Virtua Fighter 5: A Little Rough Around the Edges
Virtua Fighter 5 just came out for Xbox 360. The gameplay is great as always, but a lot of features of this game leave me scratching my head.
Button Configuration
I think I have witnessed more players configure their buttons than any other US game developer. (Feel free to correct me if you know of someone else who tops me here). I watch people config buttons for hours and hours and hours as I run tournaments at multiple events per year, every year. There is a 100% rate of agreement among players that the best implementation is where the game lists the functions, then the player presses the button he wants for that function. So you highlight "jab" or "punch" or whatever, then you press the button you want to be assigned to that. This process does NOT require you to know that the button you presses is really X or Square or A or whatever else.
Virtua Fighter and many other fighting games STILL use the bad method where you cannot press the button you want to assign. You must highlight the *button* (not the function), then go left/right to set the function. So the game lists "X" then you have to look down at your controller, find the X button, realize that it should be kick or whatever, then go left/right until you select kick.
Believe me, this requires an extra mental step from players and it takes significantly longer for them to configure buttons with this implementation and as I said earlier, exactly no one likes it.
Still on the subject of button config, Virtua Fighter 5 has a major problem that I can't believed passed Microsoft's technical requirement checklist. I configured my buttons for player 1, then I played some matches online where I was the one creating the match. Things worked fine. Then I decided to *join* someone else's created match. I was put on the 2p side (fine), and my buttons were all messed up! I was now using the 2p button config! I can already sense the VF apologists trying to defend this with some kind of warped logic, but it's absolutely terrible. No other fighting game has this problem.
Online Player Match
Very surprisingly, after you play a "player match" (aka unranked match), you and the opponent are both kicked out back to the matchmaking screen. Want a rematch? Tough, there's no rematch option. You can't create a "room", much less with spectators, where you go around in a rotation like Dead or Alive and SF2: Hyper Fighting. Now, you *can* make a private room with someone on your friends list where you get to play them over and over (just them, no spectators or others in the rotation). This will lead to a lot of good players feeling forced to only fight people on their friends list just to have a logistically reasonable set of matches. Bad for community, because you want those players playing out in the open where everyone can challenge them.
Online Ranked Match
You are allowed to set whether you want to play opponents near your skill level or of any skill level. You are allowed to set whether you want arenas with no walls, low walls, high walls, or any walls. These options should not be in ranked matches. The premise of a ranked match in any game is that the player has as little leeway to affect who he fights or what the rules will be. It's supposed to be the same rules all the time and no ability to avoid opponents you're afraid of losing to.
Not only can you filter by skill level and arena type, but you can also see the opponent's name, rank, and exact win/loss record before you even accept the match. (Yes I know that you can see their names before the match starts in Puzzle Fighter's ranked matches. That is a mistake and will be fixed if there's a patch.) Anyway, you get an awful lot of info about your opponent before you even try to join his ranked match. This alone ruins the integrity of the leaderboards. I heard a rumor that disconnects don't count as losses, but I have no idea personally.
Character Selection
Virtua Fighter 5 does another strange thing that no other fighting game does: it tries very hard to get you to only play one character. Usually, character selection is part of the main loop, meaning you go back to it after every game. In VF5, after you play a player match (and are kicked out to the matchmaking screen, ugh), you are *still* tied to your character. You have to exit the whole online mode to switch to another character. Another character is basically like another account.
I of course know why they did this. In Japan, players tend to play just one character in a fighting game. In tournaments, they don't allow switching characters like we do in the US. Now, as a tournament player, I strongly dislike the Japanese method. If I can beat 70% of people in a tournament with character A and the other 30% with character B, I deserve to win the tournament. But anyway, let's not argue that right now. The extreme emphasis on sticking to one character in VF5 comes from how the game is played in Japan. That's nice, but I want to play Jeffry sometimes, Pai sometimes, and Lei Fei some other times. It's a real hassle to do this relative to every other fighting game. The designers are saying to me, "We don't really approve of you having that sort of fun" and it makes me sad.
As I said at the start, the gameplay in VF is just a technical and well thought-out as you'd expect and the online play is surprisingly unlaggy. That's what counts the most, but all the other rough edges are a bit of a downer.
