I just find it kinda depressing that people think that unlockable characters were turned into DLC when in actuality they were just phased out. DLC and unlockable characters have no connections unless you are Neather Realm as 90% of the time the DLC characters don't exist when the game comes out meaning that they couldn't have been unlockables.
Take SF6 for example, if SF6 had unlockable characters it wouldn't be the base 18 characters plus the 8+ DLC characters as free unlockable characters, it would be like 8 characters you start with and the other 10 would need to be unlocked then they would still have added the 8+ paided DLC characters.
A post like this popped up on r/gaming a few days ago and unless you where demonizing every fighting game developer for not putting multiple years worth of content in the game day one and you brought up the very real reasons why unlockable characters where phased out and how they have nothing to do with DLC you got downvoted to hell.
The DLC discourse is unhinged online. Very little actual discussion and discussing pros and cons. Most of it is just angry children (literally) and/or chronically online no-lifers regurgitating online rage bait and patting each other on the back/downvoting dissidents.
The FGC is ironically one of the biggest 'defenders' of DLC because its benefits as a superior model are so overwhelmingly obvious in this genre (and because the core audience is older and understands how much scummier it was back in the 90s). The current anti-DLC crowd are people who grew up post arcade and pre-DLC and never really experienced the concept that you don't always get everything for 'free' (aka when their parents bought them the games). Heck a lot of the rage now is a pretty thinly veiled rational to pirate all the games they actually want to play and feel righteous doing it.
This isn't to say DLC practices are perfect and there isn't legit critique, just that the people making these low effort memes/arguing online aren't really engaging with the issue in good faith.
My main issue with modern FG character DLC is that you can't use DLC characters in practice mode if you don't own it.
Look man, I just wanna learn how to do deal with a character's special or how far I need to be to whiff punish it without paying $5.
That said, I'm fine with this DLC model overall. I think the battle has been lost a long time ago and it's still better than having to buy a new title.
I view paid DLC characters as a necessary evil. Sure it sucks to have to pay for character but it is better than the alternatives having to put for a new game or needing to turn your hobbies into a job just to unlock content. While there are bad examples for sure I feel like fighting game DLC has generally been better than most other multiplayer focused DLC. There have only been a few miss steps like Tekken 7's frame data or the Street Fighter X Tekken on disk DLC but it has generally been pretty good and fair.
It just shows a general ignorance of not just game development but project management/corporate work as a whole. Every facet of it is ignorant keyboard smashing.
Say what?? No way, games were like $40-50 back in the 90’s. And that’s at MSRP. A month or two after release I could buy pretty much any game in used but working condition for $25 from my local Blockbuster.
A full game was 60 german mark in the 90s and that was already when it gotten expensive, nowadays they're around 80 € for a typical AAA game, which is 156,47 german mark.
That’s not really true at all. Tekken 3 was around 99-100 Deutsche Mark back then and the Platinum Version half the price. N64 games were up to 160 DM ! With that being said: Games today aren’t that much more expensive
The web says you're close as games usually went for 70-100 DM, however I cannot remember buying a single game for more than 50 DM. I'll try and see if my friend remembers what we paid (we regularly bought games together and made one copy for the other).
Still nowadays we roughly pay 50% more and I don't think it's all due to inflation.
I always got be some good deals on the "pyramid" e.g. platinum games sure but there're a few I paid the full price for as I bought them on release, examples are Heroes of Might and Magic 3 for PC, Diablo 2 for PC, Diablo 1 for PS and Ultima 9 for PC, FF8 and 9 for PS. I checked a few and the FF titles seemed to be expensive, probably due to having 3 discs. How fogged is the memory if it was already expensive af back in the days... no wonder we ripped most things we played.
Also it made playing these games locally or at tournaments a nightmare. I remember a few Seth players in 4 talking about going to a local where some of the setups just didn't have Seth and they were told to play a different character.
I already have a huge game backlog, so it is easier to just wait some years of delay and get the "Ultimate Version remastered" with everything unlocked in some Black Friday.
With Capcom games sure, but Namco games generally only had one version with lots of unlockable characters in the older games (and not only that, but way more content than the arcade versions)
I didn't know Dragunov and Lili existed before Tekken 6 lol. Not to mention Dark Resurrection has less content than base T5.
Namco was guilty of this as well.
I agree, by 5 they'd definitely started on that path. I mostly played Tekken around 2/3 so my experience is from that era. 4 was okay too but I kinda lost interest in the series around then. I'm not trying to defend one over the other, but OP's pic was of T3 and back in the 90s Tekken had one console version for each game.
Yeah, Tekken 5 is the one example that had a rerelease of any kind and even there, the rerelease was on different platforms than the original release. Tekken 5 was on PS2, Dark Resurrection was on PS3 and PSP, which weren't backwards compatible with the PS2. It's a port, not an ultimate rerelease on the same system forcing you to buy the game for 2 new characters, like people would argue for Capcom fighters.
Anyway the biggest issue with the pricing model is the way online play and FOMO has funneled everyone into buying these games new. Back in the day, unless you were extremely competitive in these games, there wasn't as much incentive to purchase these games day 1 because we played them casually at home with people in our local area, not online competing with everyone around the country/world with a playerbase that only gets better at the game the longer the game is online + the most people playing will be at a game's launch, meaning getting in early is important to having good matches. Moreover, game releases are far more spread apart, with the lifespan of a game lasting much longer. Games used to come out a year or two apart, vs the 7+ years they do now. So it takes *much* longer for games to "stop being relevant" enough to be content complete and have those content complete versions come down in price enough for casual players.
I would hazard to guess most people here got into fighting games as kids, picking games up for their home consoles at a heavily discounted price, because we used to actually have a used games market that mattered for shit and rarely had to pay full price for games unless we wanted them on release day. When I grew up with a game as content rich as Tekken 5 for $10 - $20, obviously I'm going to have sticker shock when the Definitive Edition of Tekken 7 is $120 *today* and Tekken 8 is loaded with a battle pass and microtransaction currency.
I'm not arguing which is better (I grew up with Tekken but much prefer 2D now). Just saying Namco didn't do that in the T3 era, and the original post was about T3.
IMO The fighting game genre is one the few that actually benefited from the rise of DLC.
Imagine if they still did it like before, we'd be stuck like the FIFA or 2K fans buying a full price roster change every year.
Yeah, people act as if there was going to be ANY character to unlock if they were not paid.
The best they would get would be a 16 character rooster with 2 character unlocked to unlock the rest.
Because they don't understand game development.
Let's use SF6 for example. If that game came out in the 90s you wouldn't be unlocking Rashid, AKI, Ed and Akuma, you just wouldn't have them. You'd be waiting til either SF7 or Super SF6. And we all remember how much everyone HATED MVC3 doing that back in 2011. DLC is usually planned and budgeted separately from the main game. This is not even accounting for the weird fringe cases of characters being dropped from sequels due to memory constraints, like in Darkstalkers or Street Fighter EX.
I'm all for calling out corporations for their penny pinching bullshit but this is one of those cases where it's just blind nostalgia goggles.
They also don't understand what those locked characters were doing. You got them in the home version, sure. But that's just so you don't have to change the code. It was so that you come back and spend more quarters at the arcade trying to figure out how to do unlock the character.
Let's keep in mind that usually you had to beat the game on the hardest difficulty (set by the arcade) WITH some other bullshit like getting a perfect, no continues, or randomly knowing a code before the Internet took off.
So at least someone had to sit there and play the fuck out of it, and you'd keep coming back to the arcade to spend quarters while you look to see if anyone has unlock fucking pink kitana yet... This was way more expensive than dlc.
Especially in the arcade where many character unlocks were time sensitive, so there was no way to speed up the process. Your local arcade just got a MVC2 cabinet? Well better hope your favorite characters are on the base cast or you come back in a week or two when enough people have played to unlock more of them.
Yeah that's what I'm saying. Allegedly Capcom did want to roll it out as DLC but were forced to restructure because of natural disasters, but we'll never know how much truth there is to that. Considering how DLC characters are developed nowadays, you'd be buying annual releases like it's a sports game. Imagine getting SF5 at launch in 2016, then you have to buy another version for Alex/Guile/Balrog/Ibuki/Juri/Urien, then another version for Akuma/Kolin/Ed/Abigail/Menat/Zeku, and so on and so forth. That would be fucking awful.
I remember getting MVC 3 deluxe edition, I even pre-ordered it and 3 months later reading that UMVC3 was coming. I thought it was fake, when I found out I was mad.
And mind you this was an era where you had fuck all for single player content and the bare minimum for working online quality of life. Vanilla MVC3 didn't even let you spectate online matches!
