Maximilian Dood: VF6 needs to be F2P with X-play and Rollback

I had to log back in to reply to this brilliance of a take.

Prior to 2020, you could argue that online features were not a necessity involving the success of fighting games, not just VF. Single player content has been a huge indicator of success when you include franchises like smash bros. and the like. Not every player is looking to compete and would love to do things other than just hop online and get steamrolled 20 times a day. Heck, especially during the rudimentary phase of online back in the mid 2000s, offline content was king.

But, that's where this opinion should really exist. We're not in 2008, 2012, and we're not in 2019.

Online play has tremendously grew in every genre, but with fighting games, it just started. Rollback has now entered the mainstream, and for every game that has it, it has captured a huge amount of interest. Fightcade has literally injected life in dozens of retro fighting games, that would've never seen playtime from more than two people. Old, dusty ggxxac+r, garou, last blade 2, and more games on steam exploded on player numbers once rollback was announced and added.

Let's not forget about the pandemic back in 2020, where offline events were butchered and our only means of playing was through online. Video games in general garnered more demand, and of VF came out during that time, interest would've been decent off of single player content.

But VF isn't a single player game. It's a competitive, multiplayer game.

After that year, nothing change essentially. The demand for strong online persisted thanks to Delta and omicron variants, little to no offline events, and etc. What DID happen was more games were added to rollbackia: cvs2, mvc2, Hokuto No Ken, Rumble Fish 2, and more. For a brief time, this games became the most popular games on fightcade for a week! They garnered player counts in the 700s! Now, cvs2 and mvc2 consistently stays in the top 10, with consistent numbers around 150. Fightcade is a competitive "market" so to speak, and 3rd strike, kof 02, and 98 have perpetuated themselves extremely well.

Oh, that's right. VF3TB was added into rollbackia as well (Dreamcast port, but VF3tb nonetheless).

Guess who's interested in VF now.

I've experienced games that didn't have rollback, smash bros being one of them. I could essentially make myself a nice dish of tuna patties with sweet rice with some banana pudding on the side before "READY? GO!" ended in some cases. Stuttering matches, freezed games, and generally horrible online experience. I will never go back (also played SSF4 and UMvC3. Will never go back to those games either). I've also played samurai showdown 3 and 4, king of fighters 2002, cyberbots, and many more games, as well as VIRTUA FIGHTER 3, on fightcade, against Koreans, Brazilians, Vietnamese, South Africans, Colombians, and Japanese people.

My experience? You must've NEVER experienced rollback if you think it won't make a huge impact on sale for gamers intrigued by VF.

Max has a lot of opinions, but this particular opinion is the representative of a general gamer's opinion in the current times. Today online play is a requirement, not a suggestion.
The demand for functioning online is too obvious to be ignored.

I will say this though, this is from the perspective of someone who's already into fighting games. The casual audience that never played fighting games will require offline content. Even established fighting game players will like offline content. This is not to say offline content is not important; this will would actually make VF drastically different than other fighters because every other fighter is depressingly garbage at this aspect. Arcade mode, training mode, offline versus, and online play is usually the extent of what happens. That's hilarious.-ly bad. That's super bad.

Quick note, VF1,2,3,4 and etc would not be successful relying exclusively on single player content today. Cost of production has gone up and they can't just rely on Japan support for sales. On top of that, an offline only fighting game is basically just asking to be city-locked.

Dragon ball fighterz outsold Tenkaichi 2 & 3, which are both largely offline games with the best set of offline content I've ever seen in a fighting game. FighterZ has online content (plus a more respected fighting system, something you wouldn't think casuals would care about), so another interesting data point.

A VF with rollback + sizable offline content and global accessibility (available on numerous platforms and cross play functionality) would probably be the #1 fighter. I haven't even talked about accessibility for systems or cross play, which is also a basic feature that hasn't been worked out fully. I also haven't mentioned guilty gear strive, who sold hundreds of thousands of copies off of marketing alone and became the most sold GG game with no sizable offline content in sight. It did announce rollback though. Hmmm.

