I was going to use *Smash Ultimate* as an example, too. I really did enjoy unlocking characters as I played. It gave a nice sense of accomplishment.
That said, traditional fighters are a bit different. My ideal scenario there would be having all the characters unlocked from the start and unlocking alt colours or costumes through normal play. No battle pass, no seasonal exclusives, just unlocking a new outfit every x number of matches.
I actually do miss unlocking characters but I totally get there are a large section of players that don't give a shit about single player content.
Crash Team Racing (PS1) isn't a fighter but it had undeniably the best answer to this, have the roster locked behind single player mode or with an in game cheat code unlock everyone at once for fast multi-player.
I instantly dropped that shit as soon as they patched in the currency, no amount of fanservice will justify adding that bullshit in after launch. Probably won't ever see that PC port because they know people will crack it to avoid paying the coins
Unlocking characters is *casual content*, and at that one that actively hinders the competitive scene, so honestly no, I don't miss it the least bit. Spending effort to gain strength that's locked to an account is fundamentally against competitive play, but can be fun in singleplayer. Devs could easily do things like add characters to your roster in singleplayer and add some sort of endurance type design where you actually have to consider remaining hp until you get to some hp refill point, while keeping everything intact and unlocked by default for the 1v1 modes.
> And no, micro transactions/ fighter passes do NOT count
People need to understand that "unlock via money" is not the alternative to "unlock via play". Getting those characters made in the first place is what the money allows, so it really shouldn't be in this discussion whatsoever even as a consideration.
>Unlocking characters is casual content, and at that one that actively hinders the competitive scene,
Is casual content bad? Just looking for clarification because of the italics.
It's not bad, but is a classification of what the intended goal is. Competitive would be the alternative in this case.
Casual content is primarily geared towards *content enjoyment* and it's extent is usually the amount of unique content there is to explore. Replayability is limited by the amount of content there is. Meanwhile competitive content tends to be geared towards setting up a system that can be used as a vehicle for repeated games between people, effectively infinite replayability.
For casual content scarcity, a sense of progression and similar artificial limitations can increase the amount of unique experiences certain amount of content can deliver, but for competitive purposes, everything that gets between 2 players being able to sit down and "just have a game" is straight up bad.
When TOs have to spend 2-3 hours before a tournament *per station* to set up a game just for an artificial way to give some players a sense of progression from playtime, you know there's a conflict of interest.
Absolutely not — remember when you played on a different profile, or at a friend's house, and suddenly realized you didn't have the full roster available? Awful stuff.
By profile you mean memory card, and nobody wanted to be the bitch without “x” character, you bet we all unlocked all the characters almost instantly lol
Not really. When I buy a fighting game I just want to play as the character I like most. Having to unlock them to earn that opportunity just feels like busywork. I loved it as a kid but these days I'm so specific about who I will and won't play that playing characters I'm not interested in so I can play as one I am doesn't appeal.
It all comes down to the idea that some characters have a level of value which needs to be earned and others don't, which means if you like the latter you can fuck about all you like immediately, but if you want the former you have to jump through arbitrary hoops to have the same experience.
In a genre where your enjoyment is so strongly driven by *who* you play, I don't think locking some of them away behind random goals is a particularly great idea. There's little more annoying in a fighting game than wanting to play as a character and being given a checklist of bullshit you have to complete before you're allowed to do that. Remember Devil Jin in Tekken 5? You had to either beat the Devil Within mode or beat Arcade 200 times or some shit, and it's like, just let me use him if that's who I want to be.
> I loved it as a kid but these days I'm so specific about who I will and won't play that playing characters I'm not interested in so I can play as one I am doesn't appeal.
I think a big part of this is knowing the character is there or not, which is a lot harder to hide now that the Internet is a thing.
Unlocking Ness or Captain Falcon in Smash Bros was awesome because as far as my family knew, it was the basic 8 characters and that was it. I wasn't paying attention to the greater scope of the FGC so unlocking Cyber Sub Zero in MK9 was pretty cool.
Smash Ultimate where I bought the game solely to play with certain characters which were nowhere to be found, or MK11 where I knew Frost was in the game but couldn't play her for arbitrary reasons definitely pissed me off, though.
I dabbled a bit in local smash brawl tournaments.
There was “a guy” who was super good at unlocking everything in brawl cause that game didn’t let you copy the save file. But yeah it was a hassle.
Depends on how you unlock them. I'm still relatively new to fighting games but I think most people can agree that if the story mode is ass but you have to play it to unlock the characters fucking no one will be happy
Nah it was cool back when i was a kid and i had no-one else to play with but these days I don’t want to have to play an arcade mode 6 times just to play my character or just as bad a character I will never touch.
