The Biggest Problem with Patches in Fighting Games - lightslingergame.com

The Biggest Problem with Patches in Fighting Games

Panda | Kizzie Kay
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Sit down everyone. I’ve got probably the hottest of hot takes that’s been on my mind lately. I am going to share my thoughts on the concept of the “Patch Era” or “Patch Culture” in fighting games, and why constant updates of major features or aspects throughout a game’s life cycle is not the best thing for a fighting game to grow.

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Arc System Works (Arcsys) has recently made Guilty Gear Strive, the latest entry in the Guilty Gear franchise! This fighting game is heralded for its use of Rollback Netcode, included on all platforms Playstation 4 (PS4), Playstation 5 (PS5), and PC (Steam). Recently Arcsys has released it’s latest season pass character, Baiken, alongside a brand new combo maker tool!

Panda Games: Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Guilty Gear Strive, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Street Fighter V, FGC, Anime Fighters, Chess, Speedrunning, Dragon Ball FighterZ

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#FightingGames #FGC #KizzieKay #Strive #GGST #Panda #PandaGlobal #GuiltyGear #GuiltyGearStrive #StreetFighter #SFV #StreetFighter5 #StreetFighterV #StreetFighter6 #KingOfFighters #KOFXV #KingOfFightersXV

131 Comments

  1. Given Riot's record with patches and league? Not exactly promising.
    Hopefully they let the real developers work on this instead of doing what they do with League.

  2. The song at the end sounds like a Rouge SA song I love it so anybody know what it is

  3. I was musing these days about how a big game as Strive is really lack luster in content compared to some other games. I'll compare with MK 11 as that was the game that really oppened my eyes to the issue.

    Each character has 4 intros and outros, and 3 or more special interactions with each other character, the Towers of Time that are an excellent single player mode, the cript that is somewhat cool, but has a lot of griding to it.

    This all not talking about customization, although I understand that making a character outfit as they currently work in Strive is not a doable job.

    The music player is terrible, the media viewer does not add the new trailers, we don't have cinematic arcade endings or openings, as we used to on Xrd.

  4. I wouldnt mind patches that are more like reasonable I've seen patches like strives like last big patch it's like yeah we already have a good character they get massive buff but then we see someone who is under performing and they get a small buff or even a nerf like just throw out buffs across the board if your gonna go and give a big Buff a over performing character

  5. Kizzie 2 years and 3000 costumes later. "I mean you can call a game live-service but putting lipstick on a pig isn't going to make people keep playing the game".

  6. Hard agree with this. I love strive, but a lot of stuff isn't in the game. I played the arcade with 2 characters and felt like it wasn't worth beating to experience the story. And I watched the story, and that feels the most rushed of it all. I would've rather they make us play the fights than to get what we got animation wise. I don't like to clown animation and stuff cause there was probably a huge time crunch, and I've seen what they could do with DbfZ dramatic finishes, and the opening of the game, but still, I feel like I would almost rather them not give us the story than to give it to us like that.

    I feel like in order to completely overhaul these things, they need to make a SFIV – SSFIV kind of patch, that way they can justify making an actual arcade mode, patching up the story, and adding more features.

  7. These "anti-patch" arguments from these comments sound more emotional than logical, going to keep it real.

    Fact of the matter is, if people want less patches, stop being so quick to call things broken, good, bad, etc.

    As much as people want to believe it's only casuals doing this, a lot of Pros feel like they have the game figured out by week 2 or 3.

  8. There was a quote one riot developer said: if a game was completely balanced, nobody talk about it. If it isn't, people will complain. No Win-Win

    Also, patches brings hype. If it releases as a solid game, it'll be great only once and people, theoretically, will stop talking about it without changes.

    And lastly, the one thing nobody ever talks thoroughly about release times. You probably lose more money the longer it stays in development, especially if you don't release it in peak hype time. "Oh shit, the game was released" quote will get thrown around. Furthermore, coordinating everything from a management perspective? Yea nah that aint easy to budge.

  9. Yup league of legends is the absolute tops in terms of updates. Most things you run into thats broken will be fixed every two weeks. They let some stuff slip, youre looking at like six weeks. Still more frequent than most online games at their WORST. At their absolute BEST though, shit will get fixed in literally less than 24 hours. Can't be matched.

  10. I remember dbfz did a 2nd season they did 1 patch that whole year and people we're upset.

  11. It literally took me 4 months to fish HEAVY DAY, only song I really wanted from the start. Seriously, I know it sounds made up, but it was the last song I got lol

  12. I got baited yo, I thought this was going to be about how we didn't need patches in games anymore only to watch the whole video and learn that this is more of a communication issue between player, developer, and owners. Dope video like always.

