Social media is an integral part of our daily lives, and for good reason. Because of the social media boom over the past decade, our voices are louder than they’ve ever been before. Instead of sending well-thought-out hate mail to a developer over something you dislike, you could get on X and shout directly into their ear.
Of course, now that people can just tag the developer directly, suddenly everyone thinks they’re an expert in the genre. FPS games, MMO games, heck, even sports games have their own self-proclaimed experts that think just because they’ve sunk hundreds of hours into the game, they know everything that needs to be fixed. But this applies twice as much to fighting games.
Balancing Problems
Balancing in fighting games is a daunting task for a genre with dozens of characters at players' disposal. There are times when you would have an arguably perfect game like Tekken 7, where any character can win if piloted by a skilled player, but then there are games like Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, where, well…Vergil exists.
Back in the arcade days, this would have been a huge problem. Developers would switch out entire machines when they wanted to fix something broken in a game, in contrast to today, where they could just release hot-fixes as soon as they heard something was busted. But this gave rise to a completely different problem, because nowadays, Developers would give in to the overwhelming feedback of players and make ham-fisted balance changes.
To see what I mean, let’s take a look at the good and the bad side.
NetherRealm Studios
It would be an understatement to say that Mortal Kombat 1 left a lot to be desired. The first tag game of the modern series was ambitious and fun! But a lot of the player complaints led to NetherRealm Studios taking most of the problem characters out back and hitting them with the nerf hammer over and over again until they’re just a husk of their former glory. On the surface level, it seems like a great thing. Who would want an overpowered character in their fighting game, right? But these changes in the long term hurt the game to the point of no return.
A lot of backlash is warranted with an entry as ambitious as this. Many NRS players have gotten used to the 1v1, so adding in a tag system led to players having to rewire their brains. The knee-jerk reaction to this was that the game sucks, delete the game, delete this character, etc. But I firmly believe that if NetherRealm stood their ground and made more subtle changes that kept the game’s identity, we would have a much better game that didn’t get chopped at season 2.
But on the other side of the spectrum, we have Killer Instinct.
Iron Galaxy
Killer Instinct is a free-to-play fighting game released way back in 2013 and is personally one of the most enjoyable fighting games I’ve ever played. The hits were snappy, the music was booming, and the balance was, well, interesting!
Early on in the game’s lifespan, a lot of players were complaining about Jago, Killer Instinct’s cover character with hair as high as his win rate. The main problem with Jago was that his instinct had him healing with every hit while he combo’d you to death. It took a lot of effort to beat Jago and made him a pretty annoying character. For months, the community yelled for changes to Jago, pushing the creators of the game to put him on the chopping block and remove his healing entirely.
Instead of killing the character entirely, the dev team at Iron Galaxy took a look at the character’s kit. Healing in a fighting game has always been a controversial mechanic, the most notable offender being Elena from Street Fighter 4, but this was Jago’s whole identity as a character. If you took away Jago’s instinct gimmick, then he’d be left on the cutting floor with no unique identity.
Thankfully, this time, the devs didn’t straight up just put Jago through the guillotine and call it a day. Instead, they noticed that the problem wasn’t really about Jago’s healing, and that it was actually how quickly and easily Jago could turn on the offensive, which led to the healing. Jago had a fast approach move that left him safe and started his pressure, and after a few tweaks and changes to the range and frames of the move, the healing wasn’t much of a problem anymore.
In a different universe, if Killer Instinct’s balance team was controlled by the vocal majority of fighting game players, then Killer Instinct wouldn’t have lasted as long as it did. Of course, that doesn’t mean devs should shut their fans out completely, but it does mean that they should take a good, long look at their criticisms before making any hasty decisions.
This type of expert decision-making is exactly why I'm hopeful for upcoming games like Invincible Vs and 2XKO, because instead of just listening to their fans, they have an entire roster of Fighting Game experts who play and understand their game. Which, of course, is the bare minimum, and I sure hope someone tells that to the Tekken 8 Balance Team!
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