Is it time to say goodbye to story mode "chapters"?

[pure.Wasted]

-When Kung Lao died in MK9 and we were forced to jump into a boss battle as Liu Kang, no one complained. If anything, people loved the twist.​

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-When Liu Kang got 5 fights in MK9, and Sub-Zero got 8, no one complained. Again, people loved the surprise, and it made perfect sense in the story.​

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-When we had to jump in to beat boss Brainiac as Superman (after potentially 3 fights as Batman and having never touched him before in storymode) or as Batman (after potentially 4 fights as Superman), no one complained. It worked for the story and that's what mattered.​

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-When INJ2 paired characters up - GA & Black Canary, Catwoman & Cyborg, Aquaman & Black Adam, Firestorm & Blue Beetle, Batman & Superman, again no one complained. Instead people rejoiced that we got to play as so many characters. And I watched enough story playthroughs to know that sometimes people switched who they were playing as mid-chapter. The infamous Cyborg vs Poison Ivy match comes to mind...​

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-When we found out that "duo" chapters are coming back in MK11? The response was unanimously positive. It wasn't even as positive as it was "fuckin' duh."​

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My point is... people clearly don't NEED 4 fights per playable character, all arranged in a row, 1, 2, 3, 4.

Especially not when it means that every good guy is contractually obligated to take up the same amount of fight time as every other good guy, no matter how little they have to do with the story.

And especially not when it means that every bad guy runs around in the background fighting over scraps, just to get one or two awesome scenes where they stand out. We've proven that we're big boys and girls enough to handle jumping in for a fight with no prior practice as that character. The challenge it adds isn't so scary that it's worth dumbing down the story mode. We've been taking baby steps in a direction away from character chapters since the start of MK9 and I feel like it's high time for the big plunge.

Without making a single change to the story of MKX... imagine how much better the game would have been if instead of Sub-Zero's four fights all being in a row, two were against the Kombat Kids as training, and the other two were against Kotal Kahn's army at the end of the game, distracting Kotal to help Cassie's squad infiltrate Revenant HQ?

Again, this is without changing the plot WHATSOEVER. The only thing I did was rearrange the fights we actually see Sub-Zero have, on-screen, and made him 10x more bad-ass in the process, and made the climax 10x more bad-ass for involving Sub-Zero in it, and made Kotal look like less of a punk for losing. Now think about all the unnecessary padding fights in the game (Kotal, Sub-Zero, Kung Jin, Takeda, Jax, Jacqui, Cassie chapters come to mind) and how many battles could have been cut from those chapters, and given to characters like Mileena, Erron Black, Ermac, Reptile, Kano, Quan Chi, Shinnok instead. Cut just one fight from every chapter I listed in brackets, and that's enough to give every "bad guy" one fight where they get to be awesome! Have Mileena defeat D'Vorah during "Kotal's" chapter, to set her up as a legitimate threat and foreshadow their grudge match later on. Let us play as Erron as he beats up Cassie during Kung Jin's prison revolt. Show us how Kano used technology (and magic?) to trap Raiden, and incapacitate the Thunder God while he was vulnerable. Let us beat Takeda as Reptile, and Cassie as Ermac, to show how terrifying Kotal's forces can be, before Sub-Zero steps in to save the day.

I think the character-per-chapter system has become a shackle for NRS's storytelling abilities, and I think future NRS titles would benefit greatly from switching to a more naturalistic order. Though we know MK11 isn't taking as big a step as this, I do hope its structure is more playful and creative like MK9 and INJ2, not MKX.

Does it make sense for Liu Kang to have 5 fights in this story mode? Great, give him 5, and spread them out as much as you need. Does it only make sense for Johnny to have 2? Then just give him 2, one right at the start and one right at the end if need be. Did that just give us enough room for one fight from Noob Saibot's perspective? Fuckin-A! Let Dr. Claw win a fight.

 

[Samsara]

Look dude. Even if you can choose who you fight with, chapters are STILL themed by the characters involved.

Don't know why you felt the need to write a novel when the answer is already obvious.

 

[Circus]

My roommate is really bad at fighting games and he didn't really have any connection with the characters or playstyles until he played MKX's story mode.

During the story he actually started to piece together (roughly of course) what to do with Kung Jin and that became his character that he'd later take to towers or w/e casual stuff he did.