I've said a lot. In general, functioning online is the foundation to great sales. Offline content would be the essential additions to push sales over-the-top. I hope VF6 will make a lot of offline content. Fighting games have got too streamlined on everything. I miss fighting games like dragon ball z Budokai tenkaichi where there was A LOT you could do. Bringing back the casual gameplay stuff would be a nice change-of-pace and would "chill out" the game experience. However, if VF6 released with barebones, delayed-based online play, but with massive offline content, we would be going back to pre-2019 in a 2022 day and age. You want less people to play VF? Don't add basic online features.

EDIT: read more of your posts. Gonna edit mines a bit. I honestly don't feel like I'm disagreeing with you. I genuinely want more content. I want to do more stuff in a fighter. But, we need to know what's vital for multiplayer games today.

 

The key to VF's sustainable growth and sustainable popularity is with significant, legitimate offline content.

I am not going to tell you that rollback would not bring new players. Because it would. I will not tell you that rollback would not cause some player's to stay with the game who left because of delay based netcode because rollback would have caused many players to stay.

I'm not going to tell you that rollback wouldn't give VF a significantly better online experience because it would. But solid rollback netcode is at best 1/4 of the reason why people play fighting games.

What you don't understand is that without a solid single player experience no current fighting game would be around today. Not SF. Not KOF. Not Guilty Gear Not MK. NOT Tekken All of those games that have a legitimate online community only have that community because of the single player base and solid legitimate single player content

The online competitive multiplayer thing is only an extension of the offline VS thing. And the offline Vs thing only is viable when there is significant Single Player content.

Online Competitive Multiplayer is the Game Publisher's Profit Driven Wet Dream. Its the least expensive option for a game publisher to produce.

Online Fighting game focus is cheaper (considerably cheaper ) to produce:

• No Story Modes
• No Expensive Voice Acting
• No Expensive CGI Movies
• No Hard to balance, complex AI Programming
• No Story Boards
• No Elaborate Save Files and Inventories and player profiles
• No Character Arcs to worry About
• No Expensive Actors or Actor Royalties to Pay
• No Expensive Character Intros and Outtros movies

With an online competitive multiplayer all you need is acceptable netcode, 5 or 10 stages, balance and some character skins. And you can charge the $H#T out of the players for more character skins in the form of Seasons and DLC. VF6 will likely be based on NFT's and Blockchain

@Radical777 You get hyped up about playing online, but really... online is playing you You've totally bought into the game publisher's fantasy:

I'm sry to tell you m8 VF being a (online competitive e-sport only) is a myth that RGG/Sega would like to be true and are trying hard to sell, because profit margins are a helluva lot juicier if you don't have to spend all that cash on single player content but instead push character DLC and NFT's

Meanwhile SIFU has no online, no rollback, no competitive multiplayer. Lots of Single Player Content and over a million sales:

https://www.pushsquare.com/news/2022/03/stylish-kung-fu-action-game-sifu-breaks-1-million-sales

 

Super late to the party but on the note of Soul Calibur 6, it took 3 years to break 2 million sales. Soul Calibur 4 took 6 months to break 2.2 million. Not sure where this idea that 6 was more successful than 5 or 4 came from.

Also, the point of rollback isn't just to sweeten the experience for current players. It attracts players from the limited pool of players that fighting games have in general. Fighting games are a niche genre, and the casual audience for them is still but a fraction of the overall pool of people who play games. A LOT of fighting game players will buy a new fighting game to try it out (and getting that initial $40-$60 investment IS very important for investors, which is who SEGA will cater to) and having rollback slapped on the marketing ensures grabbing a marginal share of those players. It is incredibly important in this day and age for any multiplayer that wants to succeed to launch with rollback.

SIFU is a weird thing to bring up... it'd be like bringing up God Hand or Asura's Wrath or Anarchy Reigns, etc.

