In case anyone forgot: this game was nominated for Best Fighting Game twice at the TGAs and still failed π Both times ahead of far more deserving candidatesβfurther evidence a good chunk of these awards is promotional crap.
this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2025
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So bizarre to me that a game has to be a runaway hit to even remain accessible for any length of time.
Stopping updates I get (and good, most game updates are annoying), but shutting down servers completely and especially delisting it seem so over the top.
Games need to bring back locally hosted servers.
I remember back in the day I could play Warcraft II with a friend over dialup, I'd put his number in and that modem would call his house and he'd answer with his copy of Warcraft and we could play against each other over the phone line with no server.
Even as recently as the Xbox 360 you could system link games and play on multiple consoles without any connection to the internet.
I don't see why it would be so hard to allow for a locally hosted server on most games. They would still be playable indefinitely without need of any kind of central server system.
And they don't need to be mutually exclusive, Halo 2 allowed for you to play both on Xbox live and system link games
It's not that it's hard. It's that they see it as interfering with their business model. Not only would that remove the likelihood of you seeing other people's new skins, it also removes a dependence on them, where they can create forced obsolescence. Plus I suspect that they fear more piracy.
It wouldn't be, necessarily. A bunch of games (survival games, in particular) still give you that choice. It's cheap, reliable and doesn't need a ton of people playing your game.
The problem is then you can't do matchmaking, you need a server browser, which is a lot clunkier. And it does get harder to avoid cheating and so on. The experience is also dependent on how close the server is from you, and if it's just some guy's computer the server goes away when they're not playing.
For fighting games specifically, where "room matches" are still a thing in most games, I do see it becoming an option as a separate mode. And man, if you're doing something like Multiversus I do think you should consider having it ready to go as a fallback, because this is a bad look and hurts future games that may want to give this a shot.
You can do both dedicated servers and official matchmaking servers. It's what counter strike does as an example.
That way if the official servers go offline, you only lose the matchmaking, but the game isn't totally dead.
Yeah, that's what I was trying to say there at the bottom. I think that's a better fit if you assign it by mode, especially in fighting games, where the ranked/unranked/lobby difference is well established, but at least it should be in the back pocket for a F2P fighting game to avoid this scenario.
Fighting Game of the Year 2022, but apparently even that's not successful enough.
Well, that's the problem of GaaS. It used to be games cost however much to make and you were recouping expenses after. These days games cost money to run, on account of all the centralized backend and dedicated server cost to keep everything locked down and enable matchmaking and microtransactions.
The bizarre thing is this zombie state where pieces of the game work, but only if you bought stuff ahead of time. The idea of F2P fighting games makes some sense on the surface, but with the way audiences work in the genre it may not be feasible because... who the hell is going to buy into a fighting game that poofs into the ether the moment someone else gets a Mai Shiranui DLC again?
Looking at you, 2XKO. I played Rising Thunder. I remember.
Rising Thunder was eventually released for free, server binaries and all, years later, but I don't have the same faith in 2XKO.
Wasn't Rising Thunder the one that at least handled part of shutdown right by semi-open sourcing?
But yeah, it's all part of a wider problem. Personally I don't want an invasive devloper over-tuning fighting games all the time, and I don't want any microtransactions. But unless you keep dangling new shiny, very few players will stick with a given game, making it hard to find matches on-demand.
It's fine and natural for populations of an online game to wane over time. Trying to cheat that comes with too many negative consequences.
Right, I don't even know how you would cheat it. Down at this point, I guess I'm just lamenting that more games aren't able to keep healthy communities after dev support ends.
At that point, you go to Discord, either with friends or the game's community. It's pretty much mathematically impossible to sustain the kinds of populations you find at a game's launch.
At the very least it should allow locally hosted online games.
There should be a law allowing full refunds of a game if its core service is taken offline without implementing a workaround. It should be treated the same way as planned obsolescence.
Companies aren't motivated to allow self-hosting at launch because there's no money in it. And they're not motivated to implement self hosting after they've made their money and then take the service down because there's no money in it.
Implement the workaround, open source the software, or force the publisher to issue a refund to anyone who requests one. That should be the standard.
There's not just no money in it, they see incentive in killing their old products thoroughly in order to better sell their new ones.
I mean half these games could do some form of self-hosting or Peer to Peer. It makes no sense that Multiverses needed to run on some centralized service. I wonder what made all the dinosaur survival games allow self-hosting, a trend I noticed.
That seems unreasonable to you, because you are a peon. You mean nothing to profits, so you will stop playing and you will like it. Now, buy our other products.
This game already died 2 times
Note: even though the game will be playable locally, they're still going to de-list it, so grab it before then.
Additionally, when Season 5 finishes, the game will no longer be available to download via the PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, Steam, or Epic Games Store.β
Grabbing it before then still means interacting with their freemium currency, so it's an expensive purchase. They could just sell the game for $40, but that would make too much sense.
Why
Great idea, release a fun enjoyable beta with mtx, shut the game off for a year while we rebuild everything from the ground up, then rerelease as a completely different game. I played throughout the whole βbetaβ release, then lasted maybe a week when it came back.
The game wasn't great, but was entertaining at the start of the open beta. I think they did a decent job with the characters, the style, and the moves like Shaggy throwing his sandwich. I had hopes that they would improve the netcode and hitboxes, but still got like 40 hours of fun out of it playing in a group with a friend.
The microtransactions were bad to start and only got worse. Charging for seasons in a beta? Stupidly high priced skins? Ugh. Then the went away for a while and the official release made the game playworse, microtransactions bascially assaulted you constantly, and any shred of fun was gone. They did the opposite of the feedback from the beta to chase microtransactions and that is why the game is dead already. They actively killed it.
Now I'm sad again.
If youβre still hankering for something similar to super smash bros that you can play online on pc, slap city is decent. However, melee+slippi is still a masterpiece.
Has that improved at all? Last I tried items were disabled and it was match after match of Falco doing the same move over and over.
Gotta find a person that you like to match up against or youβll find sweaty melee elitists. Try an online melee group if you donβt know anyone, or maybe you could try making a Lemmy community. Most play without items so items are completely disabled by default. Not a long process to change that, though. Just donβt use this information for evil, only against friends.
Fighting game characters take too long to make. The tried and true Riot method doesn't work when you can't get new content out at a regular clip, so people would have easily unlocked everything for sale without paying for it. The only option was a huge grind to attempt to make it sustainable. We'll see this problem again when 2XKO comes out.
That assumes that going all in on mtx an in game currency is the way to go and not other options like offering the game at a decent price and then selling skins and other mtx at reasonable prices.
It's the way Multiversus went, and it's the way 2XKO will likely go. You need to put your thumbs on certain scales to make the math work out for free to play.
free to play
other options like offering the game at a decent price...
2XKO is already announced as free to play.
I'm talking about possible ways of monetizing these types of games, not 2XKO specifically.
They had already chosen free to play, and I was speaking of the options available to them given that choice.
I've been playing this game ever since beta and have enjoyed it. It's a shame to see it go, but I guess I got my money's worth, since I paid nothing. Still, I can't understand why they can't just let people keep playing online like every other fighting game out there. I would even be willing to pay a one time fee if I knew the basic gameplay would remain available.