A Year Later Safe To Say The Gameplay Changes Did Not Work Out?

[Dankster Morgan]

Be it that case or not, my argument is what kind of people these games attract.

Yes, mass appeal haha, I still gotta shill for Modern Warfare as usual for all the work they've put into this game and new engine, and for not ass blasting their consumers with insane DLC practices while still being the biggest game out there.

 

[xKMMx]

Against certain characters though it's a big risk to spend seven seconds with no defensive bar. If they read it, its party time for them

As a Jacqui player the first thing I do off a knock down with an opponent that has no d meter is just get the knockdown and then rape them to the end with b34 until they are smart enough to stop pushing buttons

 

[PapaRegadetho]

Yes, mass appeal haha, I still gotta shill for Modern Warfare as usual for all the work they've put into this game and new engine, and for not ass blasting their consumers with insane DLC practices while still being the biggest game out there.

You see, all these changes in MK11 do seem like its a downgrade, but the gameplay is so geniously subtle that most people don't even see it. Funny enough, some people are starting to understand, and if anything at all, the game teached y'all how to tech throws lmao.

 

[xKMMx]

You think mk11 isnt scrub friendly?

IF this game isn't scrub friendly I don't know what is.

 

[Dankster Morgan]

You see, all these changes in MK11 do seem like its a downgrade, but the gameplay is so geniously subtle that most people don't even see it. Funny enough, some people are starting to understand, and if anything at all, the game teached y'all how to tech throws lmao.

I don't even think MK11 is a bad game or even a downgrade in every way, just not my cup of tea. Can certainly see why people like it though, I just think the business practices NRS uses are shitty, don't particularly enjoy myself playing, but it's all good.

 

[craftycheese]

IF this game isn't scrub friendly I don't know what is.

I dunno where your getting this from. No one on the game wears scrubs, therefore it's not scrub friendly.

Unless you're talking about you, or me for that matter, wearing scrubs while playing. It's definitely scrub friendly in that regard

All I know is that we're a year in and I'm still having fun, even while getting my ass beat while figuring out a new character.. That's all that matters to me.

Ya know what I find surprising, if you were to believe some of the shit people say from this site, is there's shit still being discovered. There's the corpse hopping thing in the kano forums here and or discord figured out that kanos d3 can low profile some wakeups, leading to do fun ass shit you can do. If Kano blocks Erron's FB high, he can immediately duck and let go of block and the rest of the shots while all whiff, reducing pushback and making it all easier to punish. (sorry I play kano and that's all my examples).

I don't know where I'm going with this. So I'll stop here

 

[Zviko]

It's been a year and I still don't have a main. And that's only because there are so many characters I enjoy playing. I've even played some characters I've never thought I would. In that regard it definitely surpassed my expectations.

 

[Second Saint]

I dunno where your getting this from. No one on the game wears scrubs, therefore it's not scrub friendly.

Unless you're talking about you, or me for that matter, wearing scrubs while playing. It's definitely scrub friendly in that regard

All I know is that we're a year in and I'm still having fun, even while getting my ass beat while figuring out a new character.. That's all that matters to me.

Ya know what I find surprising, if you were to believe some of the shit people say from this site, is there's shit still being discovered. There's the corpse hopping thing in the kano forums here and or discord figured out that kanos d3 can low profile some wakeups, leading to do fun ass shit you can do. If Kano blocks Erron's FB high, he can immediately duck and let go of block and the rest of the shots while all whiff, reducing pushback and making it all easier to punish. (sorry I play kano and that's all my examples).

I don't know where I'm going with this. So I'll stop here

Speaking as a tech guy, tech doesn't get a whole lot of attention. It goes against a lot of people's narrative. I posted a broken Dirtbag setup that'll loop unblockables until death on a sizeable portion of the cast yesterday, @Blewdew posts flawless block OS's and uses interactables as invincible launchers, and god knows what else gets posted that I don't notice. Tech doesn't stay on the front page very long.