Overall I agree with you that there is a market for single player content. Whether or not that's the majority, or even a marginal market share is another question altogether. Whether or not SEGA is looking to make a game for that market share pushes that question even further. Having a lot of single player content in a fighting game isn't magically going to attract soulsborne fans, or metroidvania fans, or madden fans, or puzzle game fans. The fighting game market itself is still incredibly small compared to something like, Battle Royales and FPS's in general.

A random thought though. League of Legends (since we can throw out random games of different genre's) still has a strong player base and is still pulling in profits and secures sponsorship deals etc. It's been going since 2010 and has never had any single player content. Could it possibly be the case that a developer constantly showing support for their game and interacting with their core audience might actually have a bigger impact on keeping the game alive than injecting a bit of single player content?

 

No, significant single player content won't magically attract those kinds of fans. But it will magically attract fighting game fans. Look at the single player content for the Tekken, MK, SF, Soul Calibur, Guilty Gear, DOA series. I just don't have the time or energy to make you a spread sheet right now. But the richer and nicer the single player content was for these games, the bigger the "fighting fan" community was. As the game publishers tried to maximize profit by removing bits and pieces of single player content here and there, the fighting game community (which was a niche to begin with) got smaller and smaller. And once the fighting game genre is totally stripped of all single player content and all that remains is 10 stages, 20 fighting skins, and perfect rollback netcode, the only players that will be left will be a niche of the original niche of fighting game fans and the entire genre will simply fizzle away, and game publishers and investors will move on to something else to squeeze dollars out of.

SIFU is a Single Player only game directed at fighting game fans Instead of 1 on 1 martial arts , its a 1 against (4 or 5) martial arts game. What's weird is that you think that bringing up SIFU in a Virtua Fighter forum is weird. Virtua Fighter features lots of quasi kung fu. SIFU features quasi kung fu. Virtua Fighter requires skill, dexterity, practice in the context of a virtual martial arts exchange. SIFU requires skill, dexterity and practice in the context of a virtual martial arts exchange.

The obvious difference is SIFU is single player only. Whereas Virtua Fighter has 1P mode, VS modes, and Online Vs modes. So maybe you don't know this, but there are many Virtua Fighter fans who only play or prefer VF Single Player modes. I'm one of those types of players. I really don't give a flying F#ck about online play or roll back net code. I play primarily offline VS modes and enjoy VF fights against the AI. So from my perspective SIFU is a good measuring standard.

I'm a fighting game fan. I play all kinds of fighting games:

• Virtua Fighter
• Soul Calibur
• DOA
• SIFU
• EA's Ultimate Fighting Championship
• Tekken
• THQ's Ultimate Fighting Championship
• Fight Night
• Fight For New York
• Absolver
• Sleeping Dogs
• Shenmue
• Judgement
• Kengo
• Deadliest Warriors
• Mortal Kombat
• Urban Reign

And none of these games are :

But one thing is for sure, the relative success of all of these games which do in fact appeal to a certain class of fighting game fans can be measured by how much single player content they have or don't have. The games with the most significant single player content sold considerably more than those games with less single player content.

The games with the least amount of single player content have the fewest sales, and have the smallest player bases. And when fighting games with bare bones single player content strip what little single player content they have, these games will enjoy even smaller player bases. Although I suspect that they will eventually get pretty good rollback netcode and maybe these extremely niche games will survive as the few people left playing them will be desperate enough to pay $300 to $1500 for 3 or 4 seasons worth of high quality rollback netcode, with 10 stages, and 20 skins and half a dozen game publisher sponsored tournaments.

 

not sure you know what "quasi" means my man

 

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/quasi

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english/quasi

https://www.yourdictionary.com/quasi

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quasi-

 

yes

 

I haven't read this thread yet, but on the headlining topic I fully believe that Free to Play is the way to go for Virtua Fighter 6. I also believe that it should have a mix of content that makes it incredibly FUN AND REWARDING to play Multiplayer, Single Player, and even have a fun way to interact with it asynchronously (like on your phone).