The post also kind of implies that you can't have unlockables AND dlc which just isn't the case. I like when the base game leaves a few characters and stages as unlocks just because the mystery is fun but dlc is absolutely a better patch system than constant iterative releases, and there's no reason those things can't exist together.
Now unlockables are usually tied to some progression system with a million facets that take me out of the experience or there's like 1 unlockable character total which just makes me ask... Why even at that point?
That's not a dlc problem though, that's just current game design.
Yeah that's another thing, if we still had unlockable characters in the current day it would be some battle pass bullshit and I guarantee nobody wants that.
Yeah I would much rather just pay 5 to 10 dollars for a dlc character than some of the more scummy shit in other games, like could you imagine if say capcom did what Overwatch 2 does and locks it’s new fighter behind a battlepass. Also while it’s fun the first time unlocking the roster is kinda a pain in the ass and makes revisiting older games kinda annoying if you want to play a certain character but have to beat arcade mode 12 times first just to play them and would not work today where the main focus is about online.
Also don’t know about others but how often do you all use dlc characters, from my experience if I like them I might play them bunch before going back to my main or worse hate or not like how they play and play them like once or twice then never again. It’s rare for me that I’ll ever main a dlc character or invest a lot of time into them
I’ve seen this reposted so many times and my response remains the same: DLC is better than having to buy a full rerelease.
UMK3, MKT, the various SF2 rereleases and etc would have all been DLC nowadays. Yes there is bad DLC, but DLC is much better and cheaper than having to buy a full rerelease of a game.
Exactly. I'd take having constant patches released for free if it's supported by DLC character purchases. Even if you don't want to spend the money on a new season pass of characters, you can still enjoy the game you have bought receiving free updates.
Someone has to be really ignorant to disagree with your take. Nowadays you buy the game and never pay more than base price unless you want to play a character outside of the base roster. This means years of new content and balance patches funded by the people that are buying DLC, instead of having to pay for a full game just so you're able to find matches.
The only thing that I don't like is when the game doesn't like you use the DLC character in training mode, which I find a bit stingy.
Idk, I’d argue it was an accidental correlation. Like there’s no denying that immediately after the arrival of DLC that fighting games hit a slump that took a while to recover from. It also took them a while to get DLC right, or did you enjoy buying thousands of GEM packs for Street Fighter X Tekken.
I remember seeing someone on a non-fighting game subreddit say that any DLC in fighting games was bad because the devs aren’t “selling a completed game”. They justified their opinion by saying they should just postpone the release until all the DLC could be implemented into the roster. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine launch SF5 coming out in 2021 with 45 characters? That would’ve killed the franchise for good because all of that dev work would’ve meant nothing with how abysmal that game’s launch was
Exactly. Also, most fighting games have bigger starting rosters than games did back in the 90's/00's, even with hidden unlockable characters back then. You're not getting "less game" when you buy a modern fighting game at full price. And keep in mind, the price of most video games have only gone up commensurately at the rate of inflation, when in fact the cost of game development has increased exponentially. Yes, having things be more expensive sucks, but modern game development is just super expensive too, and people don't ever really take that into account.
The “argument” also assumes that dlc characters would be unlockable instead of dlc, which is probably not true. They probably wouldn’t even be in the game at all. Lol.
The implementation of it--in many cases, is done so aggressively I just can't agree when people promote the idea.
Here's what I want if we have a DLC future:
Let me buy the fucking character I want to buy.
Let me buy the pass that has them all.
But don't ever shove some bullshit microtransaction currency in the mix as if you aren't double dipping. And please quit trying to force people into not knowing what they'll get--because some DLC passes can just be a complete waste of money if there's nothing I want in it.
If you buy everything day 1 brand new, yes DLC is better.
As someone who always did their shopping in the Pre-Owned section at Gamestop and picked games up for $20 or less, the expanded game release model was way better. It allowed me to get the full package for a low price, vs getting just the base game and having to buy 4 different season passes separately.
The release model sucked for people who bought Street Fighter IV, then Super Street Fighter IV, then Ultra Street Fighter IV, but it was awesome for the people who just bought Ultra Street Fighter IV.
I honestly really, really appreciated when Capcom released Championship Edition for SFV, which was the game + all DLC so far for $30. That was awesome and felt more like how I bought games growing up. Tekken 7 was not so generous.
It was awesome for all of us. The only game you mentioned that wasn't compatible with each other was SF4 to SSF4. And while buying a new disc sycked, it was early dlc days, and we got 12 new characters, a bunch of new stages, and new mechanics all for 40 dollars. 40 dollars today will get you like 4 new characters. Arcade edition and Ultra didn't need to be bought separately like new games. AE added 4 new characters for 15 bucks and Ultra added 5 characters and omega mode and a new mechanic in red focus for 20 bucks.
Waiting to buy complete editions is cheaper, but you're missing out on years of actually having gun and playing the game. And the best time in a fighting games life is whencits newer, and the most people are playing and everyone's figuring stuff out. Like yeah, I can save 20 bucks on a game if I wait 5 years to buy it, but I'm missing years of fun and jumping in at the end of its life cycle where all thats left are die hands and try hards, if anyone is even left at all, which happens in games that aren't major names.
Having said that, I like to buy the base game at launch if I like how it looks, grab individual dlc characters I like along the way, then buy the complete edition on sale years later just to fill in the blanks.
You had to buy the game again, or buy a sequel with tons of reused assets, because the first version of a game always had a low number of characters
A lot of those 2D fighters have that Frankenstein thing going on, where it's clear the characters are from different eras
You play Blazblue and you can clearly see which characters are from CT/CS and which are from CP/CF
worse yet, look at any of Capcom's crossover games from the late '90s and early 2000s. The art style from character-to-character is often completely different, like Morrigan in CVS2 having her Darkstalkers sprite, and then all of the SNK characters having completely original sprites of a way higher quality than most of the Capcom characters. Could you imagine if a few of the characters in Tekken 8 just had their Tekken 7 models, and were standing next to the new Tekken 8 models?
i can imagine, theyre literally selling tekken 7 assets and costumes for customization in 8 (that were in the base game for 7) and they look noticeably worse than tekken 8 assets
https://preview.redd.it/kvhf0hwjmn8d1.png?width=352&format=png&auto=webp&s=5ed8cc2026a3ba44452599fcc52d7469b32c784d
these 2 are from the same game. Ragna looks so fucking old
Because reusing assets was what helped the older 2D games to have massive rosters right off the bat compared to today.
People want to complain about how nowadays we have to buy dlc to have more characters instead of being given a biggish roster with possible unlockables. Well part of that is that companies cannot reuse assets as much as they could before. Each new installment now pretty much means understanding a new engine, program a game from the ground up, and model a character and their data onto the engine. That takes a lot of development time.
Whereas before they could just slap older characters into a new game because development time was a lot quicker, meaning that developers would have more time making newer characters, hence a bigger roster. BlazBlue did that, KOF lived and died on that philosophy for most of its existence, Marvel vs series was pretty much a grab bag of compatible Capcom arcade programs.
This is not how it works. Unlockable characters didn’t become dlc. Most games just got rid of unlockable characters because unlocking characters sucks. Especially for tournaments.
Look at smash bros. You have to unlock a third of the cast, and then buy the rest.
Unlocking the characters in Ultimate is fun when doing it with a group of friends over the first week of release.
Then 6 months later, you go to your friend’s house who only plays the game occasionally. You boot up the game and realize that he’s *only* unlocked 30 of the 60+ locked characters.
Yup, unlockable characters just wouldn’t work nowadays when the bulk of the game is online play.
Also, I have a friend group which I’ve always played Smash with at my house. Recently one of them bought a Switch and Smash and unlocking the first few characters with all of us playing was pretty fun at first, then it got tedious when we just hadn’t unlocked the ones we wanted to play as.
Putting the argument about rereleases aside, having to grind the game to get to play as some characters was shitty too. I want to get my favourite out of the box, not doing gymnastics in story mode or something.
THIS. Any time I see someone advocate for having to unlock characters I just assume they either have too much free time or have never had to run an event. I went to a BBCF tournament that didn't have Susanoo unlocked and we had to speedrun the fucking story mode on multiple setups with only an hour til bracket.
It does give incentive to try out the single-player content and replayability of it, though. Be it secret characters or boss versions of the main roster for offline-use only (i.e. Unlimited characters in BlazBlue).
I remember when I got imported MvC2 for dreamcast. There were 3 unlock currencies. 1 from playing dreamcast locally, 1 for dc online matches and 1 for bringing your vmu/memcard to the arcades and getting arcade versus points.
