@spitznock: beginners really tend to struggle with special cancels, i.e. inputting something like a quarter-circle motion plus a button during the startup of a normal move. In KI you're special-cancelling all over the place, particularly in combos, and when you think about it the motions are halfway redundant anyway, so they got rid of the motion inputs.
@thoseposers: do you understand Street Fighter-style link combos? They're something like
normal, normal, normal xx special
where the commas denote links (which are where there's enough time between when you recover from doing the move to when they recover from getting hit that you can press another button and hit them) and the xx denotes a special cancel. They're more-or-less entirely about execution: you lab out the optimal combo for a given situation and practice it mindlessly whilst listening to the Bombcast, and then you bust it out in-game when you manage to open your opponent up while they walk off and make a sandwich.
KI's normals don't usually have enough advantage on hit for linking other normals, but you can link off of specials, so a KI combo looks something like
special, normal xx special, normal xx special, normal xx special
The first special is called an opener, and the normals are called manuals (which are basically like SF links), and the middle specials are called linkers (not to be confused with links) and behave a little differently than they would outside of a combo, but you can basically ignore that stuff. It's good for the last special to be one of the character's designated ender specials, because it cashes out white life that's accumulated during the combo and gives other benefits depending on the ender (e.g. meter, corner carry, more damage).
Which strengths (light, medium or heavy) the normals in that combo can be are dictated by the strengths of the preceding specials -- same strength or lower -- so that the defender can have a chance to predict and break the correct strength, because nearly all of these moves are impossible to break on reaction. Combo breakers are a commitment: if you mismatch the strength or mistime it, then you're locked out from breaking for a few seconds and your opponent gets to wreck you.
Now, there are also these things called "auto doubles", which are two-hit canned animations that can replace the normals in the sequence and which you cancel into (so they're easy to perform), so you get things like
special, normal xx special xx auto double xx special, normal xx ender
Auto doubles usually do a bunch of damage, and there are no rules about which strengths can follow which strength specials (so they're an option after a light special where you can only link a light normal), but the medium and heavy ones are long enough to be reacted to (the heavy ones are particularly slow), so you're serving up a breaker attempt on a platter when you use them.
That's where counter breakers come in: if you think they're going to attempt the breaker, you can pre-empt it with a kind of parry stance that, if they input a combo breaker within roughly half a second of you endering that stance, then they get locked out from breaking for a long time and you get to wreck them with lots of heavy auto doubles and whatnot that they'd normally break. But if they don't take the bait, you just stand there in the counter breaker parry stance all dumb and vulnerable and get opened up by them.
The combo system means that the offense has to do more than just punch out a canned combo from the lab to remain unpredictable, and the defense does something more interesting than just sit there and take it, which makes KI a really frantic game with very little downtime.
It's a shame that this launched on PC with a few problems, but it seems like a mostly sound launch and IG seems to be fixing things, so it should be pretty robust in short order. The base game and netcode seem to work fine for the vast majority of people, at least, so it's unlikely to turn into another MKX.
Also, I'm pretty sure the free version of the game is still just the one character -- currently Wulf -- and @unastrike probably just happened to log into Windows 10 with a Microsoft account that was tied to his gamertag or something.
EDIT: oh, and wrt combo assist: you could probably enter Evo or the KI World Cup with combo assist on at this point. The season 3 changes removed any competitive advantages you could get out of it.
I don't think I'll ever approve of non-fighting game guest characters. They never seem to be anything other than an extremely cheap and lame way for a game to garner more interest.
Lore-wise? In terms of combat design, Arbiter and Rash turned out really cool. They brought over a lot of gameplay concepts from their respective games to KI in ways that enriched the game.
criticism of it by people who I consider to be quite knowledgeable have renewed my wariness.
Not Durante, surely? As someone with a CS background, the article you linked before struck me as deliberately misleading drivel from a zealot who hates change.
As for Sweeney, I respect him a lot, but I wish he'd gone through with that awesome Unreal Engine design that, importantly, abandoned C++. Fucking terrible language. :( It was a bit odd that he put out an incredibly aggressive opinion piece on UWP, only to back off when some Microsoft reps basically pointed to some info that was already out there. I still don't think we know enough about the platform for all the uproar it's causing to make sense, and we know the worst that could happen is that we stick to the Win32 API and just don't get a bunch of PC ports of Microsoft-published XBOne games that we're expecting via UWP, anyway, so I don't see what the big deal is. I do get the impression from Sweeney's rant that he saw some technology in UWP that impressed him, though, otherwise I doubt he'd care as much.
I love that this is actually news. I hope that the issues I have with UWP (namely, lack of end-user file access and modification, hardware restrictions and the like) are resolved in a way that's satisfactory to both PC power-users and Microsoft. This may not actually happen, but it'll have to for the Universal Windows Experience to actually take off.
