Guilty Gear Strive

[DickMain]

it's boring as fuck, every single character barring maybe Chipp can kill in two combos

To be fair, most of the roster in XX and Xrd could melt you like that, but you had to know your character and the opponent's character pretty well to do it consistently. It wasn't just that the combos could be mechanically complex, but that you also had to consider:

hitstun proration & decay (Strive doesn't have air tech); what starter did I use and how can I route?

Opponent weight (Strive did away with that year 1; it had it at first)

Opponent aerial hurtbox shape; Sol and Ky are goofy, Pot and Anji are chunky (they dumbed that down to 2 universal types in Strive 2.0)

Camera shit; sometimes the cam moves the wall in certain ways like for Sol's SW loops

I could go on and on and on and on but it's just that they take one tiny thing away then do it a hundred times and you're left with nothing.

 

[DocAwe]

Just like how Poison has always been a woman.

 

[DickMain]

It's telling that friends i've tried to get into fighting games the last few years just stick to strive, because it's so ludicrously babified and simple.

I'll add some more and repeat what I said earlier about who this is for (read: nobody). These simplifications aren't gonna help a brand new player if your fear as the dev is that they'll drop your game. Their problems are so much more broad and fundamental than that. Examples:

Something like "these guys can't be combo'd like those guys"; the new player can't even do the combos where that matters, let alone basic BnB's into 2D or a knockdown which is where they need to start.

Hurtbox changes aren't something they're capable of even seeing at that stage.

Same with nuances like "hey that weird button your character hardly ever uses is actually sick in this one scenario this other character wants to push a lot".

The devs think Wild Assault was too unintuitive, so they replace it with Granblue's thing (I forget the name) and dumb the input down specifically, in their own words, for new players? The new player hardly knows how to block or use FD or burst, they are NOT gonna get every mechanic down in their memory and even when they DO it's gonna take actual experience to learn when and where it's fine and when it'll get you killed. It's a sense risk/reward they do not have at that stage.

I could (and have) go on, and on, and on, and on. Who the fuck are these changes actually for?? A new player doesn't even know any of this stuff got changed (if they know it exists to begin with), and you're just stripping away the ceiling for your invested players to dig into. These are not the kinds of "problems" that are causing that new player to lose, and in fact I'm so fucking tired of these devs treating these things like they're problems that need solving period. If that new player gets his shit pushed in and quits that's on HIM (and I say this as a dogshit player who has been dogshit for like a decade). It is on HIM to figure your game out. This equity crisis new player parity horseshit is not the answer.

 

[Maniacal Foreigner]

Just like how Poison has always been a woman.

Yeah, the localizers made her out to be a tranny for the funniest reason back then - it was considered more acceptable to beat them up in a game than to beat up women.

 

[Billy the Adult]

Something like "these guys can't be combo'd like those guys"; the new player can't even do the combos where that matters, let alone basic BnB's into 2D or a knockdown which is where they need to start.

How long are strive combos anyways? I imagine most casuals give up on seeing any more than 4-5 button presses in a combo, regardless of difficulty.

The devs think Wild Assault was too unintuitive, so they replace it with Granblue's thing (I forget the name) and dumb the input down specifically, in their own words, for new players? The new player hardly knows how to block or use FD or burst, they are NOT gonna get every mechanic down in their memory and even when they DO it's gonna take actual experience to learn when and where it's fine and when it'll get you killed. It's a sense risk/reward they do not have at that stage.

Very funny that fighting games keep introducing extra mechanics in an attempt to make things easier somehow.

 

[Cryptosporidium 138]

To be fair, most of the roster in XX and Xrd could melt you like that, but you had to know your character and the opponent's character pretty well to do it consistently.

That's true, but as you said you needed experience and execution. i didn't mind if a Johnny two shot me in Xrd because he has to know three or four character specific combos for EVERY character, i don't mind if Kum kills me because those loops are pretty damn hard to get consistently and he's absurdly slow and stubby and he has to push his way in with orbs. i don't mind if Slayer two shot me because that was his whole gimmick. In Xrd and XX it was more pressure and mixups than just two shotting people and if i DID get twoshot i could at least relent that my opponent had to put in the work to get it. In Strive i could pick up any character and do a bnb to any other character, end it with a super and do half health into a wallbreak that will then give me insanely good oki into another free bar of meter. there's next to no execution, no reward for time spent in the lab, just bnb and end with super on any character with any character.