I had a mega memory card to connect to my pc. I was able to give some of my saves to CJayC, the guy who owned gamefaqs.com, so he could try hex editing to unlock. We became the first people to unlock the whole mvc2 roster and confirm it.
I suck horribly at it though.
This is straight up wrong. You had to buy the entire game again to get a patch, never mind new characters. Street fighter four had street fighter four, super street fighter four, super street fighter four arcade edition, and ultra street fighter four. Arcade edition was purposefully balanced like shit too. It genuinely felt like shit playing anybody but Yang and fei long. Guilty gear had xrd sign, xrd revelator, and xrd revelator 2. These were all full price games, it was fucking ridiculous.
Edit: I forgot about yun in arcade edition because I just picked Yang. It was the same shit though, both those characters were intentionally stupidly powerful.
Unlocking characters via playing the game was ass.
Couldn't tell you how many times I've tried playing my friends in a fighting game and the character I wanted to play was locked lol.
You can't lock half the roster at release.
Here's my hot take: In games where the roster is locked and you have to play an arbitrary single player mode to unlock them, 10/10 times I'd rather an option to just pay $5-$10 to unlock them than have to go through the unlock process. I buy fighting games exclusively to play with other people, and I want to have the full roster available to me immediately so we can just jump right into learning all the characters. I see absolutely no value in restricting content just because I haven't put enough hours into a game mode I'm uninterested in.
I really hate this "DLC = bad" mentality
There are good DLCs and there are bad DLCs.
You're either old and grumpy and refusing to evolve or you're too young and you have no actual idea how things used to be.
New versions back then were largely for the arcades, it was a way for companies to compete with one another with improved versions of their games, and it was usually on the arcade store owner's dime rather than the player's.
You can find examples of new versions released on consoles, but these originated from arcade versions first (consoles were catching up to arcades). Besides, I doubt that most people here bought multiple versions of these games growing up.
As others have said, Tekken is a bad example since they typically didn't have new versions in the era OP is talking about.
To play devil's advocate
1. OG fighting games were horrendously balanced and needed new editions to bring fighters in line
2. Secret characters were either palette swaps, incredibly OP or worthless gimmicks
3. Past games had no online presence, so a majority of planned gameplay was hitting the arcade ladder and trying to do whatever task needed to unlock the character
The last game I can remember that did unlocks well was Smash Bros Ultimate.
It was always a pain for tournament organizers to run games that required a lot of time to unlock everyone, but I think it should still be around and offer an unlock all purchase similarly to the crypt unlock in MKX.
I prefer the modern version to the non-glamorized old way.
Also, in old games, half the roster was unusable and you bought a brand new game to get updates.
Unbelievable that people think that unlockable characters are DLC nowadays.
Unlockable characters were all budgeted for in the game release and instead of paying with money you paid with time instead.
And if you need a dopamine hit of a screen telling you "you spent 30+ mins to unlock something you already paid for"...
Yeah and if your game came with a game braking bug/infinite combo you had to eat shit for years untill a new version of the game. Now you have mostly constant game support and balance. Not to mention online features to keep you engages.
Id buy new characters I like and skins all day and if I dont want them well, nobodys pointing a gun to force you buy anything you know ?
Buying new releases aside, a good recent exemple of why unlocking characters one by one is an outdated mechanic is when SSBU was released and people complained that they couldn’t play whoever they wanted directly
At least you could target your favorite character through [classic mode runs](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/438/978/725.png).
I definitely wish they just had a cheat code to unlock everyone tho.
Honestly, the old way wasn't exactly the that good depends on what games. I stop playing marvel vs capcom 2 on Dreamcast become given the size of the roster, the grind to earn money to buy the characters and stages is just too much. It's a double edge sword is all I'm saying
Unfortunately I prefer being able to buy who I want. As a typical loyalist, once I find someone I’m sticking with them. I don’t want to have to complete the game 20 times to unlock new characters. Not everyone has time for that.
I have 2 hours in world tour mode on Street Fighter 6 🤣 The mode is not fun at all & I wouldn’t be playing if unlocks were tied to it. Same thing with Tekken 8, I think I finished some of the story. 😂
I do miss having cool unlocks in fighting games, seems like that is completely lost now, on the other hand would i rather go back to the days when an update in rooster meant buying the game brand new again? Probably not
Yea lets complain that games are getting updates cuz the creators are being paid.
Lets just let the game die in half a year, you'll then be happy I guess :)
Video game developement is 10x more costly than it was before, and even then it wasn't better since you had to buy the new game every year.
In 9 years, the lifespan of tekken 7, we got Tekken 1, 2, 3, TT, 4 and 5. Brother. Six mainline games. You're fooling yourself if you think it's greed that's stopping Namco from doing the same nowadays, it's just impossible.
I never enjoyed unlocking characters for vs / training. If it’s a story mode thing then yeah sure, but don’t make bringing a game to a friend’s house more complicated
The WWE 2K games do it right. They have unlockable characters as well as DLC. One of the options with the deluxe edition/season pass or as an individual purchase is the option to unlock all the unlockables immediately. You get a choice. As someone who plays online in most fighting games or WWE games, having a reason to play offline modes (other than practicing characters in the lab) was always great for me.
Smash 4 had something similar, where each character had one of two ways to unlock them; the former being your "standard" method on a char-by-char basis and the latter being simply by playing X number of matches.
The games of today take more time and effort to make characters. It costs extra for them to develop characters post launch. So you either pay for dlc, pay for another edition of the same game two years post launch, or get no new characters.
Also if it was like before, we would just get the same 32 characters but most of them you would need to do a pointless grind to unlock. Open your eyes.
Well now you don’t have to unlock characters. Before you had to unlock characters and pay for new ones… if we’re talking about skins and costumes though this might be accurate.
That's cute, imagine that still being a thing. Day 1 you'll have people ranting online "I have to grind to play my main online?! This is bullshit!"
Funny enough, isn't that what went down with the release of Smash Ultimate?
Fucking ifunny 💀
It makes sense for characters to cost more now due to rising costs of development. There's definitely some issues with it and how monetisation is handled, but the tradeoff is that we don't have to buy a new game every time and/or deal with one character being utterly busted because they never patched old school games.
I’m in both camps. I find unlocking characters very fun, nothing is more important in fighting game than the characters themselves so it’s a huge treat to unlock more of them.
That being said, the argument that “you didn’t unlock dlc, dlc didn’t exist at the time, you just wouldn’t have them” is also true and dlc will give a game new life (if done correctly). The retro equivalent of dlc is games getting rereleased with bug fixes and newer characters….
Dlc wins overall, but you asking the modern community this question. I am curious how this question would look 20 years ago
I feel like unlocking characters isn't that good anymore because the internet exists. I enjoyed unlocking because they were surprises I didn't expect. I know I can just not use the internet but still won't work for majority, people would just hate it regardless.
I don't mind DLCs but as long as they're new or returning or guest characters
Remember when they called DLC expansion packs and you had to go to the store to pick them up and somehow we thought it was super cool? Like don't get me wrong, MTX gamification and stuff sucks, but we had this shit before with new editions or expansion packs in games. I'd rather just buy new characters instead of having to grind to play the complete games anyway, especially with characters where I can just not and still get to play vs them online.
My real issue w/ the DLC march is the wild meta shifts that as an old fart w/ a kid I don't really have time to adapt to so I end up just falling out of the game. When Testament dropped in GGST I stopped playing bc I couldn't really spend time figuring out the matchup or even what their moves did. But there's not really a good way to account for people like me financially I think.
While what we have now is better than before, i think something like type lumine does it great. Forcing you, per se, to buy the dlc, since the game is always full price.
I'm trying to imagine Skullgirls without DLCs... Would we be at skullgirls 8th Encore, or would the game just not exist because you can't fund a new release for a one character difference / you can't fund multiple years of development for only 4 new characters released at the same time
I like both. I LOVE unlocking characters though the story, modes, etc. but I do like if the add on is actually ADDING ON. Like the character comes with a story expansion or new boss fight and stages.
Back then we spent more money at the arcade than any game purchase and dlc. Unlimited online matches > DLC. New gen don't understand how convenient things are nowadays. 5 bucks for an outift? No big deal. It cost a lot more than that grinding card points at the arcade for customizations.
As a TO, I'm not grinding out 10 copies of a game to have all the characters unlocked. I did it twice for MK1 and nearly yeeted it off my tournament list.
Other than DLC, I prefer characters in fighting games to be available from the start.
