GetTheTables

It is maybe telling where my brain is that I was trying to figure out what the Loki FG is that you'd be playing this weekend.

Nice. Yeah that was how Xrd was. You could basically treat it like a show and chop through it at your own pace. You ended up enjoying it ya? The trailer was pretty rad so that was a good start.

Yeah its really nice for airdashes. Even after banging on it for awhile I still dickfinger up IADs. Question about story mode: does it play out like Xrd (i.e. basically a big 'ol movie)? It's going to be awhile before I can get to it so I'm curious.

Yeah I'm not leaning on the dash button too heavily. I have so much dashing muscle memory from +R anyways that I don't want to bother overwriting it, especially since I can see playing that too here and there. I do see it being very valuable to make stuff like drift RC real easy, and since that is unique to this game I can devote the muscle ROM to it without much issue. Playing games like that with someone else can be a lot of fun. I experienced a lot of games that way with my ex but backwards: she'd be playing them while I painted so I just got to sit back and enjoy the story. Live action LPing. 🙂

I'm the same way. Even if I see a bunch of tech I only really absorb it by taking notes. During the SFV times I had 3 pretty beefy note docs that I kept up with and even with the bit of time I have in +R I have two docs going for that already. I find that the act of just writing something down does a lot to help me remember it. I likewise need to take some time and poke around at the tutorial-y stuff. Just good to walk through it even if I probably know everything already. And I need to legit sit down and lab some core stuff. I need to get used to the dash button and stuff like drift/fast RC. Its rad that you and your wife are playing Disco together.

You're about to ascend to God hood. If you want to ensure some controllers go through TVs in the next 3 days, do H. Dolphin, 2S. It's not real but most people are probably gonna just eat it. Mix in vertical Dolphin to catch jumps and randomly side switch. Spend that time working on your best maniacal laugh. Totsugeki indeed.

100% that. Like the broad mobility is similar but this is still a very different beast from +R or Rev2. Case in point I realized I was dropping my basic ass sweep combo and didn't immediately realize why. Then I stopped and paid attention to what my hands were doing which was my HoS 2K route. Lo and behold that doesn't work in this game. 😄

It definitely does. Jumping between this and +R is funky. I do find that once I get into the Strive groove though it works out. This has been a very busy week. So I said to myself "I'll just hop on to clear the mandatory online ranking mode thingie, then I'll hang out in training mode for a bit." I finally hopped off 90 mins later. The duel stations are still hiccupy. Pairing up with people is better than the last beta but still not 100% hit rate. Woolie's advice of defaulting to searching for matching from training mode helps alleviate running around as much at least. Connections were solid throughout. I think I may have seen some small rollbacks but I also could have just not really understood what I was looking at. Got a bunch of games in including an impromptu ft10 with a Nago player in a park. He can be really scary but if they don't manage their blood it murders his lead. May is still a super cunt. Lab Dolphins. The block stun is weird. Overall didn't do too bad considering I barely know what I'm doing. Ram and her God buttons help a lot. Had a lot of fun. Hopefully I can fire it up again before the weekend.

That fast RC shit is wild. Therein lie the lab monstering. Work is of course being a bastard this week but I'm hoping to be free by 7pm EST tonight if anyone wants to try for a lobby.

KingTotsugeki

For what its worth Ram is piss easy to play until your opponent starts to know what they are doing. You can get so much mileage out of f.S, 5H and j.S and sword tosses get you easy corner carry into burst safe routes. She's sort of a mid screen bully that converts into a corner mauler on the right hits. But TBH you can play her real, real stupid for awhile and the character can carry you pretty far. Or at least that was my experience in the betas. I think Anji will/should be her natural predator but I dunno how popular he is going to be. Sol/Gio are great choices if you want to get up in that ass. I like Sol because he is basically just punching the shit out of people now. Case in point: The triple 5H combo cracks me up.