 

[Blewdew]

Speaking as a tech guy, tech doesn't get a whole lot of attention. It goes against a lot of people's narrative. I posted a broken Dirtbag setup that'll loop unblockables until death on a sizeable portion of the cast yesterday, @Blewdew posts flawless block OS's and uses interactables as a invincible launchers, and god knows what else gets posted that I don't notice. Tech doesn't stay on the front page very long.

it's sad to say that this really isn't the place to post tech anymore. you can tell that the majority here isn't interested in discussing tech and getting better at the game but complain in the hope nrs come here to to see it and change literally every game mechanic.

as much as I loved tym back then I'm glad that nrs leans more to other platforms now when it comes to criticism because the complains posted here are just ridicolous half of the time. luckily a handful of people here still like to lab things out and try to make this game grow and I really appreciate the effort

 

[Second Saint]

it's sad to say that this really isn't the place to post tech anymore. you can tell that the majority here isn't interested in discussing tech and getting better at the game but complain in the hope nrs come here to to see it and change literally every game mechanic.

as much as I loved tym back then I'm glad that nrs leans more to other platforms now when it comes to criticism because the complains posted here are just ridicolous half of the time. luckily a handful of people here still like to lab things out and try to make this game grow and I really appreciate the effort

Where IS the place to post tech though? If you don't have a twitter following, it's just lost. I have a whole 6 followers and I can post the most amazing broken stuff, and no one will be aware of it. Single greatest piece of tech I've ever come up with has maybe 600 views. How am I supposed to spread knowledge if no one will read it because there's no drama?

 

[Trustful_Whale]

I still enjoy the game and it is my favourite MK game easily. I definitely agree with many of its criticisms and I'm looking forward to its future.

Now, despite that I voted "met" in terms of my overall satisfaction with the game, I am absolutely disappointed with the variation system this time around. To be clear; I have no problem with the concept of variations. It's viable but somehow NRS likes to get in their own way. I have been in the camp in favor of customs since beta, which was still the most fun the game was imo largely due to said custom variations and a few other things.

I strongly disagree with those who say that we need to just cram all the moves together in one package or that variations make incomplete characters; this has been said before but the absence of variations would not, in absolutely any way whatsoever, mean that the resulting character would have any more moves than they currently do. I'll admit that definitely not all variations are well done, but simply taking them out of the equation is not the auto-fix you guys think it is, I promise you.

This has been said before but I think it's important and worth repeating; wasting man hours creating all these cool abilities that permeate everywhere throughout the game all except for a single mode/rule set was a monumental error. We can argue that the ranked/tournament scene is such a tiny % of the players, but the reality is a very large portion of players defers to that tiny % for consuming media and high level gameplay of MK11. The result is 99% of the game is disregarded because it doesn't fit in this one rule set, and that's a real fucking shame.

To make things worse, many of the custom moves are actual throwaways. Stephanie mentioned in one of the later Kombat Kasts that many of these moves were never intended for tournament use. If this is indeed true, my question to NRS is:

WHY?

Why spend all that time and money designing literally dead moves? Who are you making these moves for? What benefit is purposely half-assing these abilities bringing to the game that couldn't have been achieved, and better, by just designing them to the same standard as the tournament moves?
If this decision was made for people who just wanna flail around and have dumb fun with the game, then you genuinely fucked up here, NRS. That group of people doesn't care any more about the tournament moves than the custom moves, so why not design all the moves for tournament play since it really makes no difference to the "goof around" group either way? Why create a pool of moves just to effectively erase a significant portion of them from an also significant amount of players?

Wouldn't designing the entire game to the same standard be better for the overall game? I don't mean to suggest to make the game too opaque for new players to enjoy, but simply that these players will get the same enjoyment out of any fighter they play regardless to whether it caters to them.

It's absurd to me that this amount of waste was the intention all along. It really isn't the mountain impossible task to just make a bunch of good moves that have synergy with each other in fun ways without being literal garbage with no real purposes.
Then they do shit like Terminate...

The fumble on the variations is so bad that we still have a game full of characters who are shipped default with two UNFINISHED variations that aren't even their ranked versions. The amount of confusion I've seen from people asking how to "unlock" the ranked variations is astounding because of how obtuse the loadouts are at a glance. Please someone explain to me the logic behind giving players sample variations that have empty slots. Why can I participate in Spawn's premiere tower but am forced to use his Variation 1 without the dive cape? It would have been less effort to just slap on his actual V1 instead of just randomly removing one of its moves for the activity. What the actual fuck is that, NRS?