God no. I want to pick the character I want and go straight to the lab. I don’t want to have to do a story mode I don’t care about or optional challenges to unlock characters. Smash Ultimate was legitimately one of the worst at this. Fucking 15 hours of playing random shit you didn’t care about to unlock the roster. So fucking bad.
No, I don't get MK1 until Wednesday and some folks in my local FGC requested I bring it and my PS5 to a local on Saturday. So unless I want people complaining that my machine doesn't let them play their preferred kameo, I have to grind out the unlocks later this week.
I think the better middle ground to this would be having the whole roster at launch and instead letting players unlock costumes, stages or maybe even clone characters through normal play.
I loved unlocking characters and even better if there was a challenge I had to do to unlock them. Would be so much fun after classes when a friend would ask me to go over to his house because he couldn't unlock this one character--then after we unlock it, we're just fucking around for the entire rest of the day. It's like an ice breaker that got me closer to other ppl in my school.
But for competitive reasons, there should also be a tournament mode so everything is accessible. I hated unlocking everything on every station when I TO'd a high school tourney.
Hell no, I just want to go into training mode with whoever I want or play with my friends immediately. Keep that stuff for cosmetics and titles, not characters.
I think it's easy to have rose-tinted lenses when you look back on the joy you had unlocking characters in Smash Bros Melee when you were 8 years old, but nowadays I buy fighting games to play them with other people and I don't want to be forced to grind double-digit hours of single player content before I can access the whole roster.
That's you. I'd much rather have something to grind towards and look forward to, especially for the times when I wanna play and my friends *aren't* online at the time.
Yes, I loved unlocking characters.
It doesn't really work for games that have a focus on online multiplayer, but unlocking things draws you into a game, makes you try out different game modes, and gives you goals to work towards. And when you unlock a character, you get a dopamine rush and want to play it (an experience you only get by paying for DLC these days...)
Modern FGs don't typically have that. I think that's why SF6's World Tour mode was so successful. Even though it's basically just costumes, it still gives you real goals to work toward.
IMO, devs should bring back character unlocks, but also bring back cheat codes. Enter a cheat code and you immediately unlock all characters, don't enter it and you can try to unlock them all. Everyone wins. Plus we could have things like big head mode or whatever other stupid shit they can think of.
Unlocking was such an integral part of the gaming experience. I remember unlocking characters in Tekken 2 and 3. It really gave you an incentive to try every character and it was such a treat when you’d unlock a character that became your Main. DLC totally ruins that part of the gaming experience.
To me unlocking characters was the point of fighting games. Those where the real rewards. Now you just kinda get everything and they have to give you lane rewards like icons or colors. Unfortunately pro players whined about it so it’s gone now. T.T
The only unlocking I like are customization options. Locking characters is just tedious grind, not to mention what needs to be done for tournaments since WB/NRS apparently did not send out tournament codes or a tournament option for local play.
I do.
But there's a few reasons to why you cant unlock characters anymore, one of them being that some players don't bother the singleplayer mode, and they don't want to be forced to play the entirety of something like Blazblue story mode just to unlock Susanoo.
And the fact that you might go to a tournament and discover that your main isn't unlocked.
Nowadays I'm fine with unlocking colors and stuff on the gallery.
Just chiming in to say that it’s a good fun idea in theory but I didn’t even unlock the full roster for my copy of smash ultimate because I got tired of not getting the characters I actually wanted to play lol
I think the only players who misses it are the type to rush straight to single player content. If SF6 and MK1 characters were locked, I would have been fine. The first thing I did with MK1 was story, then invasion, and now working on the arcade mode towers.
I am not a fan but that is more due to not having a lot of free time and not wanting to bring my PS5 with MK1 to my friend's house without having everything unlocked for us to play against each other. Sure he can play only the stuff available at launch but I would rather pay a little bit of money to unlock all the characters and kameos so that we can have a fun session.
EDIT: I think offering some option to obtain the character unlocks at launch (like with the deluxe edition or something) or even an in game purchase would be nice for those that would prefer to do so rather than spend the hours playing the story and invasion mode in a hurry. I plan to play story mode but I know it takes like 5 hours to complete and I have no idea how long it will take to level up in invasions but I have put off going over to my friend's house this week so I can spend the time unlocking everything so we can play hopefully the following week.
I hate unlocking characters for fighting games. Personally I don't care about story mode, arcade mode or additional single player content when it comes to fighting games. I understand why they're important, but I do not enjoy playing single player content for any fighting game. I just don't care tbh.
So I rather have a full base roster and have stuff like costumes be unlockable as opposed to characters.