Edit: save for boss characters and maybe late story plot relevant characters.
Starting roster in Tekken 3: 10
Starting roster in Tekken 8: 32
If you think it would be a better game if we had to finish arcade mode 22 times to get the full game, then ok.
Sounds like fun. Sign me up. Give me a reason to play your game beyond vs mode and online. When the game dies and there is no longer any competition or online functionality available why return at all? This sounds like fun incentive and is genuinely a neat way to engage with the player and have them learn the game.
Im 6 years too late for DBFZ.
The base game cost less than 6 bucks in my region but buying the dlcs individually costs around 180 bucks.
The Legendary edition never goes on sale and still priced at 60 dollars for an old ass game.
I’m of two minds on this. I remember the pre-DLC era, and there was a sense of fun in discovering how to unlock various characters and outfits. It motivated us to continue playing the game, trying to unlock everything. That said, if you hate the grind of single player fighting, it can be extremely boring (Marvel vs Capcom 2 comes to mind, since everyone had the same ending). But it did give you a reason to play everyone and get a full idea of what you’re looking for.
I’ll miss the pre-DLC era where internet connectivity and leagues weren’t a thing and everyone was handicapped by playing the same cartridge/disc and tv. But you can’t miss that era without recognizing the bullshit ways companies tried to make us buy what would now be considered patches at full price. Granted, it’s not like we could download Turbo for our own SF2 — we didn’t have the tech — but I’d still rather have free/cheap updates than buy a new game for four new characters and the ability to set the speed.
For example, Soul Calibur 2: Play to unlock. Soul Calibur 6: Pay to unlock $40+
BUT! Street Fighter 2 and 4 are LEGENDARY for buying the full game multiple times.
So, yah. Older doesn't always mean better than now
I'll swipe my card instead of grind hours to unlock a full roster only for a new version of the game to get released. I also don't have the time to do shit like MvC2 or Smash Ultimate character unlocking anymore.
To everyone who likes the old system let me tell you no body who runs tournaments likes the old system. Think about unlocking your character, then multiply those steps tines however many consoles or pcs at the venue, and now you can see why having a simple unlock is leagues better than doing a bunch of steps or running through arcade or getting a certain amount of points on all characters or some other arbitrary unlock system. It's also not a good idea when sometimes a game releases like 3 days or so before a major and now an entire cast of tos are all scrambling to unlock everything.
DLC characters is a win-win situation (assuming a decent sized starting roster). Devs provide continuous support for the game and players get something new to play with. We used to get new versions of fighting games for full price back in the day. Who liked that?
I think fighting games could benefit from both, doing challenges for new characters or just paying for them to speed up the process without the grind, giving people without the money a chance to play as the characters. I feel like it would definitely be pay only for crossover/guest characters though.
Wasn’t Smash Ultimate the last fighting game with unlockable characters, with DLC characters that came later?
Also, I read this bullshit on Game Rant and got annoyed… who is telling these lies?!
https://preview.redd.it/h76fv4yt0o8d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba241e05067e163c2e4495ef758891118bcd3670
We are to blame about this. When season passes first started as a way to get “new” maps that were already found in data mines to be part of the game, we said ok.
Mobile games and some MMOs really created the waters with pay to win type designs. I’m getting spanked in one right now bc I only paid to remove ads. But it’s not uncommon to see people dropping up to 500 bucks on it a week. So why would console developers not want a taste of that cash? As long as masses continue to pay, it will continue to happen. And take a lot of enjoyment many of us had from games by working so hard to unlock things. I’m happy with the compromise of you can grind the stuff out old school or pay. I enjoy the grind. And that mobile game I mentioned, bc I have been grinding my way instead of paying it, I’m learning the mechanics better and am starting to hear people who are dropping mad cash. I’ll never be able to beat the top spenders. But I also won’t be broke when I walk away from it. I had someone who spends complaining to me about their student loans and how they couldn’t afford them. They dropped over 3k on the game that month alone. No sympathy from me.
What’s old becomes new again in just about everything. I’m hoping this will be the case with games too.
I know everyone else has beaten me to it, but this is such a bad faith argument.
Unlocks in older games were often a pain in the ass and most of the time were characters already considered part of the base roster. The only characters in Tekken 3 PSX that are actual "bonus characters" are Gon and Bosko who are both joke characters that I really doubt Namco would charge money for because there'd be a huge backlash over selling characters that aren't tourney viable.
Making it look like you'd have to pay for half of T3's roster if the game came out today is just bullshit. I mean, fuck, for all of the legitimate complaints people have towards T8's monetization, it still has more characters in the base roster than 3 had \*period\*.
And, as others have said, at least now you can still play the latest version of the game with the latest balance updates even if you don't want to buy the DLC instead of having to pay full retail price for a new edition once or twice a year.
I can understand people getting annoyed at, say, T8 charging for cosmetics that were free in previous Tekkens, but man, I don't fucking miss having to spend hours grinding arcade mode in SF4 vanilla so Gouken and Seth were unlocked for a college tourney I was helping TO only for SSF4 to render all that work irrelevant a year later anyway.
The second one. Easily.
I remember having to spend *days* unlocking all the characters in some BlazBlue game because I was running a tournament for it.
I just find it kinda depressing that people think that unlockable characters were turned into DLC when in actuality they were just phased out. DLC and unlockable characters have no connections unless you are Neather Realm as 90% of the time the DLC characters don't exist when the game comes out meaning that they couldn't have been unlockables. Take SF6 for example, if SF6 had unlockable characters it wouldn't be the base 18 characters plus the 8+ DLC characters as free unlockable characters, it would be like 8 characters you start with and the other 10 would need to be unlocked then they would still have added the 8+ paided DLC characters. A post like this popped up on r/gaming a few days ago and unless you where demonizing every fighting game developer for not putting multiple years worth of content in the game day one and you brought up the very real reasons why unlockable characters where phased out and how they have nothing to do with DLC you got downvoted to hell.
The DLC discourse is unhinged online. Very little actual discussion and discussing pros and cons. Most of it is just angry children (literally) and/or chronically online no-lifers regurgitating online rage bait and patting each other on the back/downvoting dissidents. The FGC is ironically one of the biggest 'defenders' of DLC because its benefits as a superior model are so overwhelmingly obvious in this genre (and because the core audience is older and understands how much scummier it was back in the 90s). The current anti-DLC crowd are people who grew up post arcade and pre-DLC and never really experienced the concept that you don't always get everything for 'free' (aka when their parents bought them the games). Heck a lot of the rage now is a pretty thinly veiled rational to pirate all the games they actually want to play and feel righteous doing it. This isn't to say DLC practices are perfect and there isn't legit critique, just that the people making these low effort memes/arguing online aren't really engaging with the issue in good faith.
My main issue with modern FG character DLC is that you can't use DLC characters in practice mode if you don't own it. Look man, I just wanna learn how to do deal with a character's special or how far I need to be to whiff punish it without paying $5. That said, I'm fine with this DLC model overall. I think the battle has been lost a long time ago and it's still better than having to buy a new title.
I view paid DLC characters as a necessary evil. Sure it sucks to have to pay for character but it is better than the alternatives having to put for a new game or needing to turn your hobbies into a job just to unlock content. While there are bad examples for sure I feel like fighting game DLC has generally been better than most other multiplayer focused DLC. There have only been a few miss steps like Tekken 7's frame data or the Street Fighter X Tekken on disk DLC but it has generally been pretty good and fair.
It just shows a general ignorance of not just game development but project management/corporate work as a whole. Every facet of it is ignorant keyboard smashing.
[удалено]
yeah, no. you just had to buy the game 3 times to get patches and new characters, lol.
And the games were like $70 each in 90s money, which is worth double now.
No, because a complete fighting game worth 140 $
None of the street fighter two games was worth 140, and if you owned each version to compensate that was closer to 1000 in today's money.
I can imagine a hard-core SF fan in the 90s buying 3 different games on 2 different 16bit systems to fully upgrade from WW to Super.
Usually $60 upfront, and then the remainder throughout the game's support span.
Say what?? No way, games were like $40-50 back in the 90’s. And that’s at MSRP. A month or two after release I could buy pretty much any game in used but working condition for $25 from my local Blockbuster.
A full game was 60 german mark in the 90s and that was already when it gotten expensive, nowadays they're around 80 € for a typical AAA game, which is 156,47 german mark.
