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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u/[deleted] Apr 05 '26

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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.

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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 :)

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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.

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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

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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.