Level13BlackGuy
Noob
(This is quite long so there's a TL;DR at the bottom.)
First of all, this is not meant to be a insult to this game and to those who play it. These are simply some of my observations about the game meant to promote some discussion about what are some issues about the game and how they could possibly be remedied.
To begin, this critique will focus primarily on the online aspect of the game. I respect the offline scene greatly, but a large portion of those who play the game have no access to a good arcade scene. So many of these points I'm going to make may not be known to those who play this game primarily offline.
To start, in almost every fighting game, there are always more mediocre players than good players. Few players will ever reach EVO-level skill. I have always considered a fighting game's online ranked system a method to facilitate this process; by extensively playing online, one should ,in a properly balanced game, grow in skill level. They should lose to more skilled players and beat less skilled players. Now, not all fighting games do this well, but Injustice is especially bad in this regard.
We all know its relatively hard to match players with others of similar skill. A lot of fighting games struggle with this. However, Injustice seems to make no attempt at bothering. Upon starting the game, ranked match has no issue with matching someone that has a 4 win - 10 loss record with someone who has 600 win- 239 loss record. Unlike in Street Fighter 4 or UMVC3, there is no semi-reliable method of checking an opponent's skill. 600 wins mean nothing if they were won against day 1 players. Sadly, the best criteria for skill level in Injustice is player rank, which ranks purely by wins, not by win/loss ratio. This means someone with 800 wins- 1000 loss is higher ranked than someone with 700 wins- 100 loss.
Already this is bad for those who play this game primarily online. They have no true indicator of how good they're getting. Are they growing more skilled? Or is the person they're fighting simply unskilled? Yes, truly skilled people will appear, but this inhibits their growth. Many players, more than in most fighting games, will think they're skilled simply because their gimmicks in a match allow them to beat most players.
In a game like Street Fighter 4, one would eventually rise high enough where players would soon force them to adopt better tactics and gameplay. Ken wake-up Shoryuken will eventually be punished. However, in Injustice this may not happen. Someone who relies primarily on gimmicks may lose to the skilled player now and then, but ultimately beat a large portion of players because Injustice will match them with good and bad players alike, meaning that players who rely on gimmicks will not be forced to adopt better play.
Furthermore, another potential flaw within Injustice is its incessant keep away. Maximillian, a prominent fighting game player, noted in his Online Warrior series that the current meta of Injustice is that of the Keep Away-Zoner. Keep away in of itself is not a bad thing. However, in most fighting games, keep away is balanced in that either good keep away requires complex inputs and timing or keep away does minimal damage on chip or hit. Street Fighter 4 fireballs serve as a good example. Chipping is a threat to be sure, but one never feels that they are in danger of blocking too many fireballs. In Injustice, however, many characters can effectively pressure with keep away alone, some having high chip damage specials, or specials that hit high or low.
To add to this, Injustice has added environmental tools as well. Certain characters can throw unblockable objects that take up a certain portion of the screen that do 20-30% damage. These can be used multiple times in the same stage. This affects gameplay so much that stage selection has a large factor on certain match-ups. Most Catwoman players, for example, would not like to fight Black Adam on Watchtower or Metropolis, stages with plentiful throwable interactables. This has led to many players simply relying on just keep away and interactables to win. And many of them do.
Now, again low-level players relying on relatively skill-free tactics is nothing new in a fighting game. However, this problem is noticeably worse in Injustice due to the fact that these tactics are especially effective due to the nature of the game and also that these players upon winning, are not funneled towards more skilled players to fight. To be honest, I think that among the high level, offline scene those who rely on primarily keep away will eventually be punished as more of the game is discovered and optimal combos are mastered.
However, on the online scene, there's simply too little incentive to take that path. To give an example, one player plays Deathstroke and another plays Catwoman. Upon playing Deathstroke, the player realizes he can play keep away quite easily as well as punish get-in attempts or cross-ups with many of his specials. Most of this he learns how to do in the first couple days. The Catwoman soon realizes that in order to beat players like Deathstroke, she has to learn effective blocking tactics. Learn proper blockstrings. Learn optimal punish combos. Learn how to use untechable knockdowns in order to then learn her vortex game.