  13. i fully believe that the way riot handles league is the most optimal way to support a game and just copying them for what u can is good

  14. 6:05 Maybe not once a month but at least once every 2-3 months. It would allow for communication from the dev team to say what they are working on and it could allow for player feedback that is up to date with the current meta and what players want.

  15. listening to the community can be important but sometimes the community doesn't know wtf they're talking about. I can't remember exactly but in the KI documentary they talked about balance from listening to the community and how ppl where complaining a thing about Jago and the balance the gave him wasn't what the community asked for b/c they were just wrong about why they weren't happy with Jago.

  16. Alright I did my best to not comment without watching the full vid and heres my view on things.

    Patches are needed if there are clear balancing/bug issues in the game such as Sol on release in Strive or May TOD wall combos. There are also unforseen things that can arise such as abusable tech/mechanics so since we have the technology why not patch and improve.

    Devs should also be running PTS servers so the community can test future potential changes and the devs can use that data to make the right decisions. As of now mostly all fighting game devs have no clue how to balance their games, thats why were seeing ram, leo buffs in patches.

    In summary patches are needed, preferably every quarter but not blindly done, enable some of form of community feedback so the changes make sense and don't distress the community.

  17. On another note CONTENT is severely lacking in fighters. MK11 was the perfect model for providing content but I think it still could of had more. Crossplay is needed too Strive on PS4 is as dead as Melty blood.

    Seeing as i'm here i'm also gona take a shot at ugly ass KOF 15 as kizzie tried to shit on 3rd strike 🤣

    KOF Ol Atari 3600 Looking ass! KOF look like Nintendo without the super looking ass. Special moves look like Streets of Rage 1 looking azzz. How it look worse than Alpha 1 looking azz LOOOOOOOOL

  18. TBH kizzie is the only player I've seen crying about the game, toxic channel

  19. I mean…..melty blood online is basically impossible in Korea
    I go online and there's literally no one.
    Either that or my opponent has Mc Donald's Wifi (which basically makes Roll back useless)

  20. Sup kizzie, aye bruh a sin kiske mod came for strive, it was made by a fan and It's fantastic, don't kno if u saw that already but wanted to see you playin wit him on strive

  21. I subscribed after this video. Great talk man and I don't even play Guilty Gear

  22. I came into this expecting to hard disagree.
    But as someone who played/plays Yu-Gi-Oh and LoR for a long time now, fighting games having scheduled seasonal updates/patches might be pretty interesting.

  23. I'm going to tell you something: the 'games as live service' thing is why I don't buy and don't play fighting games anymore. I'm tired of buying a quarter of a game for full price, and then having to buy all the missing chunks of it as time goes on, and in the end having a 300-400$ worth of a niche game, that few people even play.
    Patches are one thing, I don't mind them that much, but I'm used to getting a full game to begin with. Fighting games are not only niche in their own right, but also often do not offer much in terms of variety. You sometimes even get just online play and pracitse mode… and thats fucking it! And companies fucking wonder why more people don't play fighting games… Those are already intimidating enough for new players to want to jump into, but asking them for so much money and giving so little in return is just BS. If this goes on, fighting games are going to die out, since it will not be coste effective enough for developers to even make those anymore.

  24. makes me wish there was more developers like the people who make killer instinct. carefully making changes and being open with chatted to the fans of why they did what they do.

  25. Ayo Kizzie! Dope video! What's the song playing during the outro on this though? I need that for cooking.

  26. Devs saying nothing is absolutely the most infuriating thing about the patch era. Like DBFZ always in the dark on whether or not there will be new content.

  27. for me i feel fighting games should have a demo of some kind so people can try the game out to see if they like and allows devs to have a open source for feedback without people feeling like they didn't get a full product

  28. Strive low key should have a tag team mode, game would be hype as a vs fighter

  29. Imagine if in street fighter 6 the properties of Ryu's fireball changed almost every day in a week, one day the fierce fireball has hard knockdown and people are blown away by how busted it feels, but the next day it disappears.
    One day Guile has a teleport crossup super and after a month of people getting used to it they swap it out for something entirely different. It would be pretty trash.

  30. Love Kizzy, and there are some problems with patching, but I disagree with this notion that devs are purposefully releasing games unfinished, especially since we just went through a pandemic where everyone was working remotely.

  31. I gotta disagree because with no patches, ppl would just abuse and get away with so much cheesy ass moves like leroy in tekken, sheeva in mk11, lowain in granblue ect. like dawg theres infinite combos and all type of janky stuff ppl would-exploit for an advatage dawg. I love patch notes WHEN done right. But also tuning characters and making them more unique/balanced to play is what makes it more fun and competitive when cheeseball players can abuse stupid gimmick style move to rob you out of a W.