Of course, my personal priority is that it still has a rewarding competitive multiplayer but again, while satisfying the above goals.

I do think that everything can be tied to a rewarding system that rewards people who play, but also gives people good and usable and demand-worthy content that people are willing to pay for in addition to an amazing baseline experience.

I have a few strong visions on making all of this happen too.

Cheers!

 

yeah, I didn't say it was an esport. A Competitive multiplayer game =/= esport. VF, with no multiplayer features, wouldn't be fighting game.

You mention sifu a ton in this thread, but it's a beat'em up. Not a fighting game. It's indistinguishable from bayonetta, god of war, devil may cry, streets of rage, and final fight. They're beat'em ups with specific goals. Street Fighter blew up for being a competitive multiplayer experience. Very different than sifu.

Most of those games you mention (SF, KOF, MK, and the like) are popular due to what they did in the arcade scene. SF is big because it was the first. KOF is big because it's a combination of various SNK games (Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Samurai Shodown, Metal Slug, and etc) into one. MK is the one game where your point really stands, since although they started in the arcades (and got big there too), they continue to sell immensely due to their sizable single player content. But, if MK didn't have competitive multiplayer, it wouldn't have grown to the size it is now.

??????? "awh, you think VF is a competitive multiplayer game? So, you don't care if you just see hitboxes and hurtboxes with wireframes in a 3D grid space, with nothing to do besides fight?"

yes, that's clearly what I'm arguing for, and that's clearly what esports games do (LoL and Dota have movies on netflix, CSGO is largely user-generated content, Halo is heavy in delivering on story, Starcraft have their own story and movie, etc etc). This is a strawman, and empirically wrong even within the strawman.

And masterpo, I care about online because even with extensive single player content, the best story and voice acting you can produce, plenty of minigames and character costumization you can muster, If the game was reported to have garbage netcode, it'd be functionally indistinguishable from a beat'em up. I could play sifu for the beat'em up experience, and then play VF for fighting against other players.

 

Well my friend., we shall see. Time will tell. Because the fighting games are removing and cutting out more single player content with each release. Let's see where they end up. Since you believe single player is not really the key to their success we shall see in the next 2 or 3 years how the fighting game fares. If the trend of scaled down, trimmed down single player content continues, my prediction is the player base for any fighting game that scales back or presents no single player, will shrink. And the the loyal player count will continue to dwindle.

On the other hand, if there is no significant connection between single player content and the size of online peak play then as game publishers cut out the single player modes and single player content instead of shrinking player bases we should see vibrant, growing player bases over the next 2 or 3 years.

VF lost players with VF5US but according to you that was only about rollback.
DOA lost players with DOA 6 but according to you that was only about rollback


So we shall see. Time will tell.

And since you don't believe there is an intersection or correlation between fighting games and beat-em ups communities and player bases then you should have no problem explaining and understanding the dwindling and shrinking player bases of any fighting game that has less and less single player content with each release while at the same time reducing (if not removing) lag

On the other hand I see a very bright future for beat-em ups and for fighting games that increase rather than decrease their single player content

Significant Quality Single Player Content == Fighting Game Success

 

Online multiplayer is the only future fighting games have.

Arcades are dead. They are not coming back and there will never be a revival of them. It makes little sense to invest in the offline portion of fighting games today. Especially when fighting games are given shoestring budgets, there's nothing left over to create meaningful single player content.

Japanese developers simply don't understand rollback at a fundamental level. The look at games that have awful rollback like SFV and conclude that rollback is awful. Rollback in 3D fighting games is more difficult than 2D to be sure, but it absolutely can be done. But we live in a world where people like Harada say that since you can't improve the online experience, then make the offline modes lag so it can match playing on the shit netcode.