I agree, it doesn't have to be so set in stone though. Every character doesn't need 3-4 fights.

But I don't think a character's fights should be scattered around the story though.
It'd confuse the casual audience and just promote them to mash and flail about.

 

[pure.Wasted]

Look dude. Even if you can choose who you fight with, chapters are STILL themed by the characters involved.

Don't know why you felt the need to write a novel when the answer is already obvious.

I wrote a novel so that people like you wouldn't have an excuse when you completely misunderstood the point of the post. I'm not talking about who the chapter is "themed" by, I'm talking about who gets how many fights and in what order.

You can have a "Special Forces" chapter and give us two fights as Cassie, then a fight as Sonya and a fight as Johnny. There you go, there's your chapter.

 

[Law Hero]

Agreed 100%. It's not like four fights is even enough to learn a character.

If they're gonna stick with a cinematic story mode, I'd rather it just follow whichever character is important at the moment, then give me control over them when they fight. No need for each character to have a chapter with only them in it. I think it really hampers the flexibility of story-telling when they do that.

 

[pure.Wasted]

But I don't think a character's fights should be scattered around the story though.
It'd confuse the casual audience and just promote them to mash and flail about.

We've already had that, though? Liu Kang vs Shao Kahn. Then Batman has 4 fights at the start of INJ1, and at the end. Then he has 4 fights at the start of INJ2 as well, then anywhere between 1-9 more at the end.

I understand where your concern is coming from, and the casual experience is important to think about, but it just doesn't seem to have had any negative effect on casuals when it's already been tried. I don't remember ever seeing a single complaint. Except maybe that "Injustice needs to stop being about Batman" but that's a separate topic...

 

[HeavyNorse]

I was never a fan of the chapter setup of story mode. I would've preferred to choose a character from the select screen and then play through the story from their perspective.

For example, say I choose Reptile. Now I play through his part of the story, from when he first appears to his last fight, maybe 6 different battles, ending with a cutscene.

Now, say that Reptile fights Mileena at some point. So when you pick Mileena and play through her perspective of the story, that same fight will appear as part of her story.

Say that the Reptile VS Mileena fight, Mileena canonically wins the fight. When playing as Reptile, you might win the battle, but the following cutscene will show Mileena getting the final shot at Reptile and move on in her part of the story while Reptile will recover and move on with his.

That way, none of the characters will feel as jobbers, but each and every character will have a meaningful role in the story and you will be able to experience that through your chosen character's perspective.

It might not work and there might be a lot of better ways to handle story mode, but as long not all characters on the roster will get a chapter, those left behind will always feel like jobbers only in the story to get their asses kicked (with a few exceptions).

My point is... people clearly don't NEED 4 fights per playable character, all arranged in a row, 1, 2, 3, 4.

I did kinda like how Street Fighter V did it. You played the character that was relevant to play as at the time of the Story Mode. That also meant you played as the bad guys when it was relevant that they won the battle. Most likely an easier way of doing it than what I suggested above. XD

 

[Circus]

We've already had that, though? Liu Kang vs Shao Kahn. Then Batman has 4 fights at the start of INJ1, and at the end. Then he has 4 fights at the start of INJ2 as well, then anywhere between 1-9 more at the end.

I understand where your concern is coming from, and the casual experience is important to think about, but it just doesn't seem to have had any negative effect on casuals when it's already been tried. I don't remember ever seeing a single complaint. Except maybe that "Batman gets too much focus."

Yea, true. And what @Law Hero said it true too about it hampering the flexibility of the story.

Why can't causals just not be so completely clueless at fighting games.....

I was teaching a friend that religiously plays Fortnite some MK11 during the beta and he couldn't even consistently do an attack string like B312.

If I had any request for devs it would be to completely forget quicktime events and instead force the player to beat or finish off an opponent with a certain move, special, or combo. This way it'd teach them that a certain character has a tool that is special to them.

We saw in the achievements that there are three different tutorial modes.
Lets see if that helps casuals out like I wish it would.

I just hate how none of my close friends understand fighters AT ALL and just mash through Story Mode.

 

[Testurmight19]

This is why I prefer a konquest mode so we can play the story however we want and get to explore multiple realms. They could make the konquest so big and deep that they could eliminate the krypt and scatter all the chest and other secret items throughout the realms.