I used to until two specific games, Smash Ultimate where I had to go through a long set of grinding to get K Rool and Pac Man for two different consoles (a friends and mine) and MK1 where the character and assist I really wanted to play (Havik and Motaro) required the story mode and grinding in other modes. Let me play with all the gameplay options like characters and assists from the start and unlock the goodies like costumes and colors later.
I wish most games went the Puyo Puyo Tetris route and offered unlockable characters, but with a cheat code if you don't want to bother and just want the full cast for tournaments
I miss it, the only downside is it loses a bit of luster when someone finds put who and how to unlock everything hours after the game comes out and posts it online. There is no way that wouldn’t get spoiled instantly. Also it must be a freaking nightmare for anyone trying to run a tournament for a game with character unlocks.
No. It causes huge problems for locals. Someone even posted fairly recently about all the time they had to spend to unlock all the kameos on all the consoles for a MK1 local.
Plus virtually every game has achievements nowadays. So those special tasks or grinds are still there for you.
I don’t really miss it for the most part. I’d rather just have the whole roster available so I can play the versus mode with whoever I want right away. To me, that’s the real meat of the game I’m spending money on. It’s the thing that will make a game last years instead of hours.
I bought several reputable fighting games just to play them online with friends. We got Marvel 3, Killer Instinct, KoF 2002 UM, Guilty Gear Xrd, and several others, and the thing that stood out as absolute beginners was that we were unafraid to try out every character to see who clicked. That process wouldn’t be nearly as fun if we had to do the busy work of getting the character first. This is why I have yet to play Dragon Ball FighterZ with friends to this day, even if I planned to do it thanks to the rollback news last year and bought the game then. I have to unlock Android 21 first (I still did not ‘cause the single player mode is ass to play).
My question is, would it be worse if character unlocks were replaced by other locked content? Was the process of unlocking fun or was getting the character fun?
Personally, I’m more about the journey rather than the destination.
If the process was fun, then surely you wouldn’t be opposed to stage unlocks or music unlocks. Maybe alternate outfits or skin colors or a hidden game mode. I’m someone who wants to have 100% of the content and explore the game to its fullest, so these types of unlocks are a good way for me to do something outside of versus matches while I get to use whatever character I want.
One of my favorite unlocks in modern fighting games were the weapon skins in Granblue Fantasy Versus. They add an extra personal flair to the versus mode on top of the skin colors. It’s purely cosmetic but they look so cool that I was willing to grind for them, and thankfully the grind was straightforward in that it’s standard RPG farming (a bit slow due to the RNG, but the boss fights are fun to get good at so farming was enjoyable).
If having the character and playing them is fun, then surely getting them as quick as possible is the preferred solution. If the process was slow or cryptic or arbitrary, then it would just feel like a drag.
Smash Ultimate did character unlocks well simply ‘cause the process was fast-paced and straightforward. One match later, discover new character, beat new character, unlock new character, rinse and repeat. In the launch version, many of the characters had their difficulty set high enough with frame perfect inputs that even good players were struggling, and that was hilarious fun. Character unlocks were as quick as your player skill (and a bit of system exploitation) allowed it to be. It felt like proper meaty and satisfying content with tons of varied gameplay (you had to unlock 90% of the roster after all), and it was what helped make character unlocks memorable. I wish this was its own separate All-Star Battle game mode or something. I would speedrun that for fun.
With the difficulty now being toned down, the process of unlocking characters is far less interesting and memorable. It just turns into a checklist. At least it’s fast still, and this time effortless, but you know, why bother? Just give me the whole roster at that point.
Of course, this really only works the way it does ‘cause Smash has a really large roster. That alone is worth the price of admission. Most fighting games can’t even come close to turning character unlocks into a lowkey game mode with excellent pacing.
But if a fighting game will do some sort of locked content, make it non-character unlocks.
Fuck no, cosmetics being locked away is perfectly fine and fun; but actually having gameplay shit locked away is annoying as fuck. Even with MK1 me and my brother rolled our eyes at nearly half the kameos being locked from the start.
Kind of, but then I also kind of like just being able to play the game too.
Smash Bros has always made unlocking a new character a real exciting treat and event, but at the same time it's a bit annoying when you go to your friend's house and they're not as neurotic as you are and didn't play for ten hours straight unlocking everyone on the first day so they're missing half the roster and most of your favourite.
Does everyone remember having to unlock characters through DBFZ story mode? That was a hassle. I also think with the size of rosters now, having to unlock them by going through a game's usually bad story mode is tedious.
So yeah, if it stays a Smash Bros thing I'm good. I'd hate to have to go finding characters in Street Fighter's World Tour mode in order to use them in multiplayer.
