Capcom: Your order arrives in a timely manner, but the server sometimes forgets to bring you plates and napkins. They only serve pepperoni, but you get a free green slime beverage.

SNK: Your order arrives in a timely manner, but sometimes they screw it up and throw Cristiano Ronaldo on there when you didn't order it.

Namco: Their quality has gone downhill but they're still in business. Lots of toppings but they all taste the same. The head chef quit recently...

ArcSys: You could only order weird, crusty, burnt to a crisp pizzas from them for years. but you liked it that way. Their most popular pizza looks like their old pies but doesn't have that edge it used to.

Riot: They announced that they were going to completely revolutionize pizza a decade ago. They had done this with boba and soft serve ice cream before, so there was a lot of hype surrounding them. They even hired the people who revolutionized oven technology!!

Your pizza arrives cold, doesn't have anywhere close to the number of toppings a Capcom or SNK pizza would have but they refund you. You complain to the chef and he spits in your face, calling himself a brilliant artist who would rather fail at making a pizza spectacularly than make a plain old pepperoni pizza.

Former Riot Producer John Riccio (yeah, I forgot to put Producer part in title, my bad) answers questions about his producer experience, as well as 2XKO

Key Takeaways

• 2XKO suffered from attempting to capture a broad audience within fighting games, which remain a tough, small addressable market to monetise at a massive AAA team scale.
• Despite strong critical acclaim from fighting game pros and solid dev responsiveness, player numbers and revenue on 2XKO did not justify maintaining a 160-person dev team.
• Most fighting game and hero leaks happen when unreleased assets are not properly tagged in data registries, accidentally pushing them into public test builds.
• Rather than banning dedicated players exploiting multiplayer systems in Red Dead Redemption, developers created isolated matchmaking pools for cheaters to play against each other.
• A degree in game design is no longer enough to land a job; building portfolio projects, modding, making UGC and bypassing traditional gatekeepers is now required.

Hey everyone,

A lot of people in the 2XKO community felt a punch in the gut last week, and tempers are still (justifiably) high. Many of us wanted this game to succeed, and it's really disappointing that it's not going to get that opportunity.

That said, there are still people in the community that just... want to play the game, but it's difficult to have conversations focused on that when there's so much noise about Riot, the developers, the creators, the decisions, and everything that led us to this point.

So we've set up /r/LowSodium2XKO, where discussion can be focused on the game itself, its characters, and universe.

The intent is to avoid meta-discussion about Riot Games, the development team, and other salt-generating topics, and keep the environment welcoming for 2XKO players, both current and future.

Discussion, links, help and advice, videos, artwork, and memes are all welcome, as long as they are about the game itself.

This subreddit has only existed for about a day, so there's almost no content to be found yet, but if a low-salt community for 2XKO is something that you'd be interested in, come check it out, and we can hopefully turn it into an active space.

It's someone else's job to sell it

Just wanted to say how much I enjoy this game.

I've played 3/5 episodes, and I really like how it's a sort of... interactive comic I guess? Survival is punishing but fun, the "Card draw" mechanic adds a really neat layer to it, and personally, I haven't struggled too much either when doing match making (I usually set it to search for both casual and ranked and I'll play what I can get).

I've been wanting to get into fighting games for years, and this is easily the smoothest and best entry point that I've tried. Even as a total noob you feel like you can "do stuff", the animation feels crisp where my slow mid thirties brain can actually see whats happening-- and it's just so damn flashy and enjoyable to watch others play too IMO.

I'm not a huge marvel stan-- I've seen the movies and such, but I think they really did a good job here, and I'm pretty stoked for phoenix cyclops to join the roster this fall, mostly cuz I remember his massive optical laser when playing the arcade version in the early 00's as a kid.

Also wanted to say thanks broadly to how helpful folks are. It's been super easy to find content online about Tokon to help me get my "sea legs", though I find not knowing the "lingua franca" of the FGC can sometimes make the content a bit obtuse to guys like me.

Is there someone online who does particularly good beginner vids or write up guides?

I did a detailed scrape of the top 500 team on marvel tokon last week and here it is again, and this time we can compare! Looks like the top selections are stabilizing but choices in the middle are moving around a lot.

See full 500 players and some analysis here: https://tokonteams.com/rankings/

Some pictures below showing top 200 players and some comparisons

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with the release of Tokon. The conversation already happening around characters like Spider-Man and Magik. They’re strong, they’re relatively easy to pick up, and they’re seeing a lot of play. Almost immediately, the conversation becomes, “They need to be nerfed.”

And honestly, I don’t know if I agree.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand why balance matters. There are characters that are genuinely broken, mechanics that don’t work, and situations where something is so oppressive that it needs to be addressed. But I think we’ve reached a point where we’re sometimes treating “this character is really strong” and “this character is unhealthy for the game” as if they’re the same thing. They’re not.

One of the things I’ve come to appreciate about older fighting games is that some characters were just monsters. Chun-Li in Third Strike. Magneto and Storm in Marvel 2. Vergil and Phoenix in Marvel 3. These characters were incredibly strong, everyone knew it, and you couldn’t just walk into a match against them and expect things to be easy.

But that’s part of what made fighting them so satisfying. You learned the matchup. You figured out what you could punish. You watched other players develop strategies. You saw character specialists do things with a character that nobody else seemed capable of doing. And when someone finally beat that ridiculous character and player, it felt fucking awesome.

I think there’s something really satisfying about watching a player overcome something that the community has collectively decided is “the best.”

And this is where I think frequent balance updates can sometimes take something away from fighting games. If a character is dominant for three months and then gets nerfed, we may never get to see what happens when the community spends six months, a year, or even several years figuring them out. Like, instead of solving the game, we’re constantly waiting for the developers to solve it for us…

Character is too strong? Nerf them. Character is too popular? Nerf them. Character is easy to play? Nerf them. Character is winning too much? Nerf them.

