This past weekend saw many fighting game fans and newcomers jump into the second beta for Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves. The sequel to 1999’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves has a smashing art style alongside rich and engaging combat mechanics. However, the first beta left some big concerns around two key features: matchmaking and netcode.
Related
Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves Interview – “We are keenly aware of how the community has evolved and changed.”
We sat down with Yasuyuki Oda at Tokyo Game Show to discuss all things Fatal Fury, including how the Capcom collaboration came to be.
You could be searching for players for an hour and get only a couple of matches despite the free open beta having thousands playing it.. Once you found a rival, it was likely that regardless of your region and connection quality, you’d still have a laggy and frustrating experience.
These two elements are deal-breakers in fighting games. While the vast majority of players might play only a couple of matches online and the rest offline with friends, the core audience that keeps the game alive is very different. Previous SNK titles like The King of Fighters 14, its sequel, and Samurai Shodown had a rough time due to how they worked online, hurting their user base and general interest for a very long time. Thankfully, I’m glad to say that most of these issues were solved during the second beta.
Finally, I Can Play With Other People
After a troublesome launch where players couldn’t access the beta for several hours, things took a turn for the better. I managed to find matches within seconds. I could jump into Training Mode while looking for battles, and sometimes I’d have to stop or ignore the match found because matchmaking was so fast that I couldn’t test short combos. Great success.
The netcode was working properly this time, too, and I had one notably laggy match out of dozens of them. I can’t say if this was a typical experience for every player (I’m from South America and played mostly against other people in the same region), but I found positive feedback from many users on social media and some of the most popular streamers and content creators in the genre.
But does this all mean we can expect a perfect launch? I’m not so sure.
Training Mode Is Lacking
Let’s take out of the equation that servers can fail on launch, and that there might be technical issues requiring quick patches before everything works flawlessly. This is common in the genre (and in any video game with a multiplayer component), so no surprises there. But I’m also concerned about other elements we had a chance to test in the beta.
For example, the Training Mode. If you’re a casual player, you might be wondering how you can make this bad when it’s a feature that has been available in fighting games for decades now. It’s not that City of the Wolves has a bad Training Mode, but it lacks the multiple options that games like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 have brought to the table in recent years.
In the beta, you could play with the match settings, such as the different bars and states your character can have, and set your opponent to different states (blocking, crouching, etc.) or manually record specific inputs for them to perform. What about the myriad different scenarios, like punish or anti-air training, or the detailed bars and stats explaining frame data for every move that other big games in the genre have? Nowhere to be found. This is a barebones Training Mode from another time.
This won’t be an issue for casual players, but it’s certainly something that feels like a step back if you’re an experienced player. However, there’s another thing I found to be pretty archaic and could hurt newcomers to the series: the Tutorial.
Will New Players Feel Welcome?
Over the years, more and more fighting games developers such as Capcom, Netherrealm Studios, Arc System Works, and Bandai Namco have put an effort into creating modes that explain every game mechanic as simply as possible. This is a huge win because newcomers can learn better how to play, then continue learning through online matches. I’m not sure this will be the case with Fatal Fury.
When you enter any tutorial lesson, there are dialogue screens explaining what to do. The text is simple and easy to follow, but there isn’t nearly enough time to read it before your opponent starts to react. If you fail, you need to wait for the scenario to load again with a blackout transition. You also can’t ask the CPU to perform the task needed and see what you need to do. There’s a pop-up showing the buttons, and that’s it. You’re on your own.
I’m an experienced FG player, but I wanted to test it with a friend who plays them more casually, and I wasn’t surprised at all when he couldn’t figure out some of the new Rev system utilities or perform Hyper Defense (which works like an extended parry). This needs to be improved before the full launch.
There are some other aspects I took issue with. The menus are horrible and not intuitive at all, contrasting with how great the combat and characters look, and Cristiano Ronaldo’s character design looks abysmal.
But overall, I have a good feeling about Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, which is a game that feels great to play and watch when everything is working as it should. We’ll see how it turns out when it launches on April 24.
Next
Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves Preview – The New Leader Of The Pack
We got to go hands-on with City of the Wolves and we’ve been left howling with excitement.
Source link