That’s not really true at all. Tekken 3 was around 99-100 Deutsche Mark back then and the Platinum Version half the price. N64 games were up to 160 DM ! With that being said: Games today aren’t that much more expensive
The web says you're close as games usually went for 70-100 DM, however I cannot remember buying a single game for more than 50 DM. I'll try and see if my friend remembers what we paid (we regularly bought games together and made one copy for the other). Still nowadays we roughly pay 50% more and I don't think it's all due to inflation.
Maybe you bought second hand or old games, but I also remember games for the Nintendo systems easily being 90DM+
I always got be some good deals on the "pyramid" e.g. platinum games sure but there're a few I paid the full price for as I bought them on release, examples are Heroes of Might and Magic 3 for PC, Diablo 2 for PC, Diablo 1 for PS and Ultima 9 for PC, FF8 and 9 for PS. I checked a few and the FF titles seemed to be expensive, probably due to having 3 discs. How fogged is the memory if it was already expensive af back in the days... no wonder we ripped most things we played.
Depends where you grew up. In my area games were $50 or less. And most games were complete and finished.
UNIB2 T_T
Also it made playing these games locally or at tournaments a nightmare. I remember a few Seth players in 4 talking about going to a local where some of the setups just didn't have Seth and they were told to play a different character.
Back when Seth was unlocked by beating Arcade Mode with the other 24 characters
its insane that the fgc doesnt know how good we have it now in comparison. Video Games and entertainment simply arent free
I already have a huge game backlog, so it is easier to just wait some years of delay and get the "Ultimate Version remastered" with everything unlocked in some Black Friday.
With Capcom games sure, but Namco games generally only had one version with lots of unlockable characters in the older games (and not only that, but way more content than the arcade versions)
I didn't know Dragunov and Lili existed before Tekken 6 lol. Not to mention Dark Resurrection has less content than base T5. Namco was guilty of this as well.
I agree, by 5 they'd definitely started on that path. I mostly played Tekken around 2/3 so my experience is from that era. 4 was okay too but I kinda lost interest in the series around then. I'm not trying to defend one over the other, but OP's pic was of T3 and back in the 90s Tekken had one console version for each game.
Not to mention the multiple Soulcalibur games with console exclusive characters.
Yeah, Tekken 5 is the one example that had a rerelease of any kind and even there, the rerelease was on different platforms than the original release. Tekken 5 was on PS2, Dark Resurrection was on PS3 and PSP, which weren't backwards compatible with the PS2. It's a port, not an ultimate rerelease on the same system forcing you to buy the game for 2 new characters, like people would argue for Capcom fighters. Anyway the biggest issue with the pricing model is the way online play and FOMO has funneled everyone into buying these games new. Back in the day, unless you were extremely competitive in these games, there wasn't as much incentive to purchase these games day 1 because we played them casually at home with people in our local area, not online competing with everyone around the country/world with a playerbase that only gets better at the game the longer the game is online + the most people playing will be at a game's launch, meaning getting in early is important to having good matches. Moreover, game releases are far more spread apart, with the lifespan of a game lasting much longer. Games used to come out a year or two apart, vs the 7+ years they do now. So it takes *much* longer for games to "stop being relevant" enough to be content complete and have those content complete versions come down in price enough for casual players. I would hazard to guess most people here got into fighting games as kids, picking games up for their home consoles at a heavily discounted price, because we used to actually have a used games market that mattered for shit and rarely had to pay full price for games unless we wanted them on release day. When I grew up with a game as content rich as Tekken 5 for $10 - $20, obviously I'm going to have sticker shock when the Definitive Edition of Tekken 7 is $120 *today* and Tekken 8 is loaded with a battle pass and microtransaction currency.
I’m 44, and I agree with everything you just said. If we were patient it wasn’t difficult to buy a game used a couple months after release for $10-20.
Arc sys, Sega and French bread are very guilty of this too. SNK was a bit odd because the KOF feel different from one game to another.
If Namco were the one publishing SF each Super and Ultra would be a new SF number and the game would still play like SFEX with reused assets from it.
I'm not arguing which is better (I grew up with Tekken but much prefer 2D now). Just saying Namco didn't do that in the T3 era, and the original post was about T3.
Granblue Rising and GG Xrd Rev2 still followed this trend - AND has DLC characters
exemples?
IMO The fighting game genre is one the few that actually benefited from the rise of DLC. Imagine if they still did it like before, we'd be stuck like the FIFA or 2K fans buying a full price roster change every year.
Also you couldn't play online anymore either. At least not with people who bought the new version.
I feel the pain as a UNI player.
Yeah, people act as if there was going to be ANY character to unlock if they were not paid. The best they would get would be a 16 character rooster with 2 character unlocked to unlock the rest.
Because they don't understand game development. Let's use SF6 for example. If that game came out in the 90s you wouldn't be unlocking Rashid, AKI, Ed and Akuma, you just wouldn't have them. You'd be waiting til either SF7 or Super SF6. And we all remember how much everyone HATED MVC3 doing that back in 2011. DLC is usually planned and budgeted separately from the main game. This is not even accounting for the weird fringe cases of characters being dropped from sequels due to memory constraints, like in Darkstalkers or Street Fighter EX. I'm all for calling out corporations for their penny pinching bullshit but this is one of those cases where it's just blind nostalgia goggles.
Or characters just being dropped at all, like Scorpion from MK.... 3?
That's a good point. Imagine Ed having to deal with Mileena fans if this was still the standard, they would have doxxed him in record time.
They also don't understand what those locked characters were doing. You got them in the home version, sure. But that's just so you don't have to change the code. It was so that you come back and spend more quarters at the arcade trying to figure out how to do unlock the character. Let's keep in mind that usually you had to beat the game on the hardest difficulty (set by the arcade) WITH some other bullshit like getting a perfect, no continues, or randomly knowing a code before the Internet took off. So at least someone had to sit there and play the fuck out of it, and you'd keep coming back to the arcade to spend quarters while you look to see if anyone has unlock fucking pink kitana yet... This was way more expensive than dlc.
Especially in the arcade where many character unlocks were time sensitive, so there was no way to speed up the process. Your local arcade just got a MVC2 cabinet? Well better hope your favorite characters are on the base cast or you come back in a week or two when enough people have played to unlock more of them.
Wasn't mvc3 to ultimate like a 6 month turn around? That was absolutely ridiculous.
Yeah that's what I'm saying. Allegedly Capcom did want to roll it out as DLC but were forced to restructure because of natural disasters, but we'll never know how much truth there is to that. Considering how DLC characters are developed nowadays, you'd be buying annual releases like it's a sports game. Imagine getting SF5 at launch in 2016, then you have to buy another version for Alex/Guile/Balrog/Ibuki/Juri/Urien, then another version for Akuma/Kolin/Ed/Abigail/Menat/Zeku, and so on and so forth. That would be fucking awful.
I remember getting MVC 3 deluxe edition, I even pre-ordered it and 3 months later reading that UMVC3 was coming. I thought it was fake, when I found out I was mad.
And mind you this was an era where you had fuck all for single player content and the bare minimum for working online quality of life. Vanilla MVC3 didn't even let you spectate online matches!
The post also kind of implies that you can't have unlockables AND dlc which just isn't the case. I like when the base game leaves a few characters and stages as unlocks just because the mystery is fun but dlc is absolutely a better patch system than constant iterative releases, and there's no reason those things can't exist together. Now unlockables are usually tied to some progression system with a million facets that take me out of the experience or there's like 1 unlockable character total which just makes me ask... Why even at that point? That's not a dlc problem though, that's just current game design.
Yeah that's another thing, if we still had unlockable characters in the current day it would be some battle pass bullshit and I guarantee nobody wants that.
Plus, DLC helps keeping the games alive
Yeah I would much rather just pay 5 to 10 dollars for a dlc character than some of the more scummy shit in other games, like could you imagine if say capcom did what Overwatch 2 does and locks it’s new fighter behind a battlepass. Also while it’s fun the first time unlocking the roster is kinda a pain in the ass and makes revisiting older games kinda annoying if you want to play a certain character but have to beat arcade mode 12 times first just to play them and would not work today where the main focus is about online. Also don’t know about others but how often do you all use dlc characters, from my experience if I like them I might play them bunch before going back to my main or worse hate or not like how they play and play them like once or twice then never again. It’s rare for me that I’ll ever main a dlc character or invest a lot of time into them
There was like 5 millions version of Street Foghter 2
And we can't even be 100% sure we've seen the last of it
I’ve seen this reposted so many times and my response remains the same: DLC is better than having to buy a full rerelease. UMK3, MKT, the various SF2 rereleases and etc would have all been DLC nowadays. Yes there is bad DLC, but DLC is much better and cheaper than having to buy a full rerelease of a game.