I don't think its a Sony issue. Based on everything I've heard about their crossplay policies they don't really care about PC, just other consoles and mobile. I think its mostly a "oh shit yeah we probably should have thought of that" thing. Remember that this game was originally going to launch with the same 'ol ASW netcode until feeedback pushed them to implement rollback. I think the same thing happened with cross play. My guess is that they are being coy about it because they really don't want another SFV situation on their hands: we've already seen one instance where a horsepower difference makes PS inter-console crossplay an issue. Those older consoles being part of the same family is going to make building full PS4/5 <-> PC crossplay an exercise in optimization and netcode refinement. Battle For the Grid probably had a bit easier of a time, even though its a smaller team, due to the game being more lightweight (so it probably runs more consistently across all platforms) and being a smaller game in scale overall so it wouldn't be as much of a bugbear to test and optimize. Crossplay is the next thing that the Strive fanbase needs to keep their foot down on. Even if it is a PITA, ASW needs to implement it. I still feel strongly that, aside from platform holders like Sony being fucking assholes about it, all FGs need full platform crossplay. The hobby is already so niche we can't keep being siloed off on different platforms. On a fun note: If I wasn't such a character hipster I'd play Sol. Hell I still might. That triple 5H combo cracks me up.

Noice. Despite my best efforts I couldn't get a PS5 in time for Strive. I think that is gonna push me to play more on PC. But having both will be real nice until the far off future when they get around to cross play.

Man I wish. It's preloading/loaded if you have it pre-ordered which is nice because PSN can be slow as fuck sometimes. There is supposed to be one final patch tomorrow when it goes live but aside from that anyone that bought ahead can be ready to roll.

Checked the PS4, Strive is ready to go. I'm canceling my usual nerd plans for special nerd plans tomorrow. If anyone wants to day 1 lobby it up lemme know. Assuming the game doesn't melt of course.

I've enjoyed what I've played of Ram so far because, well it's Ram. I think I may stick with her but playing HoS in +R has given me an appreciation for being more of a bulldog so someone a little more aggro like Gio is interesting as well. I feel like I'm just biding my time until Johnny shows up. 😍

Yeah there is going to be a fair bit of fair weather player transitioning when Strive comes out, but TBH I think that happens whenever a new FG comes out. Everyone flocks to it for a bit and then they settle back on whatever they enjoy. Maybe it is the new thing, maybe it is the old thing. Its always fun to dip into a FG when it is new and no one really knows what is going on. Given how particular 3D fighters/VF is I feel like the core of that game isn't going anywhere. Like for me I prefer 2D fighters so whenever one of those comes out I'm usually willing to give it a shot for a bit, less so for 3D fighters. It wouldn't surprise me if the legit VF fanbase is exactly the opposite. And of course the hardcore VFers aren't going anywhere. This one is definitely a bit weirder due to VF5US being PS+ so the player base is going to have been way bigger than it would have been otherwise. I did see at least one tweet about Sega doing some support for this so hopefully they can polish up the lobby/player match system to be an actual system as opposed to Marco Polo that ends in fisticuffs.

Might schmidght. I'm fuckin pumped. +R is already awesome to play. Having another fun GG in the near future is gonna leave me feeling spoiled for options. I almost wish I was in my 20s again to have time to enjoy it all.

I think burger sheriff is a lock. Dude has horseshoes on his gloves. No random jobber has fancy gloves like that in GG. 😉 Part of me wants Bridget back but I think he'd be a royal asshole in this game. Though it'd be great for anyone that wanted a zoner.