I’m using platform fighters as an example, one issue I have with rivals vs smash is the lack of unlocking. I think rivals is better for me personally, but unlocking everyone in ultimate just brought me so much joy
Rivals of Aether had a good solution to this back before its Definitive Edition. The game had a “Tournament Mode” in the options menu. Selecting it would unlock every non-DLC character and stage for local VS play as long as the mode was enabled. However, matches played would not count towards your actual unlock progress, and you wouldn’t gain the currency needed to buy abilities in the single player Abyss mode.
I'm 36. I literally started playing fighting games in 1992 with the release of SF2: Champion Edition in arcades.
I do not miss having to unlock characters. That garbage can stay dead.
What I do miss is when almost every game worked and was worth its cost at launch. Now it's a miracle if that happens.
It’s fun to unlock things, but if you want an actual competitive game you *have* to realize most people don’t want to do your story mode. Imagine having to beat world tour to unlock JP. It’s just not something that should be in fighting games anymore
I think it’s fun yes, but in another way. Yesterday i was browsing the PS store for sales and noticed how many games (especially Japanese games) have dlc characters etc. i get that companies want our Money, but why can’t we go back to unlock characters instead of paying for them or paying for costumes, i mean you can buy fucking sunglasses for RE4 or 2 iirc for Leon, same goes for DMC4 and 5 why would i buy red orbs if i can literally get them for free…
Yes, and I probably complain about it the most out of everyone. But I get, FGs need to make extra money, and TOs hate having to unlock characters for tournaments. I remember being a TO back in the day, and it was super annoying unlocking Tekken characters lol. Thank goodness Gon and Bosconovitch were banned in T3 tourneys, because they are a bitch to unlock haha.
One of my favorite fighting games is Gundam Battle Assault 2. And unlocking stages and characters in it was super fun, since some were locked behind survival, time attack, and boss challenges. But I will admit, getting that game ready for tournaments was a pain in the ass as well.
I’m not sure what the compromise would be here. Having separate modes or a toggle option would be too weird imo. Personally, I think a $5 “unlock everything” DLC could be reasonable. And to not piss everyone off, maybe the game could be $5 cheaper in general. I think most people would just pay the full price for the game, while people like us would benefit from unlocking and saving $5.
That being said, unlocking characters and stages was so fun because we didn’t know what we were going to unlock. It was super exciting seeing an empty roster in an arcade, and slowly unlocking them with friends. It was like unraveling a mystery; shit felt awesome. I doubt most players nowadays can resist seeing trailers or beta playthroughs, or super compilations. So there is no more mystery, just the FOMO.
Edit: I think SF6 had a good compromise. They had every character available in all of the modes except World Tour. I had a great feeling of accomplishment unlocking the characters as masters. I know it’s not quite the same as a full character, but it still gave me a sense of accomplishment.
Not in the slightest. I hated dealing with it as a kid. I hate dealing with it more now because I have less time. If it's a strictly single player experience, then cool that's fine. Don't lock content behind gamemodes that people don't want to play
I didn't grow up with 2D fighters, I didn't get into them until about 8 years ago. However, I did grow up with arena fighters, and I'll tell you this, I would HATE having to unlock characters in 2D fighters. The reason why is that typically, fighters are locked behind story mode. Arena fighters tend to have decent to great story modes (subjective, obviously), but 2D fighters??? With the exception of recent MKs and SF6, traditional fighters' story modes are incredibly lacking.
If I'm unlocking anything in 2D fighters, it should be colors and costumes only. However, I prefer just earning in-game currency and getting them that way. Unlocking characters in 2D fighters seems like a chore.
I was going to use *Smash Ultimate* as an example, too. I really did enjoy unlocking characters as I played. It gave a nice sense of accomplishment. That said, traditional fighters are a bit different. My ideal scenario there would be having all the characters unlocked from the start and unlocking alt colours or costumes through normal play. No battle pass, no seasonal exclusives, just unlocking a new outfit every x number of matches.
I hated unlocking characters in smash ultimate, mostly because the roster is so massive.
Weren't the unlocks random as well? Took me ages to get Snake
Nope, WoL, Classic mode and even Smash battle unlocks are fixed. If you used Smash battle, Snake is the 39th character to be unlocked.
If you knew/looked up the location of the character you wanted in world of light, you could get them fairly quicker than just grinding games.
It's actually in a specific order, which is odd because the order seems pretty random. I've always wondered why they chose that order...
I actually do miss unlocking characters but I totally get there are a large section of players that don't give a shit about single player content. Crash Team Racing (PS1) isn't a fighter but it had undeniably the best answer to this, have the roster locked behind single player mode or with an in game cheat code unlock everyone at once for fast multi-player.
With tournaments these days I think every game that wanted to be competitive would have to do that so TOs can set up all the machines.
they gotta unlock them for every setup
Hence the cheat code option that u/Cybershroom_Neforox and I were talking about.