 

Yes Arcades are dead and they are never coming back. And there was a reason they died. Consoles offered gamers a richer and deeper experience at a better cost point.
Its not that gamers could play VF, Tekken, etc at for home free. Because the console costs a few hundred dollars, and the games cost money. That's a lot of tokens But at the end of the day the console just offered so much more fun, so much more value for the money than the arcade token.

When VF and Tekken both hit consoles, The designers/developers of Tekken realized they needed to add more to the fighting game experience than just an arcade mode, so they added character profiles, stories, cut scenes, character intros, character endings, Tekken force. Etc. Mortal Kombat also realized they needed to add more single player content in the way of story modes, character profiles, etc. Soul Calibur did the same thing but even bigger with bigger stories, cut scenes, animations, character arcs, weapon master modes, etc. These three franchises were rewarded for their efforts in the way of success, popularity, and loyal community and enormous sales. This is why to this day the Tekken, Mortal Kombat, and Soul Calibur communities are so much bigger than Virtua Fighter.

@Radical777 draws a distinction between Fighting games and Beat'em ups, but he does not realize it was when the game publishers added Beat'em up elements such as story modes, character arcs, and additional single player content to Fighting games like Tekken, Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur that made them the block buster hits they are today.

The players that even know what an arcade is, are getting older, soon they won't be playing games of any kind. And the new generation of players have no connection to the old arcade days. All they know about is console games with rich content. New players are very loyal to Soul Calibur The customization features, weapon master modes, story modes, cgi movies, character back stories, the lore attracts new players and keeps them coming back. Soul Calibur , Tekken, and Mortal Kombat made a successful transition from arcades to consoles precisely because they added all the single player content to the basic arcade experience.

Fighting games that add significant single player content have a brighter future than those that don't. The future for fighting games is to transition to Hybrid Fighting-Beat'em up. Fighting games have to transition to a game that is part fighting game and part beat'em up. For example, as Judgement's Takayuki Yagami's move set gets more complex (like it did in Judgement 2) Judgement is part fighting game and part beat'em up. And the more sophisticated Yagami's moveset gets the more of a fighting game it becomes. Judgement is an example of one of the new Hybrids. Its part of why its so successful Its far more than a simple beat'em up because Yagami's moveset , offensive and defensive options and it has a legitimate fighting engine. Judgement has a very bright future.

Sifu is another example of a hybrid fighting/beat'em up game with a very bright future. It has a simple but complete story mode (Single Player only) and it also has a fairly deep fighting engine.

If Fighting games don't want to go the way of the dinosaur, they have to evolve. Games like Judgement, Sifu point to one possible successful future of Fighting games, Games like EA's Ultimate Fighting Championship which also has a great deal of single player content point to another possible successful approach.

Too much emphasis is placed on rollback whether the rollback is awful or not. The Ingredients for a successful Fighting game. in 2022 and beyond

• An exciting , interesting and diverse roster of fighters and styles
• A easy to learn but difficult to master fighting game engine
• Fairness and balance between characters. Any character can win (no over powered characters)
• A solid move set (sufficient offensive and defensive moves) for each character between (75 and 125 moves)
• Interesting stages and environments for the fights to take place in. Significant single player content (customization, character stories, single player modes, dojo modes, training modes, etc)
• practical VS modes, and offline modes.

Harada is letting you know what the strategy is going to be for 3D fighting game companies. In order to get rid of the difference between offline play vs online play, just make offline play lag. Its easier to make offline games lag than it is to get rid of lag online


The arcade structure of fighting games is dead or dying. The fighting games have to add significant single player content to attract and retain the new generation of players. The old players from the old arcade days are on a sinking ship on which they erroneously believe rollback netcode is going to save.

 

This illusion trick kinda worries me.

So we are apparently going back, to early old tech sony PS1 3d fighting games, where the offline play of some fighting games which had no online, were a bit laggy, clunky, and had delayed inputs, to compensate for low RAM, GPU and CPU.

Okay then.