 

[HeavyNorse]

This is why I prefer a konquest mode so we can play the story however we want

That's never been true though. In past Konquest modes we controlled one character who beat everyone else who were just considered jobbers, really.

 

[FoughtDragon01]

I'd definitely enjoy being able to play more of the bad guys in the story. It'd be a nice way to raise the stakes/tension when you eventually have to fight the good guys, and make the baddies actually feel like a threat instead of more cannon fodder in your way.

But as was already said, it'd only work best when it's relevant to plot. No real point to give, say, Eroon Black his time in the spotlight if he's just gonna go back to being dead weight a few minutes later. More non-linear fight progression would give a decent sense of unpredictability to the story.

 

[pure.Wasted]

I was never a fan of the chapter setup of story mode. I would've preferred to choose a character from the select screen and then play through the story from their perspective.

For example, say I choose Reptile. Now I play through his part of the story, from when he first appears to his last fight, maybe 6 different battles, ending with a cutscene.

That sounds amazing, but I think the amount of work it would take makes it a Herculean undertaking even by NRS standards, which is saying something.

"Unfortunately" NRS isn't Capcom, NRS isn't happy with a static image of two fighters against a background, and some text scrolling from side to side saying "FIGHT!!!" So they would be compelled to maintain their absurdly high cinematic standards, and that's where we run into a brick wall.

MKX's 12 chapters take roughly 2.5 hours of cinematics, or ~12.5 minutes per character to justify 4 fights, right? We're going up to 6 fights per character? So that's 19 minutes instead of 12.5 already, for 25 characters instead of 12. Well... that's already 8 hours. More than TRIPLE the current story mode run time. And that's before we even begin to account for the fact that MKX story mode focused on a lot of scenes with a lot of characters involved at the same time. Screentime overlap. Once you start focusing even more on the characters' individual journeys, and once you start focusing more on characters who aren't hanging out in huge groups all the time (e.g. Kano, Mileena, D'Vorah, Quan Chi, Shinnok to start) then there's less screentime overlap which means you have to add even more unique scenes. So now we're looking at 10 hours, or maybe 12 hours, to do this style of game but without losing NRS's high standards, which they would never do.

Sounds amazing, but I think we're still a very long ways away from something like that being possible. I think our best realistic bet for something like that might be a Shaolin Monks-type action game, where you can choose which character you use to play through the world, and although you're visiting a lot of the same locations every time, the story is unique from character to character. Basically, a lot more gameplay + a lot less cinematic story = what you want is possible.

 

[Sage Leviathan]

The worst offense is when fights are forced, even though they contradict character motivations and the narrative flow. And these forced fights have a minimal impact on the plot at large.

Sometimes they reach illogical ends as well; see Kung Jin defeating Kotal Kahn.

 

[B. Shazzy]

That sounds amazing, but I think the amount of work it would take makes it a Herculean undertaking even by NRS standards, which is saying something.

"Unfortunately" NRS isn't Capcom, NRS isn't happy with a static image of two fighters against a background, and some text scrolling from side to side saying "FIGHT!!!" So they would be compelled to maintain their absurdly high cinematic standards, and that's where we run into a brick wall.

MKX's 12 chapters take roughly 2.5 hours of cinematics, or ~12.5 minutes per character to justify 4 fights, right? We're going up to 6 fights per character? So that's 19 minutes instead of 12.5 already, for 25 characters instead of 12. Well... that's already 8 hours. More than TRIPLE the current story mode run time. And that's before we even begin to account for the fact that MKX story mode focused on a lot of scenes with a lot of characters involved at the same time. Screentime overlap. Once you start focusing even more on the characters' individual journeys, and once you start focusing more on characters who aren't hanging out in huge groups all the time (e.g. Kano, Mileena, D'Vorah, Quan Chi, Shinnok to start) then there's less screentime overlap which means you have to add even more unique scenes. So now we're looking at 10 hours, or maybe 12 hours, to do this style of game but without losing NRS's high standards, which they would never do.

