Riley Reviews
By Riley Fink
By Riley Fink
While everyone in the fighting game community is waiting painfully for Guilty Gear Strive after it’s release was delayed from April 9 to June 11, many including myself have taken the time to catch up on Dragon Ball FighterZ, or DBFZ.
The three vs. three tag team game has just finished its third, and assumedly final, DLC character pack, and the final character SS4 Gogeta has caused quite a stir among competitive players. After he was released on March 10, players realized he was unnecessarily powerful, seemingly intentionally.
Unfortunately for the competitive scene, this practice is quite common at the end of a fighting game’s lifespan. Since competitors have been playing and optimizing the game for years, boiling it down to the simplest strategies and and most consistent setups, developers use their last few balance patches and new characters trying to shake up the tournament scene. Popular examples include Elena in Street Fighter IV, Bayonetta in Smash Bros for Wii U, and Vergil in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. These characters usually have a pretty different gameplan from the rest of the cast, causing them to be frustrating to fight against and largely hated by the fanbase.
SS4 Gogeta’s whole toolkit is meant to be good, but the mechanic that most people are concerned about is his unique ability to level up his super moves over the course of a match, and that once he hits level 7, he’s granted access to a super that kills any one character on the opposing team regardless what combo leads into it. The interesting difference from other fighting games in this case is that DBFZ is already a crazy enough game that SS4 Gogeta probably won’t become the objective best character. The nature of three vs. three means that even a perfect character can’t carry a whole team, and when any well optimized team has access to enough resources they can already kill a character with one touch just like SS4 Gogeta, though usually with a much more difficult combo. The mechanic in question is best used with SS4 Gogeta acting as the final character on the team, but if you want to raise his level while not using him, you’ll have to sacrifice a valuable assist attack in order to give him a level up assist.
The methods of achieving fighting game balance has always been a hot button issue, and for the past decade or so balance has been a very high priority among most developers. This usually leads to characters getting less tools and becoming less interesting, homogenizing the roster to put every character on an equal playing field. However, in this online only era of the fighting game community with plenty of older games getting better online, lots of people have been discovering just how fun those games are despite their lack of balance patches and developer support.
Balance should always come after fun, and DBFZ is a great example of how to put in fun “broken” characters and still have your balance too. True balance in any game is impossible unless both players are playing the same character, so as a developer you might as well spend most of your money and time just making the game more fun. A character like SS4 Gogeta is usually a good thing for a game’s competitive scene even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface. It got me and many others to return to DBFZ, and the game’s systems ensure that he remains at least somewhat balanced while providing a good sendoff for the game with a final fun character.
The three vs. three tag team game has just finished its third, and assumedly final, DLC character pack, and the final character SS4 Gogeta has caused quite a stir among competitive players. After he was released on March 10, players realized he was unnecessarily powerful, seemingly intentionally.
Unfortunately for the competitive scene, this practice is quite common at the end of a fighting game’s lifespan. Since competitors have been playing and optimizing the game for years, boiling it down to the simplest strategies and and most consistent setups, developers use their last few balance patches and new characters trying to shake up the tournament scene. Popular examples include Elena in Street Fighter IV, Bayonetta in Smash Bros for Wii U, and Vergil in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3. These characters usually have a pretty different gameplan from the rest of the cast, causing them to be frustrating to fight against and largely hated by the fanbase.
SS4 Gogeta’s whole toolkit is meant to be good, but the mechanic that most people are concerned about is his unique ability to level up his super moves over the course of a match, and that once he hits level 7, he’s granted access to a super that kills any one character on the opposing team regardless what combo leads into it. The interesting difference from other fighting games in this case is that DBFZ is already a crazy enough game that SS4 Gogeta probably won’t become the objective best character. The nature of three vs. three means that even a perfect character can’t carry a whole team, and when any well optimized team has access to enough resources they can already kill a character with one touch just like SS4 Gogeta, though usually with a much more difficult combo. The mechanic in question is best used with SS4 Gogeta acting as the final character on the team, but if you want to raise his level while not using him, you’ll have to sacrifice a valuable assist attack in order to give him a level up assist.
The methods of achieving fighting game balance has always been a hot button issue, and for the past decade or so balance has been a very high priority among most developers. This usually leads to characters getting less tools and becoming less interesting, homogenizing the roster to put every character on an equal playing field. However, in this online only era of the fighting game community with plenty of older games getting better online, lots of people have been discovering just how fun those games are despite their lack of balance patches and developer support.
Balance should always come after fun, and DBFZ is a great example of how to put in fun “broken” characters and still have your balance too. True balance in any game is impossible unless both players are playing the same character, so as a developer you might as well spend most of your money and time just making the game more fun. A character like SS4 Gogeta is usually a good thing for a game’s competitive scene even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface. It got me and many others to return to DBFZ, and the game’s systems ensure that he remains at least somewhat balanced while providing a good sendoff for the game with a final fun character.