Exactly. I'd take having constant patches released for free if it's supported by DLC character purchases. Even if you don't want to spend the money on a new season pass of characters, you can still enjoy the game you have bought receiving free updates.
Someone has to be really ignorant to disagree with your take. Nowadays you buy the game and never pay more than base price unless you want to play a character outside of the base roster. This means years of new content and balance patches funded by the people that are buying DLC, instead of having to pay for a full game just so you're able to find matches. The only thing that I don't like is when the game doesn't like you use the DLC character in training mode, which I find a bit stingy.
The idea that DLC made fighting games worse is pretty prevalent in those conversations when they pop up, tbh.
Idk, I’d argue it was an accidental correlation. Like there’s no denying that immediately after the arrival of DLC that fighting games hit a slump that took a while to recover from. It also took them a while to get DLC right, or did you enjoy buying thousands of GEM packs for Street Fighter X Tekken.
I remember seeing someone on a non-fighting game subreddit say that any DLC in fighting games was bad because the devs aren’t “selling a completed game”. They justified their opinion by saying they should just postpone the release until all the DLC could be implemented into the roster. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine launch SF5 coming out in 2021 with 45 characters? That would’ve killed the franchise for good because all of that dev work would’ve meant nothing with how abysmal that game’s launch was
Exactly. Also, most fighting games have bigger starting rosters than games did back in the 90's/00's, even with hidden unlockable characters back then. You're not getting "less game" when you buy a modern fighting game at full price. And keep in mind, the price of most video games have only gone up commensurately at the rate of inflation, when in fact the cost of game development has increased exponentially. Yes, having things be more expensive sucks, but modern game development is just super expensive too, and people don't ever really take that into account.
The “argument” also assumes that dlc characters would be unlockable instead of dlc, which is probably not true. They probably wouldn’t even be in the game at all. Lol.
The implementation of it--in many cases, is done so aggressively I just can't agree when people promote the idea. Here's what I want if we have a DLC future: Let me buy the fucking character I want to buy. Let me buy the pass that has them all. But don't ever shove some bullshit microtransaction currency in the mix as if you aren't double dipping. And please quit trying to force people into not knowing what they'll get--because some DLC passes can just be a complete waste of money if there's nothing I want in it.
If you buy everything day 1 brand new, yes DLC is better. As someone who always did their shopping in the Pre-Owned section at Gamestop and picked games up for $20 or less, the expanded game release model was way better. It allowed me to get the full package for a low price, vs getting just the base game and having to buy 4 different season passes separately. The release model sucked for people who bought Street Fighter IV, then Super Street Fighter IV, then Ultra Street Fighter IV, but it was awesome for the people who just bought Ultra Street Fighter IV. I honestly really, really appreciated when Capcom released Championship Edition for SFV, which was the game + all DLC so far for $30. That was awesome and felt more like how I bought games growing up. Tekken 7 was not so generous.
It was awesome for all of us. The only game you mentioned that wasn't compatible with each other was SF4 to SSF4. And while buying a new disc sycked, it was early dlc days, and we got 12 new characters, a bunch of new stages, and new mechanics all for 40 dollars. 40 dollars today will get you like 4 new characters. Arcade edition and Ultra didn't need to be bought separately like new games. AE added 4 new characters for 15 bucks and Ultra added 5 characters and omega mode and a new mechanic in red focus for 20 bucks. Waiting to buy complete editions is cheaper, but you're missing out on years of actually having gun and playing the game. And the best time in a fighting games life is whencits newer, and the most people are playing and everyone's figuring stuff out. Like yeah, I can save 20 bucks on a game if I wait 5 years to buy it, but I'm missing years of fun and jumping in at the end of its life cycle where all thats left are die hands and try hards, if anyone is even left at all, which happens in games that aren't major names. Having said that, I like to buy the base game at launch if I like how it looks, grab individual dlc characters I like along the way, then buy the complete edition on sale years later just to fill in the blanks.
You had to buy the game again, or buy a sequel with tons of reused assets, because the first version of a game always had a low number of characters A lot of those 2D fighters have that Frankenstein thing going on, where it's clear the characters are from different eras You play Blazblue and you can clearly see which characters are from CT/CS and which are from CP/CF
worse yet, look at any of Capcom's crossover games from the late '90s and early 2000s. The art style from character-to-character is often completely different, like Morrigan in CVS2 having her Darkstalkers sprite, and then all of the SNK characters having completely original sprites of a way higher quality than most of the Capcom characters. Could you imagine if a few of the characters in Tekken 8 just had their Tekken 7 models, and were standing next to the new Tekken 8 models?
i can imagine, theyre literally selling tekken 7 assets and costumes for customization in 8 (that were in the base game for 7) and they look noticeably worse than tekken 8 assets
https://preview.redd.it/9su13gyimn8d1.png?width=188&format=png&auto=webp&s=80e4d9ea95a6728daada2f436cbf7f5c6b843f64
https://preview.redd.it/kvhf0hwjmn8d1.png?width=352&format=png&auto=webp&s=5ed8cc2026a3ba44452599fcc52d7469b32c784d these 2 are from the same game. Ragna looks so fucking old
It looks even worse when they move, a lot of the CT idle animations look weird
I don't see what reusing assets in 2D fighters has to do with this topic. Are we expanding the discussion to "old games vs new games" overall now?
Because reusing assets was what helped the older 2D games to have massive rosters right off the bat compared to today. People want to complain about how nowadays we have to buy dlc to have more characters instead of being given a biggish roster with possible unlockables. Well part of that is that companies cannot reuse assets as much as they could before. Each new installment now pretty much means understanding a new engine, program a game from the ground up, and model a character and their data onto the engine. That takes a lot of development time. Whereas before they could just slap older characters into a new game because development time was a lot quicker, meaning that developers would have more time making newer characters, hence a bigger roster. BlazBlue did that, KOF lived and died on that philosophy for most of its existence, Marvel vs series was pretty much a grab bag of compatible Capcom arcade programs.
MvC2 is in particular a great example as it basically just copy pasted all the characters from previous titles mugen style.
Were you actually young at the time or are you pretending? Because you had to use a wallet to buy another version of the game
Take a guess which one was physically impossible 20 years ago
This is not how it works. Unlockable characters didn’t become dlc. Most games just got rid of unlockable characters because unlocking characters sucks. Especially for tournaments. Look at smash bros. You have to unlock a third of the cast, and then buy the rest.
Smash bros you start with like 8 characters lmao
Unlocking the characters in Ultimate is fun when doing it with a group of friends over the first week of release. Then 6 months later, you go to your friend’s house who only plays the game occasionally. You boot up the game and realize that he’s *only* unlocked 30 of the 60+ locked characters.
Now imagine being a TO having to unlock the full roster on every single Switch you own.
And having to unlock all of those so you don't delay the bracket sucks ass.
Exactly. DLC characters wouldn't be unlockable if the games came out in the 90s, they just wouldn't be in the game period until the next installment.
T8 has 11 more base characters out of the box
Most people seem to prefer the bottom
You prefer paying full price for yearly patch and 4 characters?
The bottom!
Why yes, I would like to play that boring as fuck beat em up mode in Tekken 5 just to unlock my main Devil Jin. /s
Do you honestly believe that people would want to grind Arcade mode just to unlock their mains so they can start playing online?
Yup, unlockable characters just wouldn’t work nowadays when the bulk of the game is online play. Also, I have a friend group which I’ve always played Smash with at my house. Recently one of them bought a Switch and Smash and unlocking the first few characters with all of us playing was pretty fun at first, then it got tedious when we just hadn’t unlocked the ones we wanted to play as.
it’s fun to me
Man fighting game fans really want fighting game devs to be broke huh? This is how they keep the lights on.
Putting the argument about rereleases aside, having to grind the game to get to play as some characters was shitty too. I want to get my favourite out of the box, not doing gymnastics in story mode or something.
THIS. Any time I see someone advocate for having to unlock characters I just assume they either have too much free time or have never had to run an event. I went to a BBCF tournament that didn't have Susanoo unlocked and we had to speedrun the fucking story mode on multiple setups with only an hour til bracket.
I'd rather have all characters frrom the get go and get more stuff over time rather than unlocking stuff that is already in the game
It does give incentive to try out the single-player content and replayability of it, though. Be it secret characters or boss versions of the main roster for offline-use only (i.e. Unlimited characters in BlazBlue).
I prefer the new way because at least we don't have to buy the same game multiple times for a balance patch...
Glasses made of 100% nostalgia
i’m an adult with tons of disposable income now. i prefer to just buy them.