Sounds amazing, but I think we're still a very long ways away from something like that being possible. I think our best realistic bet for something like that might be a Shaolin Monks-type action game, where you can choose which character you use to play through the world, and although you're visiting a lot of the same locations every time, the story is unique from character to character. Basically, a lot more gameplay + a lot less cinematic story = what you want is possible.

lul bro you know that sfv “story mode” youre referencing is just sfv’s arcade mode right? Heavy norse is actually talking about sfv’s cinematic story...

the equivalent would be like me saying nrs tower mode is their story mode. which by the way, tower mode is just do a bunch of random fights into boss battle then you get literally what you just described, a mural and some voice over text. sfv character specifc stories have way mor thought put into them comparatively. In fact there’s 2 arcade modes and a cinematic story mode in sfv. do some research my little buddy

 

[pure.Wasted]

The worst offense is when fights are forced, even though they contradict character motivations and the narrative flow. And these forced fights have a minimal impact on the plot at large.

Sometimes they reach illogical ends as well; see Kung Jin defeating Kotal Kahn.

One of the worst offenders for me is Green Lantern vs Flash in INJ2. It's not any more stupid than all the others like it we've seen in MK9 and MKX, but because NRS has gotten so much better at justifying fights in-game, it stood out SO much.

For anyone who doesn't know the context -- Flash spends his entire chapter feeling guilty and looking for redemption from his days helping Superman. Green Lantern shows up, feeling guilty and looking for redemption from his days helping Superman. He wants to join Flash in helping right past wrongs. So what does Flash do? Only thing to do, he beats the ever loving shit out of Green Lantern, of course! Then he realizes that Green Lantern was holding back during the fight and says "sorry I guess I was wrong and you're a good guy again, let's be best pals again." Like, motherfucker, he's literally the same character as you right now, you're in no position to judge anyone who says they feel guilty.

 

[HeavyNorse]

Heavy norse is actually talking about sfv’s cinematic story...

Yes, this.

 

[pure.Wasted]

lul bro you know that sfv “story mode” youre referencing is just sfv’s arcade mode right?

Sorry, SFV's actual story mode was so garbage that I actually forgot it existed. That's on me. Thanks for the correction.

Anyway the Capcom comparison doesn't really matter to my post.

 

[B. Shazzy]

Sorry, SFV's actual story mode was so garbage that I actually forgot it existed. That's on me. Thanks for the correction.

Anyway the Capcom comparison doesn't really matter to my post.

so you wrote that 200 word essay comparing them but it doesnt matter now that you got btfo huh?

its ok to admit youre wrong on the internet bro. nrs players lul

 

[pure.Wasted]

so you wrote that 200 word essay comparing them but it doesnt matter now that you got btfo huh?

its ok to admit youre wrong on the internet bro. nrs players lul

Um... the essay wasn't about comparing them. I'm afraid you missed the point by a mile.I was making the point that for NRS to make a game where we can follow every character's individual journey through 6 fights each, would take an absolutely bonkers amount of resources. You can cut the sentence about Capcom out of my comment and nothing would change, because HeavyNorse wasn't asking for a copy of SFV's story mode, he was asking for something far more intricate.

I'm sorry that my irrelevant joke distracted you from the point I was trying to make.

 

[JINNOCIDE]

If it helps, Boon confirmed no quick time events on MK11

 

[JINNOCIDE]

Jax and Johnny fighting over nothing

 

[zerosebaz]

I hope they go in this direction, it is much better both from a story and a player perspective.

It would help a lot to lose the silly filler fights and would give us the opportunity to play bad characters even if only for one or two fights, which is really good, as making chapters for the bad characters is tough. It's easier to justify good guys not finishing their opponents, because, i mean, why would Sektor not kill you?
When given many fights back to back it becomes a problem from a story perspective, how many times can they ally with a good guy that forbids them to kill, or be robbed of their victory with a cutscene where the opponent wins, or another guy coming to save the loser? If 4 bad characters got chapters of their own, and saying one of them actually kills one of the good guys, then that means we'll need an excuse for them not finishing the loser 15 times. If 2 of those same characters get 2 fights each, and the other two get only 1, then that means we'll need only need 5 excuses, a third of what we would need otherwise, allowing for a better story to be told while still allowing us to use those characters.

 

[stokedAF]

Every character should be beaten at one point in the story by the player.

 

[pure.Wasted]

Every character should be beaten at one point in the story by the player.

And every character should win a fight at one point in the story, while controlled by the player?

 

[DragonofDadashov24]

I’ve never heard any complaints about the story mode except for the lack of experience and knowledge towards the playable character, Story mode was easy af in all games. Hope they don’t give up on it.