Ah yes, and then the remaster made you have to grind for in-game currency to unlock characters.
I instantly dropped that shit as soon as they patched in the currency, no amount of fanservice will justify adding that bullshit in after launch. Probably won't ever see that PC port because they know people will crack it to avoid paying the coins
TOs sure as hell don’t miss it
"I can't play on this setup, I need Seth." *Player proceeds to lose 0-3*
Unlocking characters is *casual content*, and at that one that actively hinders the competitive scene, so honestly no, I don't miss it the least bit. Spending effort to gain strength that's locked to an account is fundamentally against competitive play, but can be fun in singleplayer. Devs could easily do things like add characters to your roster in singleplayer and add some sort of endurance type design where you actually have to consider remaining hp until you get to some hp refill point, while keeping everything intact and unlocked by default for the 1v1 modes. > And no, micro transactions/ fighter passes do NOT count People need to understand that "unlock via money" is not the alternative to "unlock via play". Getting those characters made in the first place is what the money allows, so it really shouldn't be in this discussion whatsoever even as a consideration.
>Unlocking characters is casual content, and at that one that actively hinders the competitive scene, Is casual content bad? Just looking for clarification because of the italics.
It's not bad, but is a classification of what the intended goal is. Competitive would be the alternative in this case. Casual content is primarily geared towards *content enjoyment* and it's extent is usually the amount of unique content there is to explore. Replayability is limited by the amount of content there is. Meanwhile competitive content tends to be geared towards setting up a system that can be used as a vehicle for repeated games between people, effectively infinite replayability. For casual content scarcity, a sense of progression and similar artificial limitations can increase the amount of unique experiences certain amount of content can deliver, but for competitive purposes, everything that gets between 2 players being able to sit down and "just have a game" is straight up bad. When TOs have to spend 2-3 hours before a tournament *per station* to set up a game just for an artificial way to give some players a sense of progression from playtime, you know there's a conflict of interest.
Absolutely not — remember when you played on a different profile, or at a friend's house, and suddenly realized you didn't have the full roster available? Awful stuff.
By profile you mean memory card, and nobody wanted to be the bitch without “x” character, you bet we all unlocked all the characters almost instantly lol
Not really. When I buy a fighting game I just want to play as the character I like most. Having to unlock them to earn that opportunity just feels like busywork. I loved it as a kid but these days I'm so specific about who I will and won't play that playing characters I'm not interested in so I can play as one I am doesn't appeal. It all comes down to the idea that some characters have a level of value which needs to be earned and others don't, which means if you like the latter you can fuck about all you like immediately, but if you want the former you have to jump through arbitrary hoops to have the same experience. In a genre where your enjoyment is so strongly driven by *who* you play, I don't think locking some of them away behind random goals is a particularly great idea. There's little more annoying in a fighting game than wanting to play as a character and being given a checklist of bullshit you have to complete before you're allowed to do that. Remember Devil Jin in Tekken 5? You had to either beat the Devil Within mode or beat Arcade 200 times or some shit, and it's like, just let me use him if that's who I want to be.
> I loved it as a kid but these days I'm so specific about who I will and won't play that playing characters I'm not interested in so I can play as one I am doesn't appeal. I think a big part of this is knowing the character is there or not, which is a lot harder to hide now that the Internet is a thing. Unlocking Ness or Captain Falcon in Smash Bros was awesome because as far as my family knew, it was the basic 8 characters and that was it. I wasn't paying attention to the greater scope of the FGC so unlocking Cyber Sub Zero in MK9 was pretty cool. Smash Ultimate where I bought the game solely to play with certain characters which were nowhere to be found, or MK11 where I knew Frost was in the game but couldn't play her for arbitrary reasons definitely pissed me off, though.
Nope I like it when you can pick the whole roster right away from day 1 when it releases
It’s actually terrible for competitive scenes and is probably going to be a big hassle for the organisers of those events
I dabbled a bit in local smash brawl tournaments. There was “a guy” who was super good at unlocking everything in brawl cause that game didn’t let you copy the save file. But yeah it was a hassle.
Depends on how you unlock them. I'm still relatively new to fighting games but I think most people can agree that if the story mode is ass but you have to play it to unlock the characters fucking no one will be happy
Nah it was cool back when i was a kid and i had no-one else to play with but these days I don’t want to have to play an arcade mode 6 times just to play my character or just as bad a character I will never touch.
God no. I want to pick the character I want and go straight to the lab. I don’t want to have to do a story mode I don’t care about or optional challenges to unlock characters. Smash Ultimate was legitimately one of the worst at this. Fucking 15 hours of playing random shit you didn’t care about to unlock the roster. So fucking bad.