The game is still very fun and I enjoy it quite a lot. Needs improvements, etc, but damn there's some massive drops that were super preventable.


Also, thank you @M2Dave for bringing up the details about the throws. It's quite frustrating reading so much whining about throw techs and getting your poke beaten as though MK11 invented it, then praise MKX in the same breath.

This post became much longer than I thought it was going to be.

 

[Hellbringer]

While I still enjoy the game and it is my favourite MK game easily. I definitely agree with many of its criticisms and I'm looking forward to its future.

Now, despite that I voted "met" in terms of my overall satisfaction with the game, I am absolutely disappointed with the variation system this time around. To be clear; I have no problem with the concept of variations. It's viable but somehow NRS likes to get in their own way. I have been in the camp in favor of customs since beta, which was still the most fun the game was imo largely due to said custom variations and a few other things.

I strongly disagree with those who say that we need to just cram all the moves together in one package or that variations make incomplete characters; this has been said before but the absence of variations would not, in absolutely any way whatsoever, mean that the resulting character would have any more moves than they currently do. I'll admit that definitely not all variations are well done, but simply taking them out of the equation is not the auto-fix you guys think it is, I promise you.

This has been said before but I think it's important and worth repeating; wasting man hours creating all these cool abilities that permeate everywhere throughout the game all except for a single mode/rule set was a monumental error. We can argue that the ranked/tournament scene is such a tiny % of the players, but the reality is a very large portion of players defers to that tiny % for consuming media and high level gameplay of MK11. The result is 99% of the game is disregarded because it doesn't fit in this one rule set, and that's a real fucking shame.

To make things worse, many of the custom moves are actual throwaways. Stephanie mentioned in one of the later Kombat Kasts that many of these moves were never intended for tournament use. If this is indeed true, my question to NRS is:

WHY?

Why spend all that time and money designing literally dead moves? Who are you making these moves for? What benefit is purposely half-assing these abilities bringing to the game that couldn't have been achieved, and better, by just designing them to the same standard as the tournament moves?
If this decision was made for people who just wanna flail around and have dumb fun with the game, then you genuinely fucked up here, NRS. That group of people doesn't care any more about the tournament moves than the custom moves, so why not design all the moves for tournament play since it really makes no difference to the "goof around" group either way? Why create a pool of moves just to effectively erase a significant portion of them from an also significant amount of players?

Wouldn't designing the entire game to the same standard be better for the overall game? I don't mean to suggest to make the game too opaque for new players to enjoy, but simply that these players will get the same enjoyment out of any fighter they play regardless to whether it caters to them.

It's absurd to me that this amount of waste was the intention all along. It really isn't the mountain impossible task to just make a bunch of good moves that have synergy with each other in fun ways without being literal garbage with no real purposes.
Then they do shit like Terminate...

The fumble on the variations is so bad that we still have a game full of characters who are shipped default with two UNFINISHED variations that aren't even their ranked versions. The amount of confusion I've seen from people asking how to "unlock" the ranked variations is astounding because of how obtuse the loadouts are at a glance. Please someone explain to me the logic behind giving players sample variations that have empty slots. Why can I participate in Spawn's premiere tower but am forced to use his Variation 1 without the dive cape? It would have been less effort to just slap on his actual V1 instead of just randomly removing one of its moves for the activity. What the actual fuck is that, NRS?


The game is still very fun and I enjoy it quite a lot. Needs improvements, etc, but damn there's some massive drops that were super preventable.


Also, thank you @M2Dave for bringing up the details about the throws. It's quite frustrating reading so much whining about throw techs and getting your poke beaten as though MK11 invented it, then praise MKX in the same breath.

This post became much longer than I thought it was going to be.

Totally agree, never understood the point wasting time on abilities to be locked away in custom variations. If they are scared of it being unbalanced why make it in the first place.

 

[PetulantWaste]

I miss the roster from MK9

I miss the more fully fleshed out variation system from mkx (why did it take like 6 months to release variation 3). I also prefer MKX's roster over MK11. I miss all the different combo paths for every character.