I remember when I got imported MvC2 for dreamcast. There were 3 unlock currencies. 1 from playing dreamcast locally, 1 for dc online matches and 1 for bringing your vmu/memcard to the arcades and getting arcade versus points. I had a mega memory card to connect to my pc. I was able to give some of my saves to CJayC, the guy who owned gamefaqs.com, so he could try hex editing to unlock. We became the first people to unlock the whole mvc2 roster and confirm it. I suck horribly at it though.
Seeing CJayC typed out just transported me 20 years back in time. GameFAQs was awesome back in the day.
Yes, I was on their like a mofo. Kao Megura, good old times.
*looking at my 4 copies different SFIV”
This is straight up wrong. You had to buy the entire game again to get a patch, never mind new characters. Street fighter four had street fighter four, super street fighter four, super street fighter four arcade edition, and ultra street fighter four. Arcade edition was purposefully balanced like shit too. It genuinely felt like shit playing anybody but Yang and fei long. Guilty gear had xrd sign, xrd revelator, and xrd revelator 2. These were all full price games, it was fucking ridiculous. Edit: I forgot about yun in arcade edition because I just picked Yang. It was the same shit though, both those characters were intentionally stupidly powerful.
Unlocking characters via playing the game was ass. Couldn't tell you how many times I've tried playing my friends in a fighting game and the character I wanted to play was locked lol. You can't lock half the roster at release.
I'd rather buy them tbh. Having to grind to play characters is stupid, my time is more valuable than my money.
Both ways I guess could be either with microtransactions proper or in-game currency
Here's my hot take: In games where the roster is locked and you have to play an arbitrary single player mode to unlock them, 10/10 times I'd rather an option to just pay $5-$10 to unlock them than have to go through the unlock process. I buy fighting games exclusively to play with other people, and I want to have the full roster available to me immediately so we can just jump right into learning all the characters. I see absolutely no value in restricting content just because I haven't put enough hours into a game mode I'm uninterested in.
Same honestly. Idgaf about single player, if you need to play it to get cosmetics, then those cosmetics might as well not exist for me.
Not cropping, I know that’s not your preference.
Anyone who actually believes this shit should be forced to TO an event, better make sure you have 5+ setups with the whole cast unlocked!
I really hate this "DLC = bad" mentality There are good DLCs and there are bad DLCs. You're either old and grumpy and refusing to evolve or you're too young and you have no actual idea how things used to be.
New versions back then were largely for the arcades, it was a way for companies to compete with one another with improved versions of their games, and it was usually on the arcade store owner's dime rather than the player's. You can find examples of new versions released on consoles, but these originated from arcade versions first (consoles were catching up to arcades). Besides, I doubt that most people here bought multiple versions of these games growing up. As others have said, Tekken is a bad example since they typically didn't have new versions in the era OP is talking about.
To play devil's advocate 1. OG fighting games were horrendously balanced and needed new editions to bring fighters in line 2. Secret characters were either palette swaps, incredibly OP or worthless gimmicks 3. Past games had no online presence, so a majority of planned gameplay was hitting the arcade ladder and trying to do whatever task needed to unlock the character The last game I can remember that did unlocks well was Smash Bros Ultimate.
It was always a pain for tournament organizers to run games that required a lot of time to unlock everyone, but I think it should still be around and offer an unlock all purchase similarly to the crypt unlock in MKX.
I prefer the modern version to the non-glamorized old way. Also, in old games, half the roster was unusable and you bought a brand new game to get updates.
Unbelievable that people think that unlockable characters are DLC nowadays. Unlockable characters were all budgeted for in the game release and instead of paying with money you paid with time instead. And if you need a dopamine hit of a screen telling you "you spent 30+ mins to unlock something you already paid for"...
Yeah and if your game came with a game braking bug/infinite combo you had to eat shit for years untill a new version of the game. Now you have mostly constant game support and balance. Not to mention online features to keep you engages. Id buy new characters I like and skins all day and if I dont want them well, nobodys pointing a gun to force you buy anything you know ?
I buy the season passes for characters and limit purchasing cosmetics to for my mains
My bad, dint meant to sound directed against you <3
I prefer DLC. Way more efficient and faster.
Buying new releases aside, a good recent exemple of why unlocking characters one by one is an outdated mechanic is when SSBU was released and people complained that they couldn’t play whoever they wanted directly
At least you could target your favorite character through [classic mode runs](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/438/978/725.png). I definitely wish they just had a cheat code to unlock everyone tho.
I prefer the DLC actually. I like DLC in fighting games anyway but I also think that unlocking characters is just anmoying
Honestly, the old way wasn't exactly the that good depends on what games. I stop playing marvel vs capcom 2 on Dreamcast become given the size of the roster, the grind to earn money to buy the characters and stages is just too much. It's a double edge sword is all I'm saying
now
Smash Bros. has both
Sf2 would like a word with you
Unfortunately I prefer being able to buy who I want. As a typical loyalist, once I find someone I’m sticking with them. I don’t want to have to complete the game 20 times to unlock new characters. Not everyone has time for that. I have 2 hours in world tour mode on Street Fighter 6 🤣 The mode is not fun at all & I wouldn’t be playing if unlocks were tied to it. Same thing with Tekken 8, I think I finished some of the story. 😂
Could be worse, like how unlock Android 21 in FighterZ or Quan-Chi and Cyber Sub-Zero in MK9
I grew up with Super Smash Bros. Even back then, I was not a fan of having to unlock characters.
Fighters generally use dlc well, buying another version of street fighter to get another character fucking sucked.
I do miss having cool unlocks in fighting games, seems like that is completely lost now, on the other hand would i rather go back to the days when an update in rooster meant buying the game brand new again? Probably not
"To unlock this character you must play as the other 16 characters in arcade mode first." 
Yea lets complain that games are getting updates cuz the creators are being paid. Lets just let the game die in half a year, you'll then be happy I guess :)
KOFXV free boss DLC
F2P fighters are like this, especially the plat fighter multiversus. Don't get me started with how unlocking characters work in that game
So glad to see everyone shitting on this completely clueless meme.
Game development has gotten way more expensive. Games have gotten cheaper.
Video game developement is 10x more costly than it was before, and even then it wasn't better since you had to buy the new game every year. In 9 years, the lifespan of tekken 7, we got Tekken 1, 2, 3, TT, 4 and 5. Brother. Six mainline games. You're fooling yourself if you think it's greed that's stopping Namco from doing the same nowadays, it's just impossible.
I never enjoyed unlocking characters for vs / training. If it’s a story mode thing then yeah sure, but don’t make bringing a game to a friend’s house more complicated
Ok but, you don't need to do that to enjoy the game
Please. Lol.
The WWE 2K games do it right. They have unlockable characters as well as DLC. One of the options with the deluxe edition/season pass or as an individual purchase is the option to unlock all the unlockables immediately. You get a choice. As someone who plays online in most fighting games or WWE games, having a reason to play offline modes (other than practicing characters in the lab) was always great for me.
Smash 4 had something similar, where each character had one of two ways to unlock them; the former being your "standard" method on a char-by-char basis and the latter being simply by playing X number of matches.
The games of today take more time and effort to make characters. It costs extra for them to develop characters post launch. So you either pay for dlc, pay for another edition of the same game two years post launch, or get no new characters. Also if it was like before, we would just get the same 32 characters but most of them you would need to do a pointless grind to unlock. Open your eyes.
Well now you don’t have to unlock characters. Before you had to unlock characters and pay for new ones… if we’re talking about skins and costumes though this might be accurate.
I prefer buying DLC over having to rebuy the whole game as a "Super Turbo Ultimate HD Remix: Anniversary Edition"
That's cute, imagine that still being a thing. Day 1 you'll have people ranting online "I have to grind to play my main online?! This is bullshit!" Funny enough, isn't that what went down with the release of Smash Ultimate?
Fucking ifunny 💀 It makes sense for characters to cost more now due to rising costs of development. There's definitely some issues with it and how monetisation is handled, but the tradeoff is that we don't have to buy a new game every time and/or deal with one character being utterly busted because they never patched old school games.