Catwoman has far more to learn in order to compete with Deathstroke at a low to mid range skill level. Now fighting games having characters that have different learning curves is nothing new. But when 9-12 characters can effectively play keep away as opposed to rushdown, some of them being able to do both fairly well, one begins to see that, at least for now, Injustice favors keep away/zoning-centric gameplay over aggressive, combo-centric rushdown and mix-up. Also, a question that hasn't been answered yet due to the immaturity of this game, is that when a rushdown character is fully mastered, will the disadvantage of their non-keep away play style disappear?
We've seen what happens when fighting games favor a play style or group of characters too heavily. Most competitve players end up using what allows them to win consistently, this being more excessive the more unbalanced the game is. An example would be MVC2, which was a fun game, but became so unbalanced, high-level tournament teams ran 80% of the time Cable/Storm/Magneto. It was a fun game, but if you played to win, then you were limited to less than half the cast.
I don't believe Injustice is as unbalanced as MVC2, but as it stands now, its simply not rewarding skilled play enough. At low to mid range currently within the game, one quite can go far with by simply spamming projectiles, using high priority specials such as Deathstroke's sword spin to get away from pressure, and using interactables interspersed with their keep away pressure. Hopefully, through careful patching, balance can brought between keep away and rushdown, so every character is made viable instead of somewhat viable. People who aren't a fan of keep away may turn away from Injustice if this style of gameplay remains dominant in the current scene.
Evo will be a good time to see how the early Injustice scene will pan out. Will the top 20 be mostly keep away characters? Will the matches mostly consist of people zoning each other? Seeing how it pans out will reveal much of Injustice's flaws.
TL;DR: Injustice ranked system flawed, does not match players with similarly skilled players. This allows the growth of stagnant skill-free keep away game play, which in is too overly effective in Injustice. This could possibly result in a competitive scene mostly consisting of keep away characters and tactics.
First of all, this is not meant to be a insult to this game and to those who play it. These are simply some of my observations about the game meant to promote some discussion about what are some issues about the game and how they could possibly be remedied.
To begin, this critique will focus primarily on the online aspect of the game. I respect the offline scene greatly, but a large portion of those who play the game have no access to a good arcade scene. So many of these points I'm going to make may not be known to those who play this game primarily offline.
To start, in almost every fighting game, there are always more mediocre players than good players. Few players will ever reach EVO-level skill. I have always considered a fighting game's online ranked system a method to facilitate this process; by extensively playing online, one should ,in a properly balanced game, grow in skill level. They should lose to more skilled players and beat less skilled players. Now, not all fighting games do this well, but Injustice is especially bad in this regard.
We all know its relatively hard to match players with others of similar skill. A lot of fighting games struggle with this. However, Injustice seems to make no attempt at bothering. Upon starting the game, ranked match has no issue with matching someone that has a 4 win - 10 loss record with someone who has 600 win- 239 loss record. Unlike in Street Fighter 4 or UMVC3, there is no semi-reliable method of checking an opponent's skill. 600 wins mean nothing if they were won against day 1 players. Sadly, the best criteria for skill level in Injustice is player rank, which ranks purely by wins, not by win/loss ratio. This means someone with 800 wins- 1000 loss is higher ranked than someone with 700 wins- 100 loss.
Already this is bad for those who play this game primarily online. They have no true indicator of how good they're getting. Are they growing more skilled? Or is the person they're fighting simply unskilled? Yes, truly skilled people will appear, but this inhibits their growth. Many players, more than in most fighting games, will think they're skilled simply because their gimmicks in a match allow them to beat most players.
In a game like Street Fighter 4, one would eventually rise high enough where players would soon force them to adopt better tactics and gameplay. Ken wake-up Shoryuken will eventually be punished. However, in Injustice this may not happen. Someone who relies primarily on gimmicks may lose to the skilled player now and then, but ultimately beat a large portion of players because Injustice will match them with good and bad players alike, meaning that players who rely on gimmicks will not be forced to adopt better play.