I miss the break away system from injustice. I liked the option of dropping out of combos in place or backwards. I miss having a push-block mechanic to deal with some pressure. I also miss d2 combos with heavy scaling. I think they missed an opportunity when they kept the same d2 formula from previous MK games.

I miss every character having decent mids .

I miss being able to be more creative with set ups.

I miss every variation having a combo starter.

I miss when super moves actually cost resources.


They took out a lot of things i loved about previous games and made a game that's good but not great.

 

[craftycheese]

Where IS the place to post tech though? If you don't have a twitter following, it's just lost. I have a whole 6 followers and I can post the most amazing broken stuff, and no one will be aware of it. Single greatest piece of tech I've ever come up with has maybe 600 views. How am I supposed to spread knowledge if no one will read it because there's no drama?

Forum sites like this are dying and are being replace with other places to share stuff. It is frustrating that tech and info is getting harder to find for this game. I dunno where to go either. Kombat akademy? It's a pretty cool site and does have a lot of good info. Even has an app. I go there to quickly learn combos and it has been getting updated with character guides with enough information to get you started. Discord maybe? Even then you have to get lucky that your characters discord is active. This is the one thing about sfv, at least the gief discord, I miss, and the old days of this site. People seemed much more active and willing to share information. That gief discord had a Google sheet file that was always updating, people would share links to YouTube or twitter where stuff was being discovered or guides or whatnot, the character matchup channeled had actual information and tips on how to deal with people and was generally more active. And maybe Street fighter is a bad example because its the bigger game that more people play competitively, but that's no excuse for this community trying not to be like that. I've been lucky that the kano one is pretty active. Looks like the Terminator one might be too.

I do feel like people seem to keep things close to the vest in mk. I remember something sonic fox shared about how he deals with anti airing/jumping a long time ago that he debated about sharing. Just share it, I feel like the community only gets better and levels up quicker with the more we know.

 

[versavices]

Huge disappointment. If the meter changes are here to stay for future NRS games, I'm 100% done with NRS. I'd say most problems tie back to this dumb idea.

The best part of MK11 is that it is such a dull game that it led me to other fighting games that I really enjoy since I only played NRS games before.

 

[MuMuGuy]

The best part of MK11 is that it is such a dull game that it led me to other fighting games that I really enjoy since I only played NRS games before.

Which games? I started trying to learn Injustice 2 due to my disliking MK11, but quit that game because it’s difficult finding Competitive matches. I2 no longer having a tournament scene made people want to play with Gear moves and stats.

I just started trying MKX since a lot of people returned to that game, with MK11 being so divisive. I sold MKX quickly after launch due to the bad launch netcode and skipped I2 initially due to finishing grad school and being scared off by NRS’ previously awful netplay.

 

[Trini_Bwoi]

the game is great and exposes people who have bad fundamentals. which was me, at the beginning, but instead of complaining I got better.

 

[DeftMonk]

i think the mechanics are great, but the game has a huge presentation problem. when two great players meet, there is actually a damn lot going on gameplay wise that just doesnt convert into visuals properly. that makes even top matches look slow and random. as an example, walking forward and backward is extremely important in street fighter and they put a lot of effort into the animations for that. in mk its important too but everyone is always stiff. everything that has to do with string shenanigans has no visual indicator, like a cutting short or flawless blocking a gap. someone blocks 2 hits of a string and then gets opened up by the third hit - and nobody knows why. did he make a wrong read? did he mistime FB? was there even a gap? no idea, all i see is he randomly gets opened up - and thats basically not interesting.

In tekken many times this kind of shit happens like a three hit string u can hit confirm but normally wouldn’t finish on block because punishable. The other player assumes he won’t finish and starts his offense then gets hit by third hit. I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “unclear why he got opened up”. Obviously he was pressing buttons or mistimed a flawless block.

 

[Thingy]

They do need to loosen up the fighting a bit more and make some new combo routes possible.

Oddly enough, NRS continues to take away combo routes instead of making new ones. I am still not over what they did to Sonya. All she needed was damage nerfs.

 

[DeftMonk]

Oddly enough, NRS continues to take away combo routes instead of making new ones. I am still not over what they did to Sonya. All she needed was damage nerfs.

