So I've been concerned about the Street Fighter X Tekken project from day one. I am a firm believer that Capcom is running its fighting franchises into the ground with faster, increasingly lazy releases and money-grubbing download content: Guitar Hero-ing fighting games, if you like. As the details flow on this game, well, I don't want to toot my own horn but it's like they're in a race to prove me right or something.
Marvel 3 was released in March, and despite how packed with content it was, it really gave the feel of an unfinished beta. It was, of course, and now at the end of the same year Capcom wants to give us Ultimate Marvel 3 with new characters, rebalancing, and fixes for major, game-defining bugs (for bugs, at least, why can't these games be patched like every other game?). Capcom usually waits a year to do this, but the new cycle is nine months.
SF X Tekken will be out... in March. See where I'm going with this? Street Fighter 4's two paid upgrades have already made buyers wary, and a lot of people passed on Marvel knowing that an upgrade was inevitable. You'd be a fool not to think that Capcom wasn't planning another $40 upgrade to this game by this time next year.
That's been a thing for a while now, of course. What makes this worth posting about is the news that came out of New York Comic Con. SFxT will feature a new "gem system" by which the player equips items that will have various effects, like boosts to attack power and so on. In interviews, this has been directly compared to collectible card games like Magic. This isn't some optional screw-around mode acting as a side dish for the main game: it's been stated that gems can't be turned off.
I'm already not crazy about this: one of the reasons I like fighting games and arcade-style games in general is the absence of a really heavy metagame. The Marvel games get into that territory, but in that game we're talking about building a three-headed beast out of a roster of 30 or so, rather than picking two characters out of 30 and picking five gems out of what have said to be hundreds of gems. The more complex the metagame is, the more likely most of the options are to be useless, and the more likely the game is to be dominated by a few overpowering setups that are more perfectly tuned to kill than the others (my money is on auto-block plus extra meter gain plus anything that makes attacks come out faster). Hundreds of gems ensure that this system is much too complicated for Capcom to properly test before the game is rushed to a March release.
One of the reasons that Virtua Fighter is so good is that it's completely devoted to the fundamentals and that it doesn't mess around with metagame elements. It's about you, the other guy, and your position on the stage. That's it, and that's why it tends to appeal to existing fighting game fans who've been around the block and want a game without all the bullshit.
Anyway, that's not all about the gems. Just like Magic cards, these gems are probably going to cost money. Capcom has not said a word about how the player will acquire gems, and an image from NYCC unveiled the collector's edition, which will come with additional gems. These two points spell it out for me.
The other reason I like these games is that you get everything when you buy the damn game. Things like costumes aside, everything you need to become the best player in the world is right there in front of you, and it's just a matter of the player putting in the effort. This is how it should be. Introducing vital pay items that directly affect gameplay eliminates so much of the appeal of these competitive games, where the playing field is supposed to be equal and the strongest player always wins. The guy who wins the most at SFxT is going to be the strongest player-- among the small subsection of guys who pay up for whatever the most overpowering gem combination is. This is how trading card games are, except at least those guys make a little money at it.
Even speaking theoretically, people in the community have offered strong cases for why, for example, the auto-block gem is way too good not to play. (Videos from the devs have confirmed that the gem works in exactly the way that was speculated.) If we're even taking this game apart on a Theory Fighter level with just one gem, imagine what it's going to look like when the number-crunchers and the Desks of the world take their scalpels and notepads to the released game.
Before these revelations, SFxT was actually looking pretty good. Not anymore. To be frank, this game already looks like it's going to be a trainwreck for competitive play (tournament organizers already have their heads in their hands) six months before release, and I'm really not interested in paying $60-- plus $20 or $30 in gems-- to find out. I'll just watch the tournament streams.
Comparing it to the CCG scene is fair,though I highly doubt it will be as pricey to keep up with the people buying all the dlc that will be released, so the battles may be "balanced" but player options in terms of having a wide range of customization are narrower in competitive play due to people choosing particular builds because they win matches. I wish Capcom would stop releasing half-assed games I held off buying MVC3 and may not bother with ultimate because it seems there is a good chance another version will be released too quickly to finally surpass MV2's roster count.
Posted by: Groove-A | October 22, 2011 at 01:36 PM
pity reply
Posted by: * | October 24, 2011 at 11:30 PM
Maybe it will be balanced out by a gem that makes it so your attacks do significant damage to blocking characters.
Posted by: rvr67michael | October 26, 2011 at 12:23 AM