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.
No, I meant to reply to you. “A lot of player freedom” is not at odds with a great story-driven game, and I gave an example of a game that fits both criteria, so I think it’s unfortunate that the perception is that you can only have one or the other.
I think a lot of us would have appreciated a more optional approach to a lot of the story stuff back at the base. Some of it can go on for a long time, may not be particularly engaging or exciting, and can just leave you wishing you could get back to the combat loop. Also, what’s up with that walking/jogging animation at the home base? I’ve spent $50 in the Unreal store and imported motion captured animations, ready for use in a commercial game, that looked better than that and could be hooked up in a few hours.
It’s a very good game that, when I recommend it, typically comes with an asterisk attached.
They are making “complete” games with no early access period and no DLC with shockingly high production values for the budget. And people are ignoring them until there is a massive sale
I can think of several other variables that may be necessary for success that aren’t being tested in that statement. Like, is it a setting that resonates with people? Yes, I want more Max Payne, but not so much with vampires in it. Then when you find a game that gets acclaim and the audience is there for it, this is a good time to sequel that game, because now there’s brand recognition on the game people like, and they’ll be more willing to spend full price on a game where they’re confident in what they’re getting.