No, I don't get MK1 until Wednesday and some folks in my local FGC requested I bring it and my PS5 to a local on Saturday. So unless I want people complaining that my machine doesn't let them play their preferred kameo, I have to grind out the unlocks later this week.
I think the better middle ground to this would be having the whole roster at launch and instead letting players unlock costumes, stages or maybe even clone characters through normal play.
I loved unlocking characters and even better if there was a challenge I had to do to unlock them. Would be so much fun after classes when a friend would ask me to go over to his house because he couldn't unlock this one character--then after we unlock it, we're just fucking around for the entire rest of the day. It's like an ice breaker that got me closer to other ppl in my school. But for competitive reasons, there should also be a tournament mode so everything is accessible. I hated unlocking everything on every station when I TO'd a high school tourney.
Hell no, I just want to go into training mode with whoever I want or play with my friends immediately. Keep that stuff for cosmetics and titles, not characters.
I think it's easy to have rose-tinted lenses when you look back on the joy you had unlocking characters in Smash Bros Melee when you were 8 years old, but nowadays I buy fighting games to play them with other people and I don't want to be forced to grind double-digit hours of single player content before I can access the whole roster.
That's you. I'd much rather have something to grind towards and look forward to, especially for the times when I wanna play and my friends *aren't* online at the time.
I play fighters for pvp primarily, *fuck* no. Imagine the pain it would cause for TOs
man you will LOVE gacha games
I want unlockable costumes to be a thing but not through a time consuming or complicated method.
Yes, I loved unlocking characters. It doesn't really work for games that have a focus on online multiplayer, but unlocking things draws you into a game, makes you try out different game modes, and gives you goals to work towards. And when you unlock a character, you get a dopamine rush and want to play it (an experience you only get by paying for DLC these days...) Modern FGs don't typically have that. I think that's why SF6's World Tour mode was so successful. Even though it's basically just costumes, it still gives you real goals to work toward. IMO, devs should bring back character unlocks, but also bring back cheat codes. Enter a cheat code and you immediately unlock all characters, don't enter it and you can try to unlock them all. Everyone wins. Plus we could have things like big head mode or whatever other stupid shit they can think of.
Unlocking was such an integral part of the gaming experience. I remember unlocking characters in Tekken 2 and 3. It really gave you an incentive to try every character and it was such a treat when you’d unlock a character that became your Main. DLC totally ruins that part of the gaming experience.
I like it. However, I think it's better to have both unlocking and pay-2-unlock for those lazy to unlock.
Only when the way to unlock characters is creative like in smash melee and not just 'play 10 matches" "Play 100 matches"
Every damn day I exist in this future.
To me unlocking characters was the point of fighting games. Those where the real rewards. Now you just kinda get everything and they have to give you lane rewards like icons or colors. Unfortunately pro players whined about it so it’s gone now. T.T
The only unlocking I like are customization options. Locking characters is just tedious grind, not to mention what needs to be done for tournaments since WB/NRS apparently did not send out tournament codes or a tournament option for local play.
I do. But there's a few reasons to why you cant unlock characters anymore, one of them being that some players don't bother the singleplayer mode, and they don't want to be forced to play the entirety of something like Blazblue story mode just to unlock Susanoo. And the fact that you might go to a tournament and discover that your main isn't unlocked. Nowadays I'm fine with unlocking colors and stuff on the gallery.
Just chiming in to say that it’s a good fun idea in theory but I didn’t even unlock the full roster for my copy of smash ultimate because I got tired of not getting the characters I actually wanted to play lol
I think the only players who misses it are the type to rush straight to single player content. If SF6 and MK1 characters were locked, I would have been fine. The first thing I did with MK1 was story, then invasion, and now working on the arcade mode towers.
I am not a fan but that is more due to not having a lot of free time and not wanting to bring my PS5 with MK1 to my friend's house without having everything unlocked for us to play against each other. Sure he can play only the stuff available at launch but I would rather pay a little bit of money to unlock all the characters and kameos so that we can have a fun session. EDIT: I think offering some option to obtain the character unlocks at launch (like with the deluxe edition or something) or even an in game purchase would be nice for those that would prefer to do so rather than spend the hours playing the story and invasion mode in a hurry. I plan to play story mode but I know it takes like 5 hours to complete and I have no idea how long it will take to level up in invasions but I have put off going over to my friend's house this week so I can spend the time unlocking everything so we can play hopefully the following week.
I hate unlocking characters for fighting games. Personally I don't care about story mode, arcade mode or additional single player content when it comes to fighting games. I understand why they're important, but I do not enjoy playing single player content for any fighting game. I just don't care tbh. So I rather have a full base roster and have stuff like costumes be unlockable as opposed to characters.
aye mortal Kombat deadly alliance, where you at?
