The Virtua not Virtual Fighter Thread

[BornWinner]

Sega says “Play our new Virtua Fighter remaster or its going the way of the Darkstalkers.”.

 

 

[KingTubb]

1 hour ago, BornWinner said:

Sega says “Play our new Virtua Fighter remaster or its going the way of the Darkstalkers.”

[GetTheTables]

The classic ransom technique for one of these releases.

 

Not being a dick: has that ever actually worked? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head but I also don't know that I have followed every instance of it close enough to know.

 

Regardless hopefully PS+ gives this the push it needs. We need more 3D fighters out there. That space is looking weirdly grim right now.

[Darc_Requiem]

I know @EvilCanadianmentioned this, but my biggest disappointment is with the customization. For example, you used to be able to give Vanessa her VF4 skin tone. VF5US is pretty barebones.

[KingTubb]

2 minutes ago, Darc_Requiem said:

but my biggest disappointment is with the customization

Have you tried to play a friend yet??

 

Cause you can't. You have to search for them like a kid lost in a Food Lion. You can't search lobby names, player names, nothing. It's baffling that a game release in 2021 makes it that hard to play with a friend. 

 

Netcode is surprisingly decent. I haven't had an unplayable connection thus far. Some stutters every once and awhile, but all and all pretty solid. 

[GetTheTables]

In fairness this is a re-release of an old ass game that they clearly didn't do a lot of work with. Wouldn't shock me if all of that was the same or nearly so in the last release.

 

In negative fairness yeah they really should have done more than nothing to update that. As Strive has shown us recently the worst thing a FG can do is make it hard to actually play the people you want (or anyone at all in the case of GD duel station errors). 

[Darc_Requiem]

7 minutes ago, KingTubb said:

Have you tried to play a friend yet??

 

Cause you can't. You have to search for them like a kid lost in a Food Lion. You can't search lobby names, player names, nothing. It's baffling that a game release in 2021 makes it that hard to play with a friend. 

Dubya Tee Eff....seriously. I haven't tried to play friends yet. WTF is this shit man.

[BornWinner]

19 minutes ago, GetTheTables said:

Not being a dick: has that ever actually worked? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head but I also don't know that I have followed every instance of it close enough to know.

 

If I recall, The World Ends with You had a situation like this. And now it’s getting a sequel soon. Fire Emblem as well because FE Awakening would have been the last in the series if it didn’t sell.

 

37 minutes ago, Darc_Requiem said:

I know @EvilCanadianmentioned this, but my biggest disappointment is with the customization. For example, you used to be able to give Vanessa her VF4 skin tone. VF5US is pretty barebones.

 

I wouldn’t be surprised that if they separated all of that in packs. People for years have been saying how great VF5’s customs were. So why not put in it 10 dollar packs so they can buy it all the good stuff back?

[KingTubb]

1 hour ago, GetTheTables said:

this is a re-release of an old ass game that they clearly didn't do a lot of work with.

But it kinda isn’t? It was a full rebuild in a new engine, so they put in some serious work. 
 

until it came to a menu and a search bar. Wild. 

[GetTheTables]

1 hour ago, BornWinner said:

If I recall, The World Ends with You had a situation like this. And now it’s getting a sequel soon. Fire Emblem as well because FE Awakening would have been the last in the series if it didn’t sell.

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.

17 minutes ago, KingTubb said:

But it kinda isn’t? It was a full rebuild in a new engine, so they put in some serious work. 
 

until it came to a menu and a search bar. Wild. 

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.