My current hope is that UWP has a default policy that sandboxes the shit out of games, so developers are forced to assume that's in place and hence actually have to follow good development processes and not litter my PC with junk upon uninstall, not rootkit my PC, keep their stuff to a designated location in the filesystem, not build software that breaks as soon as my environment changes slightly, etc; but that users are able to flip a bunch of switches and unlock whatever they like, so modders and whatnot can bring their toys over relatively painlessly. The whole Win32 ecosystem is a mess and needs something like this to clean it up.
@salvation122:you might be surprised by how well they can adapt abilities in spirit. Take a look at KI's Arbiter for an example of a fighting game adaptation of a character from another genre entirely done spectacularly.
@dijon: you can play Rising Thunder on a keyboard, a lot of people were doing that on the alpha. Its hook is one-button specials with MOBA-like cooldowns.
I think the main complaint about RT was that nobody liked the IP, so this is definitely a way to go about solving that problem. Man, it could be Rising League of Thunderous Legends that finally makes fighting games crack the mainstream.
I get this sense that the typical political polarization has happened wrt Jeff's opinion on WW's visuals:
Jeff (at the WW reveal): Oh that's a nice visual style. Thirteen-year-olds everywhere: FUCK THIS KIDDY SHIT THEY RUINED ZELDA Jeff: FUCK YOU ASSHOLES ITS THE BEST VISUAL STYLE EVER
I kinda have a similar reaction to the whole exploring-islands-on-a-boat thing: the way people in the pro-WW camp praise it to death as this innovative new direction used to force me to irrationally shit on it. In reality I think the boat stuff is nifty, but not strong enough to really carry what is essentially a Zelda-ass Zelda game with unmemorable dungeons and the same damn played-out story as OoT. (Although I'd be remiss to suggest that the island exploration stuff is the only thing carrying WW -- it's also got fun NPCs, e.g. the battleships minigame guy, and the combat brough some fun new mechanics which freshened up OoT's "wait, dodge and punish" monotony.)
Also, I think it's ironic that Jeff shits on the GameCube for its underwhelming lineup, when (accepting the idea that it was underwhelming for the moment) the very likely primary reason for that is because thirteen-year-olds everywhere rejected WW and bought PS2s for "mature" games instead, thus diminishing the user base and driving away third-party devs. Whatever you personally think of the look of WW, the sad fact is that those thirteen-year-olds' opinions mattered.
Oh, as for TP: I still feel like this game felt very Disney, between some of the visuals/animations and the infuriating way it does the whole thing where nobody gets to see the magical fantasy stuff except Link, despite many near-misses. It also has such a needy main quest that barely ever lets you just go off and explore, but I think the game is still great overall, and it's for a reason that Dan nails: the dungeons are just so good.
Pacing issues have plagued the recent Zelda games and that simply wasn't a problem in the earlier games. LttP and OoT both had you with a sword in your hand and in your first dungeon within a half hour, and off on your grand quest shortly thereafter.
LttP is not a good example of a well-paced Zelda. The hardest puzzle in the first three dungeons is the one where there's a friggen key under a rock that you have to find to unlock the next door, so that you can find more keys hidden under rocks to unlock more doors.
@charlie_victor_bravo: the bit that had me flying into the comments section to make a correction was the "the moon is not full when the earth is blocking it" bit from Drew. (Then what the hell is a lunar eclipse?) Glad someone got in before me with a detailed correction.
Add me to the group of people who played Deadly Moves as a kid and forgot what it was called and most of the details about it until now. The things that clued me in were the 2.5D movement, the female character and her stage, and, when I youtubed it, the boss and his boxing ring stage, and the stat mechanics in the single player mode. I had forgotten the rest, including what the main character looked like.
I remember I used to get most of my damage from throws, and I don't think I knew any of the specials. Guess it's good to know the game is terrible.
Hm, I suspect the screen on this thing is meant to be secondary to a living room display, and I doubt the shape of the thing in the diagrams is final. Also, I could imagine physical buttons being added to the design gradually, possibly with LED or e-ink displays on them.
I recall seeing a stick+buttons harness attachment for smartphones in a news article recently, which I still think is the sort of possibility that jumps out when I think about where the Wii U failed: they correctly predicted the emergence of tablet devices, but their technology was quickly obsoleted by sleeker, more sophisticated and less clunky phones and tablets. By producing a controller harness that wraps a phone or tablet (and assuming they can get the bandwidth for a decent-quality video feed from a console onto the phone/tablet), their controller gets better as the consumer plows through successive tablet models.
They might then go with three controller models: firstly, they could build a default screen unit that comes with the harness, and just runs Nintendo firmware; secondly as noted, the harness could also attach to a typical phone or tablet, which would have a Nintendo firmware app installed on it (er, Apple permitting...?); and finally, they could enable phones and tablets to function as controllers without the harness, via the Nintendo app and digital sticks/buttons.
Going in this direction they can consolidate their Wii U and DS libraries on the NX platform. The Nintendo firmware app on the phone/controller could also be the basis for portable NX gaming to succeed the 3DS, which might bring Nintendo's new mobile gaming strategy under its wing. It also implicitly puts the NX in the emerging Jackbox Games-style game space.
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