I don’t like hitstun decay for a few reasons. For one, it’s not easily observable. If you’ve got a combo limit meter (like Skullgirls, Killer Instinct, and the upcoming Invincible Vs), you can see how much the move you just used has gotten you closer to the limits of the combo. It’s not intuitive for a player to track how close they are to the combo dropping with hitstun decay. So because of this, you’re basically just memorizing combos. If you land a hit with a move, or in a situation, that you haven’t practiced, you have no idea how to guarantee that you can finish the combo, which means that if you’re improvising, you’re just quickly routing your combo into a knockdown. As a player, I hate memorization, and as a spectator, I hate watching a game that has just a few bread and butter combos and quick routes to knockdowns when they don’t know what to do. I do like one game with hitstun decay, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core +R, which at least allows you to do “tech traps”, where I’m expecting my opponent to air tech, and if they do, I get a new combo for free, so there’s a mind game there that most games with hitstun decay, in my experience, don’t have.
Hitstun decay is, by and large, the most prevalent form of infinite combo prevention in games with big combos, but it’s the one I dislike most. Guilty Gear Strive, Mortal Kombat, and Tekken all use juggle decay, or gravity decay, where the opponent just falls harder and harder until eventually they hit the floor, and you can’t combo them anymore. This is, of course, much easier for everyone to observe. My favorite method though is just using a meter to limit combos, because it allows for something much closer to freeform jazz. Every combo in Killer Instinct is different, because if you use the same combo every time, the opponent can break it. In Skullgirls, you’re usually unable to do enough damage in a single combo with its limits, so instead you’re looking to tactically drop your combo and sneak in a new one, which is called a reset.
I love Strive and tag fighters, so this should be way up my alley, but I’m concerned about a couple of things. First and foremost, it’s Sony published, which doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that the online is going to work on Proton when it has to go through PSN. Second, there was a moment in the gameplay trailer that showed air teching, and that usually means hitstun decay, which is a mechanic I’m not a fan of. But at least if this one doesn’t work out for me, Invincible Vs will also be showing at Evo.
Ubisoft reports that around 58% of their PC revenue last year came from digital add-ons, and despite the fierce backlash, the company maintains that this model is both sustainable and future-proof.
So future-proof that they’re bleeding customers, and everyone can see it plain as day.
They briefly got a Fierro into space so they could mess with a satellite. Somewhere around the fifth movie, they became very tongue in cheek action movies, with one character whose entire job is to break the fourth wall.
It can be an ongoing series, but you can get a sense of closure each time. Star Wars had closure in 1983 and 2005 and 2019 as they kept adding on to it, each time seeming like it was done; and each spin-off had closure by the time credits rolled.
I don’t think you’re going to find many sharing your definitions. GaaS has just been simply replaced by the term live service in how people talk about this stuff. Perhaps Valve showed their hand early with this interview, but the expectation we had as customers with early TF2 was very different back then. I definitely wouldn’t consider No Man’s Sky to be any form of service; it might be the industry’s best example of being a form of penance for what they promised their customers at the start.
I don’t think Unreal Tournament 2004 would have been considered live service just because they occasionally gave out a free new map. It was a form of marketing for the thing they already made. TF2 at least was a product when they sold it up front before it was free to play, when it had no microtransactions and they weren’t the goal for getting paid for having made TF2.
I enjoy the Fast & Furious movies. The advantage to them releasing one movie at a time, or in games, one game at a time, is you can more accurately gauge the appetite for the next one, and they don’t have ongoing costs to keep the last one going. The ten F&F movies out there now are not in danger of disappearing if F&F11 bombs. The people who worked on those movies don’t have an expectation for or reliance on employment any longer than the time it takes to make one movie. And outside of Fast X, despite being pulpy and constantly recontextualizing and retconning old events, they all have their own endings with closure. Fast X does have a cliffhanger, and that is a bet that they made with their audience that they’ll be back, but the most likely scenario is that the next one offers closure. In some ways, cliffhangers can be closure themselves, too; I think more highly of Arcane season 1’s ending as closure for the series than I do of season 2, for instance. Meanwhile, the most likely scenario for a live service game is that it doesn’t have an ending or even exist anymore, only a few years in the future.
And all that said, it also doesn’t mean that I don’t understand your perspective, but I do see eye to eye with the author.
Oh, fair enough. But it’s still only going to have so much gas in the tank, and a cliff-hanger or sequel potential is very different than some continual expectation, either by consumers or the developers that the game can or should be updated forever.
Nah, Fast and Furious’ days are numbered. They already broke the glass on the storyboard card that says, “Go to space”, and the only one left to break is, “Time Machine”.
The closure the article speaks to is also just not turning the game into a perpetual expectation that more is coming. Multiplayer games have always been built around being “endless”, but there was never the expectation that this Halo would be the last Halo and just keep getting updates when you bought it 20 years ago. That expectation has led to sustainability problems we’ve all seen and that the article calls out.
This story comes alongside numerous reports from the dev team that said the team felt it was ready. Plus it was only supposed to launch into early access.