I agree, the 6P buffs felt good in this version. I don't agree with air unblockable states for AAs in this game though. Even though this game is less vertical than previous GGs it is clear they still want there to be a strong aerial component to it. If you make one alpha-AA ability it really constrains that, unless you make it FD blockable, and then you're just right back to the old GG FD air block dynamic which they have clearly stated they don't want in this game. Moreover if 6Ps were air unblockable they'd probably have to do a fair bit of work around what damage you can get off them otherwise jumping at all starts to feel real bad, which would probably be hard to do with the RC system in this game. You also already have a potentially really strong air unblockable answer in air throw. Once people get more comfortable with air throw-RC combos, getting air thrown is going to lead to fat damage. That opens up the RPS of early air button to beat the throw, which loses to a grounded AA, which isn't as effective against empty jump, etc,. I think the big thing is just balancing out AA'ing so that it generally doesn't feel "bad" to AA (6P works as intended, DPs aren't punishably negative when air blocked) while jumps continue to feel like a valid approach option. I think they're getting there. Air dashes definitely felt stubby (especially air backdash which felt like the appendix organ of all your movement options) . Considering Strive is them trying to come up with a fresh engine there is definitely going to be some tweaking time. Remember how many seasons it took SFV to iron out the AA situation, and that game still adheres to most "SF" conventions so theoretically they should have known how to tune it out of the gate.

I'd be willing to give it a shot. I'm already used to having to desperately search for my opponent after playing Strive betas. Also will make me finally download it so I have it.

My quick thoughts: I think adjusting the arcs will help a decent bit. I mentioned it around the 2nd beta but the arcs being so shallow felt off due to exactly what EC said: because the jump arcs were so acute it was actually kinda easy to whiff AAs. And as a Ram player I felt like the shallow arcs only exacerbated the strength of her normals: the jumps were stubby so I wasn't super worried about being jumped in on (airdash or bust) and j.S was a real motherfucker of a button with that shallow arc. I appreciate that they recognize that the connection rate was boned up. The lobbies are still janky but with rematches in place at least you don't have to hang out in them too long. The last real bad hurdle is how often making a connection or even readying up would break. Once that is smoothed out, the lobbies will be more bearable. And praise be we won't even have to go to the park to play each other! I'll miss the fountain hang outs....no I won't. After that hopefully they can optimize to make the act of connecting to someone else a little faster (its not super slow but it feels just a touch slower than maybe it should be, although that may just be PS4). Its close. I can almost smell the game.

Video breakdown for those that hate reading:

I hope Oro is a beast. He's one of the 3S weirdos I like the most. And that turtle melts my old, blackened heart.

Good point about TWEWY, I forgot about that re-release. Awakening I think of as a different beast, and it sort of illustrates my issue with this "old game as a metric approach": re-releasing old games is great but outside of some corner case scenarios probably isn't going to garner a lot of excitement. I think its worse with FGs: although they can have a much better shelf life (a great FG is as much fun to play now as it was when it was new) anyone that is into that game almost certainly already owns it or otherwise has ways to play it. And when you are coming to an older game you have to know damn well that you are jumping into a shark tank, so you need to be prepared to take your lumps from people who have stuck with the game since ye olden tymes. You're looking to sell to what seems like a thin slice of the Venn diagram - new players to an old game who feel like they are going to like a game enough to push through a rocky start. Always feels like a really rough situation to convert. But as others have said almost certainly the wisdom of pushing it as a PS+ title. That is probably going to increase the amount of people that will at least give it a shot by a few orders of magnitude. Programmer hat moment: although they rebuilt the game in a new engine, that doesn't necessarily mean that they messed with the bones all that much. Point of fact to keep costs low they almost certainly had a mandate to change as little as was absolutely necessary. Most of what I've seen that they changed is all graphical overhauls, which is very different from getting too deep into the code base (though not that I'm underselling how much work probably went into that, more that it probably was a resource focus). I remember in one of EC's vids he talked about how the training mode is exactly the same or near that to what the VF5FS version was. Anything that didn't involve engine tweaks - such as the wacky dacky way the lobbies sound like they work - was probably able to be ported over nearly 1:1 and so long as it didn't actually break anything they were probably told to do exactly that. Even if the final results are kind of mind boggling. To be crystal clear: I'm 101% with you on this. But I can also totally see a scenario where they basically have exactly as much time and budget as was available to reskin the game and get it launched digitally. Maybe they have the ability/time/resources to come back and update some stuff like the lobby/player match setup. If nothing else, they need to know that should a VF6 happen they're going to need a better solution in place. No one should think that anyone is okay with another game launching with a Strive lobby. I say this as someone about to buy a 2nd copy of Strive.