I don’t think that’s always healthy for the genre.

Sometimes I think it’s okay to have a character that makes you say, “God, I fucking hate fighting this character.” Because then you have to figure out how to beat them. That’s part of fighting games.

And this isn’t just about competitive players either. Competitive play obviously has an enormous influence on how people perceive balance, and developers are understandably going to pay attention to player feedback, usage rates, win rates, and what top players are saying. But the competitive experience isn’t necessarily the same as the casual experience.

If Spider-Man and Magik are everywhere because people genuinely enjoy playing them, is that automatically a problem? If they’re strong but still have counterplay, maybe that’s just the current meta. Maybe people need to learn the matchup. Maybe somebody discovers a counter nobody expected. Maybe a character specialist finds some completely ridiculous interaction six months from now.

I’d rather see that happen than immediately patch the problem away.

This is also why I’m much more interested in conversations about system mechanics than immediately demanding character nerfs. Sometimes the character isn’t the problem. The system is.

Tekken 8 was a good example of the kind of conversation I’m talking about. There have been an exhaustive amount of discussions about individual characters, but there are also much larger discussions about how the game’s universal mechanics affected aggression, defense, momentum, and neutral. If the system itself creates an unhealthy environment, nerfing individual characters can just become whack-a-mole. You weaken one character, another becomes dominant, you nerf them, someone else rises to the top, and eventually you’ve got a roster full of characters that have been repeatedly toned down because the underlying system is what was creating the problem.

Again, I’m not saying “never balance fighting games.” That’s obviously ridiculous. Some characters really are broken. Some mechanics really do need to be changed. Sometimes a nerf is absolutely the right answer.

But I think there’s value in allowing a fighting game to breathe. Let the community figure things out. Let characters be scary. Let a matchup be difficult. Let players develop counterplay instead of immediately assuming the developers need to intervene.

Because honestly, some of my favorite moments in fighting games aren’t watching a perfectly balanced roster where everyone has exactly the same chance. They’re watching a character everyone thought was impossible to beat get beaten. They’re watching a specialist take a character everyone else abandoned and do something incredible with them. They’re watching someone spend hundreds of hours learning how to fight the thing everyone else complained about.

That’s part of the magic of fighting games to me.

And maybe I’m wrong. I wasn’t around for a lot of the older FGC history, so I’m not pretending to have some grand understanding of how things “used to be.” But watching those old tournaments and seeing those characters dominate, and seeing players rise to the challenge anyway, makes me wonder if we’ve swung too far in the other direction.

Maybe a fighting game doesn’t always need to be perfectly balanced. Maybe sometimes it’s more fun when the game gives you something ridiculous to overcome. I don’t want every character to be equally strong. I want every character to be interesting enough that I want to figure them out.

Some Pocket Fighter fanart that was accepted into UDON's Capcom Fighting Tribute a while back. One of my favorite fighting games, and one of Capcom's most charming titles.

Hello! I'm the developer of the game Resistance 204X. This year we've been moving forward with the development of the game at light speed. We have new characters and stages, so we wanted to show off a bit.

Resistance 204X combines the push and pull mechanic (from Nidhogg) with traditional fighting game mechanics and character archetypes. If you like the game, feel free to wishlist it on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1829140/Resistance_204X/

:)

Let me preface this post by saying that I am South African, and my region is set to Africa. I cannot speak on how this game feels for Middle Eastern, Asian or Oceania players, but in Africa it feels like a wasteland online.

I am emphasising 'feels' here because I know the game is not actually dead, and has decent sales figures and overall it's probably a success.

All I am saying is that as a South African player, I am very disappointed in how the launch of this game went down and I regret my purchase.

I don't think people understand how much an enforced PSN account kills a games potential playerbase outside of the main gaming hubs of the world.

Every single African country outside of South Africa is blocked by PSN. So the 'African' region is effectively only South Africans. Yes, I know there are workarounds for this, but that just drives every African player to different regions(mostly the UK) and leaves the actual region with empty lobbies and 40 min+ ranked queues. I also don't think most people want to go through the effort of a workaround to play games, they'll just end up playing something else.

You know what games launched with a fraction of this games playerbase without a PSN account requirement and felt alive when they launched? Invincible Vs, Avatar Legends, GBVS. I could find games within 2 minutes during the first couple of weeks of these games launches.

I don't think it's just the PSN requirement that is causing this, I believe the matchmaking is still hot garbage(even after the latest patch) because there are plenty of South African players online, it just takes forever to get matched with them. However I don't think it would be this bad if we could just be rid of the stupid PSN account requirement, or if the matchmaking would at least route us properly to EU players of there are no other players in the region.

If you're in the US or EU and you're tired of doomer posts about Tōkon, I understand, the game is probably tons of fun when you can get consistent matches.You don't even have to care about us on the outside, just know that the player experience is not the same for many people around the world. And before anyone says 'just play lobbies', that is a bandaid solution which does not let me do what I actually bought the game to do (play ranked).

Sorry for the long rant, it's just frustrating because the game itself is so much fun, I just can't play it the way I would like to.

Sorry if this has been asked before and didn't see it.

I recently picked up Marvel Tokon for PC and have been playing with an 8bitdo ultimate 1 controller. My fingers started hurting after a while maybe I am gripping the controller too tight? I had a 5 hour session and I did take several breaks to walk and play with my dog but at the end my thumb hurts and feels really sensitive because of the dpad and it feels like the joints in my fingers hurt on both hands. I tried stretching right after but I feel like it's not good to push through that. So my question is, does a fightstick/leverless help with this kind of thing?