorite though.
Feels like fighting games got really weird after they tried to make them live-service games with updates and patches and then focusing on the small online community. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 621 Location: PA / USA |
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Guilty Gear was always more of my thing, but Tekken 5 is where I took notice of the Tekken series, particularly when they'd gone portable. It's very interesting seeing the Tekken 8 patch situation play out, because as someone who has been around for a while.... I feel like this is how the series has always ebbed and flowed. It's just that now, Tekken is mainstream enough for people to notice.
I had my characters I liked in Tekken 5, they were disgustingly overpowered/busted, and then they were barely playable in Tekken 6. Tag 2 and that free-to-play Tekken came out for a bit, and Tag 2 felt a little pinch more solid than 6 had to me. The free one actually felt even better, but the fact it was a weird little free/service title probably ruined it for like 98% of the playerbase. And then Tekken 7 finally released and it set a gold standard for the series, in my eyes finally replacing Tekken 5 after several long years as THE big main Tekken game to play. When I look back on my experiences with the ebb and flow of the series, I feel like this is just par for the course, there's just way more people onboard for the ride this time in particular. The devs may have to adapt & pivot this time since I don't think they've ever had a game release like Tekken 8 that was considered an "industry standard" til now - that was usually an honour held for Street Fighter until recently. |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6524 |
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When you bother to reconcile the fact these people are ordinary humans like you and me and getting bombarded with stuff left and right. All of which can have an impact on one’s mental and psychological health. The optics are irrelevant. |
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AiddonValentine
 Posts: 2464 |
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Fighting game balance is a Sisyphean effort when you get down to it, because you're always trying to find a way to keep it fair but not boring. There is nothing more tedious than constant mirror matches or the same five characters played.
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b-dragon
Posts: 534 |
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I would love to agree with you. I really would. That is, idealistically, correct. But that's not the world we are in. He is one of the big faces for the team. Part of his job is to talk with the community. And that community is currently on fire. Adding more fuel to it isn't going to make it go away. I'm not suggesting he engage with everyone, or even block no one- but if he isn't engaging, let alone blocking more even keeled posters (or even preemptively blocking people, as I've seen suggestion of,) these same toxic people will just find a new, likely even less prepared target. I think he's made his team more vulnerable to those same impacts you mention. "When you bother to reconcile" ideals from reality, unfortunately the optics are relevant. I don't really blame him, as I definitely wouldn't want his job on a good day- let alone right now- but his actions will have a detrimental effect. Not just on the problem fans, but likely the better parts of the community and his own team. |
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anpansparking
Posts: 43 |
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I'm so excited for Sweet School Life! Otome fans have been begging localization companies for this one for ages, and I'm really excited to play a game with these characters in which no one dies tragically in battle.
The limited edition looks wonderful too! It's been a while since I've been interested in a limited edition, but I knew I had to get this one once I saw it came with those acrylic stands. |
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EmeraldSaucer
 Posts: 148 |
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I'm glad this Tekken patch happened, because it shows exactly how not to do fighting game balance and how not to approach character design. "Buff not nerf" is a nice sentiment, but when that involves looking at nearly every character's (purposefully designed) weaknesses and going "how can we remove these to make them stronger?", you end up with a complete mess where every character is homogenous and boring to play
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Dumas1
Posts: 97 |
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I'm kinda looking forward to that Space Adventure Cobra game. I think I first encountered Cobra at Anime Weekend Atlanta about 20 year ago, a screening of a movie or long OVA with living flying swords and time travel to show some of Lady Armaroid's origins. I watched the old series with friends some time later, along with the newer "The Animation" series. I'd probably describe the character as Lupin III in space, especially the more comedic scrapes he gets into from time to time.
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Stelman257
Posts: 333 |
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Fighting games, being mostly multiplayer focused competitive games, even since the old days of the arcades, have very naturally leaned more toward the model and content style of live service games over "normal" or traditional video games. They didn't get "really weird" they adapted to the changing times. It wasn't a perfect transition and even now there are modern day fighting games that launch feeling really old and with minimal stuff to do compared to say, Elden Ring. But I'll take Guilty Gear Strive evolving and patching over time and having multiple Season Pass DLC you can choose to buy or not, over them continuously releasing and re-releasing version updates as full priced games. It was practically a meme how many versions of Street Fighter 2 there are. There's a reason fighting games had to adapt.
I get that this is a very cursory observation of a game you neither play nor interact with in the slightest, but no. This is not a boy who cried wolf situation or a "it's popular now" situation. What they've done is not only a terrible update and balance patch to their game, but it was also a bizarre case of total miscommunication. If they'd just said hey this is the party time all out offense patch, it would've honestly gone over far better than "this is the defense patch". It's that extra total miscommunication that really soured their community. |
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FinalVentCard
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 723 |
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The fact that so much of this--a balance patch--is hinging around a guy who people know by first-and-last name and how they're handling getting Tweeted feels like a major sign that people have lost the plot. Like, yeah: if you're getting a deluge of hate, I'm not gonna blame you for liberal use of the "block" button, even if a few innocent tweets catch strays. The problem isn't that the devs made a bad patch, the problem is how the community reacted; at some point, going ballistic on a guy was the "proper" solution and the problem is how the guy handles being on the receiving end of a dogpile? Naw, man; there was a right way to communicate about this, and the community sprunked it but hard.
Maximilian_Dood put up a very good video breaking this down; it's not that they want every character to be a game-breaker, it's about making sure that even if there are characters that are overwhelmingly powerful, everyone else has more tools to lessen the gap a bit. You don't want everyone to be Akuma, you just want to make sure everyone has at least one thing that can bridge the gap between them and Akuma's Raging Demon. Not as easy to figure out, but that's game development. |
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EmeraldSaucer
Posts: 148 |
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Would recommend watching PhiDX's video instead, who has way more expert knowledge on the subject than Max |
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BadNewsBlues
Posts: 6524 |
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You vastly overestimate the patience of gamers who don’t like updates that overbuff or overnerf something in the games they like. |
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Loogoo T Lexter
Posts: 12 |
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I mean you just put quarters or tokens into whatever version the arcade or pizza joint had and played that. No matter how many different revisions of Street Fighter there were they all cost the same to play at the end of the day. If you mean specifically console ports then those were always inferior to the arcade versions and you just played whichever one you got since none of them were going to be arcade perfect. "Adapt or die" is certainly a thing especially in an era where arcades are pretty much dead but it doesn't mean we can't complain about it and what it's become. Doesn't matter to me if Just Dance is what people want out of rhythm games now I still prefer DDR. |
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Stelman257
Posts: 333 |
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Oh I know, and Tekken fans are some of the loudest boy who cried wolf types in the fighting game sphere. But there were some obvious key differences here that could tell you, this time around at least, there was a lot more too it than that.
And if you were just mashing buttons that was just fine, but what about the people who wanted to learn and go deeper? Japanese players were like that from the beginning so that's not just a Western E-Sports mentality. Those old arcade machines never had training mode, so a machine eating their quarters is so much worse than anything modern fighting games have done. I think part of why we even know so much about those old fighting games is because of dedicated players on the Japanese and West side spending hundreds, if not thousands on arcade machines. And I didn't say you can't criticize fighting game packages these days, heck I do too. But understand why they've adapted and changed the way they have. It just seems silly to say yeah they got weird because now they do update patches and season passes. |
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