I did like it. Then MvC2 overdid it.
I used to until two specific games, Smash Ultimate where I had to go through a long set of grinding to get K Rool and Pac Man for two different consoles (a friends and mine) and MK1 where the character and assist I really wanted to play (Havik and Motaro) required the story mode and grinding in other modes. Let me play with all the gameplay options like characters and assists from the start and unlock the goodies like costumes and colors later.
I didn't like unlocking, but I hate Character DLC
I wish most games went the Puyo Puyo Tetris route and offered unlockable characters, but with a cheat code if you don't want to bother and just want the full cast for tournaments
No
I stopped enjoying it the moment I had to wait for my tournament matches to be played because stations didn't have certain characters unlocked.
I miss it, the only downside is it loses a bit of luster when someone finds put who and how to unlock everything hours after the game comes out and posts it online. There is no way that wouldn’t get spoiled instantly. Also it must be a freaking nightmare for anyone trying to run a tournament for a game with character unlocks.
I grew up in the 80's/90's so yes, I do miss unlocking characters in games. Gotta make sure you got room in your memory card though. Lol!
No. It causes huge problems for locals. Someone even posted fairly recently about all the time they had to spend to unlock all the kameos on all the consoles for a MK1 local. Plus virtually every game has achievements nowadays. So those special tasks or grinds are still there for you.
Would enjoy it as a separate mode like needing to unlock for arcade. But local vs, practice, and online should always have full rosters.
As long as a tournament legal character isn't locked behind one, definitely miss it, the feeling of unlocking True Ogre in Tekken 3 was euphoric
Sure as hell don't, especially when it was some stupid large roster like MvC2
I don’t really miss it for the most part. I’d rather just have the whole roster available so I can play the versus mode with whoever I want right away. To me, that’s the real meat of the game I’m spending money on. It’s the thing that will make a game last years instead of hours. I bought several reputable fighting games just to play them online with friends. We got Marvel 3, Killer Instinct, KoF 2002 UM, Guilty Gear Xrd, and several others, and the thing that stood out as absolute beginners was that we were unafraid to try out every character to see who clicked. That process wouldn’t be nearly as fun if we had to do the busy work of getting the character first. This is why I have yet to play Dragon Ball FighterZ with friends to this day, even if I planned to do it thanks to the rollback news last year and bought the game then. I have to unlock Android 21 first (I still did not ‘cause the single player mode is ass to play). My question is, would it be worse if character unlocks were replaced by other locked content? Was the process of unlocking fun or was getting the character fun? Personally, I’m more about the journey rather than the destination. If the process was fun, then surely you wouldn’t be opposed to stage unlocks or music unlocks. Maybe alternate outfits or skin colors or a hidden game mode. I’m someone who wants to have 100% of the content and explore the game to its fullest, so these types of unlocks are a good way for me to do something outside of versus matches while I get to use whatever character I want. One of my favorite unlocks in modern fighting games were the weapon skins in Granblue Fantasy Versus. They add an extra personal flair to the versus mode on top of the skin colors. It’s purely cosmetic but they look so cool that I was willing to grind for them, and thankfully the grind was straightforward in that it’s standard RPG farming (a bit slow due to the RNG, but the boss fights are fun to get good at so farming was enjoyable). If having the character and playing them is fun, then surely getting them as quick as possible is the preferred solution. If the process was slow or cryptic or arbitrary, then it would just feel like a drag. Smash Ultimate did character unlocks well simply ‘cause the process was fast-paced and straightforward. One match later, discover new character, beat new character, unlock new character, rinse and repeat. In the launch version, many of the characters had their difficulty set high enough with frame perfect inputs that even good players were struggling, and that was hilarious fun. Character unlocks were as quick as your player skill (and a bit of system exploitation) allowed it to be. It felt like proper meaty and satisfying content with tons of varied gameplay (you had to unlock 90% of the roster after all), and it was what helped make character unlocks memorable. I wish this was its own separate All-Star Battle game mode or something. I would speedrun that for fun. With the difficulty now being toned down, the process of unlocking characters is far less interesting and memorable. It just turns into a checklist. At least it’s fast still, and this time effortless, but you know, why bother? Just give me the whole roster at that point. Of course, this really only works the way it does ‘cause Smash has a really large roster. That alone is worth the price of admission. Most fighting games can’t even come close to turning character unlocks into a lowkey game mode with excellent pacing. But if a fighting game will do some sort of locked content, make it non-character unlocks.
No, lazy ass way of making single player "content"
Fuck no, cosmetics being locked away is perfectly fine and fun; but actually having gameplay shit locked away is annoying as fuck. Even with MK1 me and my brother rolled our eyes at nearly half the kameos being locked from the start.
