Hey guys I was curious if anyone knew what Mike's personal opinion was on instand kills i.e blazblue/p4a. I am well aware they wont be in skullgirls but I just wanted to know if mike was opposed to them or it just wasent a priority as much as making skullgirls as awesome a fighting game as it is. Thanks!
I mean, I know my opinion. (^.^) I do
use 'em sometimes, when they have properties that help like reach or invincibility.
IKs that you can do at any time will always have some fundamental problem or a pathological case where they swing everything heavily in favor of using them - and if they don't, they will be useless for that exact reason. GG comes closest by not allowing you to combo them, but May's ruins whole matchups vs some chars, and ABA also gets bonked pretty hard. When Sol still had his old leaping Grand Viper, Ky could punish it on block by activating and IKing Sol. And Potemkin's is able to be safely activated even in AC+R AND it's an invincible, safe, full-body hit that beats everything.
Then there are things like Xrd where the activation is a superflash which makes them even more useful...
IKs that you can only do when you could have killed them anyway (BB, Xrd) still have the ability to be over-useful, for example comboing and scaling your damage down to nothing then IKing when you wouldn't have been able to kill them with a super. BB tries to get around this by not evaluating whether they can be IK'd or not only when they're at neutral so you can't follow up a big combo with one, and there are STILL cases where they end up being a better use of your full bar than anything else you can do. Arakune's in I think CS? where he could set you up into it with bugs so it was a guaranteed death block or not, etc.
So from a balance standpoint...eh. Not really a fan. They're useful for trolling and being a jerk, but that's about it. They don't add anything to gameplay except the ability to kill someone without worrying about dropping or them bursting, in situations where those things have other ways of being done. And you can still style on 'em any one of a hundred other ways, even in games with IKs. (Like burst throwing!)
From an aesthetic standpoint, they're neat I guess. They let the game explore the character a bit more, and they're cool the first few times you see them, like any other cinematic, but after that? Ugh. Fighting games have not yet learned from FF7, I guess. (S'why you can skip Val's Lv3.) Sitting through a 20 second animation when you're already dead is super annoying, generally. That's rage quit time.
From a development standpoint, they take time and resources, as well as using memory. A cinematic can easily take more dev time than a couple of special moves and supers added together. And on SG we barely have the time and resources to do what we need to for the game, and we don't have
any memory to spare. Time the artists and designers would spend on these are better used on well...anything else. You want to spend your time working on things players will DO. Taunts, winposes, and lose poses are going to be seen much more often than IKs would be. Even max-meter unique supers (which don't have activation conditions) are going to be more prevalent, and have a wider array of uses.
One of the things I have tried to do in SG is avoid adding too many moves that are simply a blockable hit into some canned junk with no difference in spacing/timing, no followups, and nothing to do in the middle. Supers I design tend to avoid that archetype because you either can combo it or you can't and have to hail-mary, and once that hit lands you just sit around and watch until the damage is done with no option to affect the outcome. It's not interesting design that will engage players. IKs fall directly into that category.
tl;dr
- I think You Just Win is
way too big a payoff. If the downsides aren't enough then it easily becomes overpowered, and if the downsides are enough then it becomes nearly useless because of the downsides. Heh.
- I think cinematics are annoying in general. Watching a fully-scaled combo to Ultra for that extra 30 damage is painful. If it doesn't contribute to gameplay - or at least allow DHCs or RCs! - then keep it short. If the majority of a move would get edited out of a good combo video six months after the game is released, it is probably a waste of time.