  32. First, let it be known that I agree on the matter of releasing an incomplete product and then patching it to fill it out. Bad practice, and should go away forever.
    However, let's also account for subjectivity, the fact that (especially with fighting games) its impossible to come to a unanimous threshold of what constitutes a "complete package", and how out of touch many in the FGC are with what makes a quality VIDEOGAME outside of their vacuum perspective.

    That said, as someone with highly varied experiences in nearly all genres, the narrowness of said overly common FGC perspective really irks me.
    And equating quantity of skills with how quickly a game gets boring is a pretty terrible and incorrect take, considering MOBAs, Shooters, and pretty much all other competitive genres (which have less skills per character/class) outperform fighting games in player draw AND retention. HOW MANY skills characters have matter far less than how intuitive the players' kits FEEL and how well they synergize for a satisfying experience on both the winning and losing sides.

    Besides, if you take into account the fact that Project L has no motion inputs (meaning there will be less specials than in your standard fighting game) and will likely be F2P, semi-frequent incremental patches with SMALL-TO-MODERATE adjustments isn't unreasonable. The only issues lie in the minds of those who can't let go of the design traditions that have primarily served to restrict evolution for almost half of the genre's existence, and those who place player-driven meta above a fair and fun experience for players of all types/skill levels/character preferences.
    Fun, for the majority of the playerbase (aka. casuals) should come first. Competitive players will always find what's most effective to create a meta, and devs keeping that meta fluid/ever-changing will keep the experience fresh for even the off-meta players. Just because that's not how it was in the arcades, that doesn't mean its automatically a bad method to try.

    Its long past overdue for the FGC to get out of the way of the genre's progress.
    Let devs try wildly experimental new game design moves, and watch the genre you love grow as a result while the "rising tide lifts all boats" and brings eyes to the games that cater to your specific preferences (that would otherwise never be aware of your niche FGs).

    "There can be no progress, no achievement, without sacrifice."
    You have to give up something in order to gain something else. Can't have the genre grow and allow more top players to financially afford being top players without giving up some of the arcade-traditional elements that have long outlived their the setting and environment they were designed for.

    'Nuff said.

  33. I'm just not use to all these patches. I come from melee I don't like shit changing lol. I've stopped playing strive just been playing umvc3 everyday now. I'll definitely play strive a bunch more when it's done

  34. @4:43 “Baiken likes chili cheese fries….Alright guys we’re gonna make these changes. See you next time.” 🍟 LMAOOO 🤣 it really is like that.

  35. I don’t wanna make anyone mad but this is late-stage capitalism thing.

  36. FINALLY someone in the fgc speaks positively of DOA lol

  37. I will never trust a person's opinion that plays brawlhalla unironically.

  38. Lucie’s Guard [8th Apostle of the Twelve] says:

    Before anyone compares lol to fighting games keep in mind that lol is a team game and a moba the two genres are barely comparable

  39. I miss the days where when a game came out, it was finish and any bugs they did catch stayed in the game. No updates. Closest thing to an update was street fighter 2 to street fighter 2 turbo

  40. I'm not sure what this video was about. Is it that games should be complete on realease or that patch excuses incomplete games cause live service does the exact same thing og destiny was a live service game and was empty as hell on release it also didn't have good or great communication for awhile maybe strive wasn't a good example? I'm not sure I watched from beginning to end and the most
    I've understood is we shouldn't allow games to be unfinished on realease which I agree but by what matric are we measuring this by lack of features or bad practices? Both? If so I'd say we should look more at fighting games that succeed in this for a better example like smash ultimate has a huge amount of features,horrible online, and a huge rooster to major success but is also a game with patches rather than live service it also patched in alot like tournament mode didn't come till a few months after realease a major feature that's not only been in all previous smash games but released and wasn't as good as it used to be. I just think this video needed more focus I can't really hook myself on an idea if I don't understand the core of the issue

  41. U think SF6 will have a similar launch like sfv…?

  42. For w/e reason, the only patch FG players are familiar with are the balance patches, there are a lot more of things you can add to an existing game with patches that dont includes balance, new features, new game modes, new cosmetics, etc… in the current age you need more patches to keep the game fresh but the only thing FG devs adds to a game with patches are balance and new characters (which also affects the balance) and that's it.

  43. the most excitement i have for patches is to see other characters in tournaments and such. i don't think they affect mid-level players like me as much. i'm so tired of seeing ram, sol, axl, nago, and leo in every top 8. even gio too i guess.

  44. I hate Patches when he kick me into an abys… But he turns out to be a good merchant….

  45. Chaos's old crosshair was way better honestly. It just looks nicer.

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