Furthermore, another potential flaw within Injustice is its incessant keep away. Maximillian, a prominent fighting game player, noted in his Online Warrior series that the current meta of Injustice is that of the Keep Away-Zoner. Keep away in of itself is not a bad thing. However, in most fighting games, keep away is balanced in that either good keep away requires complex inputs and timing or keep away does minimal damage on chip or hit. Street Fighter 4 fireballs serve as a good example. Chipping is a threat to be sure, but one never feels that they are in danger of blocking too many fireballs. In Injustice, however, many characters can effectively pressure with keep away alone, some having high chip damage specials, or specials that hit high or low.
To add to this, Injustice has added environmental tools as well. Certain characters can throw unblockable objects that take up a certain portion of the screen that do 20-30% damage. These can be used multiple times in the same stage. This affects gameplay so much that stage selection has a large factor on certain match-ups. Most Catwoman players, for example, would not like to fight Black Adam on Watchtower or Metropolis, stages with plentiful throwable interactables. This has led to many players simply relying on just keep away and interactables to win. And many of them do.
Now, again low-level players relying on relatively skill-free tactics is nothing new in a fighting game. However, this problem is noticeably worse in Injustice due to the fact that these tactics are especially effective due to the nature of the game and also that these players upon winning, are not funneled towards more skilled players to fight. To be honest, I think that among the high level, offline scene those who rely on primarily keep away will eventually be punished as more of the game is discovered and optimal combos are mastered.
However, on the online scene, there's simply too little incentive to take that path. To give an example, one player plays Deathstroke and another plays Catwoman. Upon playing Deathstroke, the player realizes he can play keep away quite easily as well as punish get-in attempts or cross-ups with many of his specials. Most of this he learns how to do in the first couple days. The Catwoman soon realizes that in order to beat players like Deathstroke, she has to learn effective blocking tactics. Learn proper blockstrings. Learn optimal punish combos. Learn how to use untechable knockdowns in order to then learn her vortex game.
Catwoman has far more to learn in order to compete with Deathstroke at a low to mid range skill level. Now fighting games having characters that have different learning curves is nothing new. But when 9-12 characters can effectively play keep away as opposed to rushdown, some of them being able to do both fairly well, one begins to see that, at least for now, Injustice favors keep away/zoning-centric gameplay over aggressive, combo-centric rushdown and mix-up. Also, a question that hasn't been answered yet due to the immaturity of this game, is that when a rushdown character is fully mastered, will the disadvantage of their non-keep away play style disappear?
We've seen what happens when fighting games favor a play style or group of characters too heavily. Most competitve players end up using what allows them to win consistently, this being more excessive the more unbalanced the game is. An example would be MVC2, which was a fun game, but became so unbalanced, high-level tournament teams ran 80% of the time Cable/Storm/Magneto. It was a fun game, but if you played to win, then you were limited to less than half the cast.
I don't believe Injustice is as unbalanced as MVC2, but as it stands now, its simply not rewarding skilled play enough. At low to mid range currently within the game, one quite can go far with by simply spamming projectiles, using high priority specials such as Deathstroke's sword spin to get away from pressure, and using interactables interspersed with their keep away pressure. Hopefully, through careful patching, balance can brought between keep away and rushdown, so every character is made viable instead of somewhat viable. People who aren't a fan of keep away may turn away from Injustice if this style of gameplay remains dominant in the current scene.
Evo will be a good time to see how the early Injustice scene will pan out. Will the top 20 be mostly keep away characters? Will the matches mostly consist of people zoning each other? Seeing how it pans out will reveal much of Injustice's flaws.
TL;DR: Injustice ranked system flawed, does not match players with similarly skilled players. This allows the growth of stagnant skill-free keep away game play, which in is too overly effective in Injustice. This could possibly result in a competitive scene mostly consisting of keep away characters and tactics.
