Netplaying FGs

So I’m pretty much done netplaying fighting games at home. I have a laggy HDTV, which makes it really frustrating to play anything that involves timing and reaction. The sad part is that even though I’ve had the TV for a little less than a year now, I didn’t notice how bad the lag was until BBCP came out. I play Makoto in that game, and being able to time her drive attacks is essential to all of her combos. I remember complaining to Percival about how hard it was to consistently get Level 3 drives, and he told me that he never bothered to memorize the timing. Instead, he just looked at the bars every time he had to use a drive. This NEVER worked for me at home, either in training mode or netplay. Then I actually played BBCP at Super Arcade for the Rebel Up events, and noticed that my drive timings were all wrong. More importantly, I noticed that it was suddenly possible for me to get Level 3 drives by just watching the bar!

So that was the main dealbreaker for me. I can still play Gundam at home though. Even though I am technically handicapped by my TV every time I netplay, I can still get by because that game doesn’t require the same level of precision and timing as fighting games. Not to say it isn’t difficult, because Gundam has several layers of things that make it hard. But that’s a post for another time.

GGXrd comes out tomorrow

So Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN- comes out tomorrow, and while I am definitely happy to see Guilty Gear rightfully take the spotlight again, I’m not really too hype for the game.

For one, there’s the drastic cut in the cast size: Xrd is a 13 character game(14 if you count Valentine who is almost guaranteed to be unlocked in the future), which is a big step down from AC+R’s 25 characters. It’s also missing series staples like Baiken, Johnny, and Dizzy, and even the character who completely dominated the Arc Revo GG popularity poll: Bridget.

But more important is the system and character changes. While some of the changes are nice, their general direction seems to be taking the series backwards instead of forwards. The characters are based on their #Reload counterparts, which means that many characters lost the great tools that were gained in the next three versions(Slash, AC, and ACR). I can never understand when developers take away things: I am all for adjusting and changing tools that are deemed too powerful or useless. Removing tools just means decreasing the number of available options for players, which is always a bad thing in my book.

I suppose one of the reasons for my bitterness is where I live. Specifically, it’s not living in Japan which means that my first taste of +R was when the Japanese PS3 port of Accent Core got the update. AC+R had a great run in Japan, but I feel that the game never got a real chance outside of Japan because of the nonsensical release schedule for the console ports. The +R patch was advertised to have improved netplay as well as lobby support, something the game was sorely lacking. But then the patch took way longer than anyone expected. Once it finally got released, there was an air of collective disappointment at realizing that the netplay had not changed, and that the promised lobby system was absent. It’s just my hypothesis, but I think one of the reasons for the ridiculous delay is because of the promised lobby system: ASW probably had a very small team working on the +R patch, as its reasonable to assume that the majority of their efforts were on Xrd already. I’m sure the team tried their best to implement the lobby system, but ultimately failed resulting in the delay. This is just for the Japanese PS3 version too: XBox 360 players didn’t get the patch until several months after, and even as I’m writing this the US PS3 version still does not have the patch.

There’s also the timing of the Xrd announcement. Xrd was announced at Arc Revo, which was before the +R patch even got released. I feel that this really stifled the potential growth of the +R scene in America. There are a lot of players who lose motivation to learn a game when they know they’re playing an old version, or if they know that there is going to be an update in the future. I am sad to admit that I am guilty of this as well in the case of +R. While I did play the game a lot and support it at all of my local tournaments, I really did not put in much practice time. I pretty much got by with pure Week 1 tech. There was a lot of useful Millia tech that got developed later on in +R’s lifespan, but I never bothered practicing it because I knew that it was all going to be obsolete in Xrd.

But yeah, I am pretty sad to see +R go. The game really felt like a love letter to GG fans: it fixed a lot of the common complaints that people had about AC. More importantly, it managed to achieve the impossible, which is to make the game easier without dumbing it down. With a few exceptions, every GG character got easier to play in +R. The overall execution barrier was lowered while characters still retained the plethora of useful offensive and defensive tools from the previous game. In contrast, my initial impressions of the Xrd changes are not as favorable. But I’ll be quite pleased if I am proven wrong in the upcoming days, so here’s hoping.