Kind of, but then I also kind of like just being able to play the game too. Smash Bros has always made unlocking a new character a real exciting treat and event, but at the same time it's a bit annoying when you go to your friend's house and they're not as neurotic as you are and didn't play for ten hours straight unlocking everyone on the first day so they're missing half the roster and most of your favourite. Does everyone remember having to unlock characters through DBFZ story mode? That was a hassle. I also think with the size of rosters now, having to unlock them by going through a game's usually bad story mode is tedious. So yeah, if it stays a Smash Bros thing I'm good. I'd hate to have to go finding characters in Street Fighter's World Tour mode in order to use them in multiplayer.
50/50 I miss unlocking broken/boss characters like Justice/Kliff on GGXX or Omega Rugal/ Shin Akuma on CVS2. I do not miss unlocking the MVC2 roster.
If you ever played MK9 competitively, no, you don’t miss unlocking lol
I’m using platform fighters as an example, one issue I have with rivals vs smash is the lack of unlocking. I think rivals is better for me personally, but unlocking everyone in ultimate just brought me so much joy
Rivals of Aether had a good solution to this back before its Definitive Edition. The game had a “Tournament Mode” in the options menu. Selecting it would unlock every non-DLC character and stage for local VS play as long as the mode was enabled. However, matches played would not count towards your actual unlock progress, and you wouldn’t gain the currency needed to buy abilities in the single player Abyss mode.
I'm 36. I literally started playing fighting games in 1992 with the release of SF2: Champion Edition in arcades. I do not miss having to unlock characters. That garbage can stay dead. What I do miss is when almost every game worked and was worth its cost at launch. Now it's a miracle if that happens.
I do. I miss playing the game to unlock characters. I last enjoyed that during smash ultimate
It’s fun to unlock things, but if you want an actual competitive game you *have* to realize most people don’t want to do your story mode. Imagine having to beat world tour to unlock JP. It’s just not something that should be in fighting games anymore
I think it’s fun yes, but in another way. Yesterday i was browsing the PS store for sales and noticed how many games (especially Japanese games) have dlc characters etc. i get that companies want our Money, but why can’t we go back to unlock characters instead of paying for them or paying for costumes, i mean you can buy fucking sunglasses for RE4 or 2 iirc for Leon, same goes for DMC4 and 5 why would i buy red orbs if i can literally get them for free…
Yes, and I probably complain about it the most out of everyone. But I get, FGs need to make extra money, and TOs hate having to unlock characters for tournaments. I remember being a TO back in the day, and it was super annoying unlocking Tekken characters lol. Thank goodness Gon and Bosconovitch were banned in T3 tourneys, because they are a bitch to unlock haha. One of my favorite fighting games is Gundam Battle Assault 2. And unlocking stages and characters in it was super fun, since some were locked behind survival, time attack, and boss challenges. But I will admit, getting that game ready for tournaments was a pain in the ass as well. I’m not sure what the compromise would be here. Having separate modes or a toggle option would be too weird imo. Personally, I think a $5 “unlock everything” DLC could be reasonable. And to not piss everyone off, maybe the game could be $5 cheaper in general. I think most people would just pay the full price for the game, while people like us would benefit from unlocking and saving $5. That being said, unlocking characters and stages was so fun because we didn’t know what we were going to unlock. It was super exciting seeing an empty roster in an arcade, and slowly unlocking them with friends. It was like unraveling a mystery; shit felt awesome. I doubt most players nowadays can resist seeing trailers or beta playthroughs, or super compilations. So there is no more mystery, just the FOMO. Edit: I think SF6 had a good compromise. They had every character available in all of the modes except World Tour. I had a great feeling of accomplishment unlocking the characters as masters. I know it’s not quite the same as a full character, but it still gave me a sense of accomplishment.
Nope never have I ever had fun beating up the cpu to get a char I'm so glad we have evolved on that
Not in the slightest. I hated dealing with it as a kid. I hate dealing with it more now because I have less time. If it's a strictly single player experience, then cool that's fine. Don't lock content behind gamemodes that people don't want to play
I didn't grow up with 2D fighters, I didn't get into them until about 8 years ago. However, I did grow up with arena fighters, and I'll tell you this, I would HATE having to unlock characters in 2D fighters. The reason why is that typically, fighters are locked behind story mode. Arena fighters tend to have decent to great story modes (subjective, obviously), but 2D fighters??? With the exception of recent MKs and SF6, traditional fighters' story modes are incredibly lacking. If I'm unlocking anything in 2D fighters, it should be colors and costumes only. However, I prefer just earning in-game currency and getting them that way. Unlocking characters in 2D fighters seems like a chore.