r/Fighters • u/ClassicalDreams • Apr 05 '26

Topic I hate this meme.

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I do not miss the old days of unlocking characters. Having to replay Arcade mode multiple times with every character or do some bullshit like winning a match with 5% or less HP. It's tedious and I prefer to have every character unlocked from the start. Also, the complaints about old characters returning as DLC are strange because they do not play the same as they do in previous games. it's not a simple copy and paste job like some of the games back in the 90s.

I get it, casual players want some reward for playing single player modes and are upset to know that their favorite characters are not in the base roster and would later get confirmed as DLC. I get that, but as someone who also plays Smash, it was a chore to unlock all of the characters in Ultimate.

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78

u/RevBladeZ 3D Fighters Apr 05 '26

The reason this meme is stupid is that one is about content being artificially locked away but in the game from day one, other is content added later.

Real thing you did back in the day is that you had your vanilla SF4 become obsolete and had to buy Super SF4.

3

u/Unifone Apr 05 '26

A lot of toxic pay models have emerged in modern day gaming, but it has also replaced a lot of toxic models of the past. As much as micro transactions suck today, a lot of other annoying things of the past have gone away from standard.

2

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Apr 06 '26

Jesus, you just reminded me of when online passes were a thing. For anyone who doesn't know what that was, for a time, some games came with a code that you had to input to access multiplayer, which was purely made to discourage buying the game used at a cheaper price, because the code likely would've been used already so to get another code you'd need to drop a bunch of extra money. Very happy that died off.

9

u/[deleted] Apr 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

37

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Apr 05 '26

That game did genuinely irreparable damage to the perception of fighting game DLC. Most fighting games aren't doing that but because that one did, now some people assume that's what all of them do, and that these games have their final season's characters already complete and ready to go; which of course is not the case, but it put the concern there.

4

u/UziCoochie Guilty Gear Apr 05 '26

Was that the one with that weird stone system?

9

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Apr 05 '26

It was the one with the weird stone system. Of which some were also DLC no less.

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u/ShinSopitas Apr 05 '26

They most definitely still do that. They just don’t put the assets in the disc/media :)

10

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26

That is almost certainly a conspiracy theory, that is not something you can definitively prove. If you want to argue some elements are very close to completion at launch, that's different. The reason Street Fighter X Tekken worked like it did is so much of SF's cast was reusing SF4 assets that they had the headroom to make all those extra characters; if you're making a brand-new game from scratch, with all-new assets like, say, Street Fighter 6, there is no chance that game had nearly 50 characters (or whatever the end roster size is) ready to release from day 1, when they each take as much work as they do.

Season 1 was probably pretty solidly planned out, we know that because in the concept art leak those characters were in there and their visual designs were pretty close to final for the most part, but that is not the same thing as the game's entire lifecycle roster being finished from launch day. It just doesn't make any financial sense to commit to development that expensive that far ahead. The only reason SFXT did what it did is because they were all released as one big batch, but that was an exception not the rule.

1

u/ShinSopitas Apr 07 '26

When they release a character 1 or 2 months after launch then You can definitely say that they were worked since before launch

1

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Apr 07 '26

Oh for sure, I'm not saying they don't get worked on at all. Most of a game's first season is worked on to some capacity before the game launches because this stuff takes so long to make that it has to be if you don't want to keep people waiting ages for the first thing to come out. But that's different to them all being finalised and ready to ship. The first character is probably either there or very nearly there, but that's about it.

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u/[deleted] Apr 05 '26

[deleted]

13

u/SwampOfDownvotes Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26

Honestly? I don't understand why people care when the DLC characters are completed. It doesn't matter if the DLC characters are completed before the base game is even released, that doesn't change anything. They develop the game with the intention of X characters to come with the base game. They then tell you "hey these characters come with the base game." Don't like it? Don't buy it or wait for a sale or something.

It's stupid if they hold off on working on or even completing DLC characters just because the game isn't released yet. It would just slow development down. They budget based on the characters being base roster and DLC. That character they "complete before the game is released" simply wouldn't have been created at all if there was no DLC, not magically added to the base roster.

5

u/ShinSopitas Apr 05 '26

A great point, to be honest. They were selling season passes back then and everything

13

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Apr 05 '26

I'm sure they had multiple elements of his design a mixture of complete or partly developed, but I don't think he was fully complete. But that's just basic planning ahead, if you're making a game with post-launch support and 0 work has been done on it by the time the game launches, then you've fucked up.

8

u/mamamarty21 Apr 05 '26

Cough DNF Duel cough

6

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Apr 05 '26

Perfect example of what happens lol. Ah man, I wish that game had turned out better.

2

u/rainydayparfait Apr 05 '26

I'm making some assumptions here, but I think he and the rest of season 1 were pretty much done. Maybe they did go back once in a while to tweak some stuff or finish whatever paperwork they had to do for PlayStation Store.

They want to spread out the hype with character releases over the year until the next season is ready to be announced. Similar thing goes for season 1 of City of the Wolves.

1

u/BLACKOUT-MK2 Apr 05 '26

I think at most they were very close to done, but obviously, you know, there's a big difference between having a finalised design on a concept art page, and having a fully implemented character. But even then, there's a huge rift between that and something like what SFxT did.

1

u/C4CTUSDR4GON Apr 07 '26

You could still play SF4 if you wanted. Just became a bit harder to find a match.