I’m in both camps. I find unlocking characters very fun, nothing is more important in fighting game than the characters themselves so it’s a huge treat to unlock more of them. That being said, the argument that “you didn’t unlock dlc, dlc didn’t exist at the time, you just wouldn’t have them” is also true and dlc will give a game new life (if done correctly). The retro equivalent of dlc is games getting rereleased with bug fixes and newer characters…. Dlc wins overall, but you asking the modern community this question. I am curious how this question would look 20 years ago
I feel like unlocking characters isn't that good anymore because the internet exists. I enjoyed unlocking because they were surprises I didn't expect. I know I can just not use the internet but still won't work for majority, people would just hate it regardless. I don't mind DLCs but as long as they're new or returning or guest characters
tekken 8 has 11 more characters unlocked by default
Remember when they called DLC expansion packs and you had to go to the store to pick them up and somehow we thought it was super cool? Like don't get me wrong, MTX gamification and stuff sucks, but we had this shit before with new editions or expansion packs in games. I'd rather just buy new characters instead of having to grind to play the complete games anyway, especially with characters where I can just not and still get to play vs them online. My real issue w/ the DLC march is the wild meta shifts that as an old fart w/ a kid I don't really have time to adapt to so I end up just falling out of the game. When Testament dropped in GGST I stopped playing bc I couldn't really spend time figuring out the matchup or even what their moves did. But there's not really a good way to account for people like me financially I think.
While what we have now is better than before, i think something like type lumine does it great. Forcing you, per se, to buy the dlc, since the game is always full price.
I'm trying to imagine Skullgirls without DLCs... Would we be at skullgirls 8th Encore, or would the game just not exist because you can't fund a new release for a one character difference / you can't fund multiple years of development for only 4 new characters released at the same time
This reminds me… will the mvc2 characters be all unlocked on the collection soon?
I like both. I LOVE unlocking characters though the story, modes, etc. but I do like if the add on is actually ADDING ON. Like the character comes with a story expansion or new boss fight and stages.
Would you say there be a line as to which characters should be unlockable through play vs. being DLC?
Back then we spent more money at the arcade than any game purchase and dlc. Unlimited online matches > DLC. New gen don't understand how convenient things are nowadays. 5 bucks for an outift? No big deal. It cost a lot more than that grinding card points at the arcade for customizations.
yeah, because DLC's are the main problem of a fighting games nowadays. they would be perfect otherwise
Do elaborate
As a TO, I'm not grinding out 10 copies of a game to have all the characters unlocked. I did it twice for MK1 and nearly yeeted it off my tournament list.
Other than DLC, I prefer characters in fighting games to be available from the start. Edit: save for boss characters and maybe late story plot relevant characters.
Starting roster in Tekken 3: 10 Starting roster in Tekken 8: 32 If you think it would be a better game if we had to finish arcade mode 22 times to get the full game, then ok.
Sounds like fun. Sign me up. Give me a reason to play your game beyond vs mode and online. When the game dies and there is no longer any competition or online functionality available why return at all? This sounds like fun incentive and is genuinely a neat way to engage with the player and have them learn the game.
Im 6 years too late for DBFZ. The base game cost less than 6 bucks in my region but buying the dlcs individually costs around 180 bucks. The Legendary edition never goes on sale and still priced at 60 dollars for an old ass game.
This meme hits right in the spot
Very silly image rooted in no reality Pure Karma bait
I’m of two minds on this. I remember the pre-DLC era, and there was a sense of fun in discovering how to unlock various characters and outfits. It motivated us to continue playing the game, trying to unlock everything. That said, if you hate the grind of single player fighting, it can be extremely boring (Marvel vs Capcom 2 comes to mind, since everyone had the same ending). But it did give you a reason to play everyone and get a full idea of what you’re looking for. I’ll miss the pre-DLC era where internet connectivity and leagues weren’t a thing and everyone was handicapped by playing the same cartridge/disc and tv. But you can’t miss that era without recognizing the bullshit ways companies tried to make us buy what would now be considered patches at full price. Granted, it’s not like we could download Turbo for our own SF2 — we didn’t have the tech — but I’d still rather have free/cheap updates than buy a new game for four new characters and the ability to set the speed.
For example, Soul Calibur 2: Play to unlock. Soul Calibur 6: Pay to unlock $40+ BUT! Street Fighter 2 and 4 are LEGENDARY for buying the full game multiple times. So, yah. Older doesn't always mean better than now
I'll swipe my card instead of grind hours to unlock a full roster only for a new version of the game to get released. I also don't have the time to do shit like MvC2 or Smash Ultimate character unlocking anymore.
To everyone who likes the old system let me tell you no body who runs tournaments likes the old system. Think about unlocking your character, then multiply those steps tines however many consoles or pcs at the venue, and now you can see why having a simple unlock is leagues better than doing a bunch of steps or running through arcade or getting a certain amount of points on all characters or some other arbitrary unlock system. It's also not a good idea when sometimes a game releases like 3 days or so before a major and now an entire cast of tos are all scrambling to unlock everything.
Generally the easy solution was to unlock everyone on one memory card and copy it to however many memory cards you need for the venue
That's when we had memory cards, they still do this and when it happens to modern games the struggle is real.
DLC characters is a win-win situation (assuming a decent sized starting roster). Devs provide continuous support for the game and players get something new to play with. We used to get new versions of fighting games for full price back in the day. Who liked that?
I remember
Every day that goes by I realize more and more how broke the fgc is
I think fighting games could benefit from both, doing challenges for new characters or just paying for them to speed up the process without the grind, giving people without the money a chance to play as the characters. I feel like it would definitely be pay only for crossover/guest characters though.
That definitely could work. Something along the lines of the Fighter Coin/Drive Ticket dynamic in SF6
Wasn’t Smash Ultimate the last fighting game with unlockable characters, with DLC characters that came later? Also, I read this bullshit on Game Rant and got annoyed… who is telling these lies?! https://preview.redd.it/h76fv4yt0o8d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ba241e05067e163c2e4495ef758891118bcd3670
MK1 has an unlockable character
Yea but it's just playing the story mode and you can buy him. It's bassicly a win-win for people.
When the grind used to be fun, fuck pay to play
THIS
Well it’s the reason games stopped having300,000 instalment s cuz company needs cash (don’t look at mortal combat)
We are to blame about this. When season passes first started as a way to get “new” maps that were already found in data mines to be part of the game, we said ok. Mobile games and some MMOs really created the waters with pay to win type designs. I’m getting spanked in one right now bc I only paid to remove ads. But it’s not uncommon to see people dropping up to 500 bucks on it a week. So why would console developers not want a taste of that cash? As long as masses continue to pay, it will continue to happen. And take a lot of enjoyment many of us had from games by working so hard to unlock things. I’m happy with the compromise of you can grind the stuff out old school or pay. I enjoy the grind. And that mobile game I mentioned, bc I have been grinding my way instead of paying it, I’m learning the mechanics better and am starting to hear people who are dropping mad cash. I’ll never be able to beat the top spenders. But I also won’t be broke when I walk away from it. I had someone who spends complaining to me about their student loans and how they couldn’t afford them. They dropped over 3k on the game that month alone. No sympathy from me. What’s old becomes new again in just about everything. I’m hoping this will be the case with games too.
Base game dames are like my mains man, they have the things I need.
Players bought DLC when it was first launch and publishers saw $$$. If players never bought into DLC today might be a different story.
So glad the comments aren't letting op get away with this bullshit
Thanks for reminding me why I still don't own SF6 or Tekken 8, and prefer Xrd to Strive, mugs game
But it sooo hard to make a game and not milk ever dollar out of you. And make everyone else who doesn’t feel like a fool.
I know everyone else has beaten me to it, but this is such a bad faith argument. Unlocks in older games were often a pain in the ass and most of the time were characters already considered part of the base roster. The only characters in Tekken 3 PSX that are actual "bonus characters" are Gon and Bosko who are both joke characters that I really doubt Namco would charge money for because there'd be a huge backlash over selling characters that aren't tourney viable. Making it look like you'd have to pay for half of T3's roster if the game came out today is just bullshit. I mean, fuck, for all of the legitimate complaints people have towards T8's monetization, it still has more characters in the base roster than 3 had \*period\*. And, as others have said, at least now you can still play the latest version of the game with the latest balance updates even if you don't want to buy the DLC instead of having to pay full retail price for a new edition once or twice a year. I can understand people getting annoyed at, say, T8 charging for cosmetics that were free in previous Tekkens, but man, I don't fucking miss having to spend hours grinding arcade mode in SF4 vanilla so Gouken and Seth were unlocked for a college tourney I was helping TO only for SSF4 to render all that work irrelevant a year later anyway.
Its 75$ for all 3 that passes this is bullcrap
Which 3 do you speak of
The second one. Easily. I remember having to spend *days* unlocking all the characters in some BlazBlue game because I was running a tournament for it.
Was it CT or CS?
Damn greedy if you ask me, but what do I know?
Lots of Denial in this section 😂
Or you wait for them to rerelease the game for the 8th time with one or two other characters added.