Both the development time and the budget have come in at a variety of different numbers with people refuting them, and I’ll bet several of those figures depend on how you count. The range is now somewhere between 4-10 years, and $50-$400M, which is an absurd amount of variance, but even at 4 years and $50M, it’s still probably too long and too much money to spend on a game that you don’t know is going to find a substantial audience.
EDIT: Kotaku is reporting that the acquisition was $200M and did not cover all development costs, which lends credence to that report from Colin Moriarty claiming $200M pre and then $200M post acquisition for the figure of $400M.
There are tons of decisions to make at any given time in a fighting game outside of trying to be on offense. That’s why it’s more of a recent trend to add mechanics to incentivize aggression. And yes, the fact that rushes tend to only terrorize lower levels of play is why it’s more of a gimmick than a feature.
To your first bullet point, your own example of StarCraft. Rush strategies are usually so all-in that they win or lose in a couple of minutes. If they’re successfully defended, the defender now has such an advantage that the rusher can’t come back from it.
I actually don’t know of a game that’s ruined by an “aggression meta”. I don’t think I agree that it’s a problem. Neither rushing nor turtling is incentivized in StarCraft. The push and pull that the designers wanted from a given match is the optimal way to play, and you’ll find more success chasing that than either turtling or rushing.
I’m heavily invested in the fighting game scene, and the genre’s been getting more and more “aggression mechanics” for a long time now; some might call them “neutral skips”, skipping the part of the game where the two players try to approach each other. There’s a clear reason for why they do this: it’s way more fun to watch. Street Fighter V often devolved into two players left on their last pixel of health, since you can’t kill with chip damage (for the most part), so it was a boring situation of both players fishing for a last hit as the clock ticks down. Now, whether it’s Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, or Guilty Gear, you have a meter that you use on offense and defense. Being offensive rewards you with more and allows you to be more offensive, and being defensive will drain it. You can still have that moment from SFV that was supposed to be tense, but now it’s actually tense, because while that player is defending, the resource that prevents a checkmate situation is draining down, and when it’s empty, it’s basically game over.
It’s weird how all of them are saying the same thing.
“Return to form” is just one of those reviewer-isms like “mixed bag” and “fans of the genre”. You’ve probably seen the words “return to form” in dozens of trailers over the years that put the review quotes in their sizzle reels.
People have guessed that a game that reviewed well, that they didn’t want to review well, has been because of paid reviews for decades. It’s not a thing. If it was, EA wouldn’t have “forgotten” to pay for Anthem reviews, for instance. I get that this may not be what you want, but that happens sometimes. Rainbow Six is now GI Joe for some reason. The best thing you can do is enjoy the ones you enjoyed and then play the next great game that comes out that was inspired by the ones you like. Getting too invested in a given franchise is what allows them to mutate into things you don’t want. At least this game finally did away with the usual EA DRM, so part of voting with our wallets is working.
You can train it in mirror matches, but the V Rivals that you can fight other than your own mirror are an amalgamation of a particular rank. There’s a whole lot of skill variance in Master rank alone, so it might be good for training me against Dhalsim, because hardly anyone plays Dhalsim, so no one knows the matchup, but it won’t help me learn how to beat Punk, specifically.
It would certainly be nice to have for the fighting games I play. A few have toyed with the idea of “shadow fighters”, but it never really feels like playing against a person. It might get their habits down, but it doesn’t replicate the adaptation of facing a person and having them change how they play based on how you’re playing. If someone could crack that nut, everyone would have someone on their level to play against at any hour of the day, no matter how obscure the game is.
The Switch should be able to handle it unless the game was coded in some toolset where performance wasn’t a priority, because it’s only Puyo Puyo. Then suddenly it’s on a low spec platform where performance matters.
And it’s not that cross play is non trivial; it’s that it’s an ongoing expense in most cases. To justify an ongoing expense, you’re going to need ongoing revenue, which Puyo Puyo probably isn’t going to bring in.
Puyo Puyo Tetris was the only game I ever bought a non-North-American version of, after watching Giant Bomb play it. As far as I can tell, it never got a real NA version for Xbox, or if it did, I missed it. I didn’t even notice the Steam version of PPT1 until looking it up for this comment. The slowdown problems you experienced may be relegated to the Switch version, because…it’s the Switch.
“…any developer releasing a multiplayer game in this day and age without cross play is making a huge mistake.” They’re the ones who have to pay for it though. You’re talking about a game that you acknowledge as niche, which is even harder to justify additional expenses for. The only entity offering cross play services for free is Epic, and some people, for reasons I don’t understand, will whine about Epic Online Services if the game includes them. Otherwise, it’s an expense out of the developer’s/publisher’s pocket, and in a world without LAN and direct IP connections, that means the online dies when that expense no longer makes financial sense. You may not like playing against bots, but you’d also hate playing against absolutely no one. They’re not the first ones to pull this strategy, and there’s a lot of nuance to it.
As for appeal to bring new players in, I was at Combo Breaker 2022, with a friend of mine. He was watching DBFZ top 24 (IIRC) right next door, and he couldn’t stand the sounds coming from the PuyoPuyo stage, so I’d call that a barrier to getting new players in, too. I don’t know that some new game is going to solve the player acquisition problem without a new gimmick. My recommendation? Make your own PuyoPuyo, like Kirby’s Avalanche, but with blackjack and hookers.
The multiple cartridges is splitting hairs. Often they just output at different television standards or fixed a rare game breaking bug. They didn’t add a new character or change how many are on a team, which is a fundamentally different game design.
If you sit two people in a room long enough with Third Strike, they will end up playing Yun and Chun-Li. If you sit two people in a room long enough with MVC2, they will end up playing Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel. No one had to tell me to play Fox in Melee before I had any idea that there was a Melee “scene”; the rules of the game steered me that way after hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours. That’s what you preserve when the game can still be played.
The way they patched those games in the 90s was to call it a sequel. It came out about a year, sometimes sooner, after the last one. And in doing it that way, we got to keep every version. PC games used to give you installers for every patch. If patching is done sparingly, and focused on minor changes or bug fixes, this is manageable. I’m sure plenty of devs would argue that this doesn’t work for their game, but the alternative is that we just lose it all to time.
MVC2 is preserved as long as you’ve got at least one other person to play it with. With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.
Preserving a game isn’t about preserving the culture around it at the time of its release. It’s about a set of rules that the player can interact with that tend to lead to a certain type of experience. People playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 will fall into basically the same meta that the game evolved into about 15 years ago, because those rules encourage using those characters.
Yes, we should have more distinct versions of updated games that we can choose to upgrade to, or not, by our own choice. It’s absolute garbage that you can have a version of Overwatch that you enjoy that can just be taken away from you on a whim.