That was kinda dumb. If this game had less teleports and yolo fuck neutral tools but was more rewarding when you win neutral...(combo route choices that led to stuff like setups/restands that meant anything/wall carry etc.)would probably be my favorite fighting game. Also imo the amount of options on WU is a little bit much. I think delayed WU and u3/u2 would be plenty. Or remove delay WU and keep roll.

The assload of WU mechanics + FB coming back on whiff + breakaway just make it feel way too forgiving. It would be like playing DOTA 2 with a lvl boost mechanic given to players who fell way behind in their lane and also if they died allowing them to choose better options to use than normal with teleport scroll. Being at a disadvantage is normal when u fuck up and should be how it is imo.

 

[CrimsonShadow]

Speaking as a tech guy, tech doesn't get a whole lot of attention. It goes against a lot of people's narrative. I posted a broken Dirtbag setup that'll loop unblockables until death on a sizeable portion of the cast yesterday, @Blewdew posts flawless block OS's and uses interactables as a invincible launchers, and god knows what else gets posted that I don't notice. Tech doesn't stay on the front page very long.

Yup, there's this narrative that no one posts tech/there's no tech being discovered, when I see a lot of tech being posted, yet people don't reply or overlook it in favor of drama.

 

[Marlow]

and supposedly Virtua Fighter which no one plays anymore).

Sad.

 

[Marinjuana]

The fumble on the variations is so bad that we still have a game full of characters who are shipped default with two UNFINISHED variations that aren't even their ranked versions. The amount of confusion I've seen from people asking how to "unlock" the ranked variations is astounding because of how obtuse the loadouts are at a glance. Please someone explain to me the logic behind giving players sample variations that have empty slots. Why can I participate in Spawn's premiere tower but am forced to use his Variation 1 without the dive cape? It would have been less effort to just slap on his actual V1 instead of just randomly removing one of its moves for the activity. What the actual fuck is that, NRS?

I try to avoid over the top criticism of games because it's very common but this one of the most half baked and ineffective ideas I've seen in a game. I think they just wanted to give you weak variations that would encourage you to go to kustoms, but that's a horrible way to communicate that to your players. On the other hand, guys like me made 100 kustoms variations and had to type out the name for each tourney variation...

Outside of the pretty and functional menus, the UI team did not do well with this game. On launch, you couldn't even tell what moves your opponent was using until the match started. I'd even bet that part of the reason they dropped kustoms as an idea for tournaments was the lack of UI for it. They just lacked vision with the system and basically ignored these criticisms. I don't get it, it really hurt the game IMO

 

[xKMMx]

I dunno where your getting this from. No one on the game wears scrubs, therefore it's not scrub friendly.

Unless you're talking about you, or me for that matter, wearing scrubs while playing. It's definitely scrub friendly in that regard

All I know is that we're a year in and I'm still having fun, even while getting my ass beat while figuring out a new character.. That's all that matters to me.

Ya know what I find surprising, if you were to believe some of the shit people say from this site, is there's shit still being discovered. There's the corpse hopping thing in the kano forums here and or discord figured out that kanos d3 can low profile some wakeups, leading to do fun ass shit you can do. If Kano blocks Erron's FB high, he can immediately duck and let go of block and the rest of the shots while all whiff, reducing pushback and making it all easier to punish. (sorry I play kano and that's all my examples).

I don't know where I'm going with this. So I'll stop here

Yea pretty hard to follow you there bro. But this game is for sure scrub friendly. There are plenty of ways for scrubs to get bailed out when they have been out played and it takes about 10 minutes to learn a character well enough to compete online

 

[XxTheGoblinX]

MK11 is to me the best fighting game since Street Figther 3rd Strike. I would argue it's more fair than previous entries in the MK series and it's impressive that almost all characters are viable.

I'm a sucker for graphics so on top of the gameplay, the fact that this is IMO the best looking fighter ever made (not including drawn or cel-shaded games as that's kind of an apples to oranges situation).

100% Agree this is the best fighting game since 3rd strike. NRS just built a great fighting game. The only people complaining are the people who miss Mkx jank and don't like a neutral based game.