--Sirlin
November 1st, 2007 at 2:23 pm
[…] unknown wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptVery surprisingly, after you play a “player match” (aka unranked match), you and the opponent are both kicked out back to the matchmaking screen. Want a rematch? Tough, there’s no rematch option. You can’t create a “room”, … […]
November 1st, 2007 at 6:46 pm
The character selection screen itself is a problem. Correct me if I’m wrong but at least with the PS3 version there is no way to get rid of the timer and no way to unselect your character if you made a mistake. Also picking alternate costumes was rather unintuitive (by that I mean it’s not Tekken style or an obvious visual option, like Soul Calibur). For a home version of the game this seems unacceptable; it’s like the menus were designed to make people not play.
November 1st, 2007 at 11:24 pm
[…] click here to read […]
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:37 am
Regarding your issues with the online ranked matches. I’ve heard many people positing that they purposely setup fairly low-integrity leaderboards. I guess the idea being that the “true” version of the game is still played in person, and they didn’t want people playing online mode purely for the sake of getting better at online mode.
Not that that’s a good excuse for making weak features or anything, but it could be interesting if it works. The entire game definitely feels like it was made to help people practice for arcade play, which is just unfortunate given the non-existence of arcade machines on this side of the ocean. Could that explain the no character selection as well? I don’t remember, but if you’re winning versus matches on an arcade machine, are you allowed to change characters between each match? If you’re loading a saved character to play with, I would assume it’s not possible.
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:46 am
I hope they patch all those issues. And yes, disconnects do not count as loses and it’s getting almost like Mario Kart DS: people just disconnect whenever they feel they are going to lose. The crappy player matches don’t help either, I want to, at least, be able to have a random stage every time I play.
Another thing I think it’s lacking is tutorials. The manual is too simple and you don’t get enough information about the mechanics of the game by doing the command training.
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:17 am
Definitely going to wait until this game inevitably drops to $30. It’s really too bad that most fighting games get this kind of treatment on consoles.
November 2nd, 2007 at 5:36 am
Leaderboards are pretty worthless in most online games, but the other issues do sound annoying.
Unlike in more established online games like FPS, fighting games still seem to be feeling out what exactly constitutes a good online mode.
November 2nd, 2007 at 3:10 pm
wow. i definitely enjoyed playing VF5 with friends, but there seem to be so many random shit that would totally piss me off.
vf5 is still a great game though, and with the ‘group of friends’ you can make through online communities, i still think it’d be a great asset especially with unlaggy online play as you claim.
very informative article. :)
i love sirlin.
November 2nd, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Much as I love VF5, I have to agree with these points. I was really disappointed with the level of design in this one, especially in comparison with VF4e’s beautiful port.
On reassigning buttons: Not to mention that the first button on the list isn’t A, but Y or something bizarre like that. Heck, I have the Hori VF5 stick, and the buttons don’t appear in that order!
On lack of rematches: This is a very fighting-game-specific thing, born of the arcade culture. Halo 3 (the benchmark for matchmaking) doesn’t let you rematch, but it would have been great to put this in VF. This is also the American/Japanese divide coming into play: VF tournaments in Japan are usually one game, single elimination. Evo 2k4 Ohsu vs Chibita was the most ranked games I’ve ever seen two VF players fight each other.
On the “people like my skill level” option: This made sense in VF4, where only people of your skill level counted for ranking up/down. In VF5, the ranking system was changed to prevent <i>this exact problem</i> from happening, so the feature is just aggravating and tends to inflate good people’s win/loss records.
On character selection: This is a top-level design constraint of creating character-specific profiles on memory cards from VF4, and they should bite the bullet and redesign character data IMHO, for the reasons you describe. It made sense when it cost money to buy space on VF.net for global character data, but that rationale doesn’t apply anymore.
November 4th, 2007 at 2:26 am
The lack of a rematch option does in fact totally suck…
I don’t know if anyone else has had this problem, but the quick match option is totally broken for me: whenever I choose quick match, it will find me an opponent, I’ll press ok, and then it’ll nearly always say “unable to join session.” What the hell is that? The only way I can play matches on line is to always host, which seems a bit silly.
Plus, they took out the PR string, which is totally lame. Also, no item battles online? Why? There’s absolutely no reason to do that.
The thing is, I am totally willing to put up with all this weirdness simply because they were able to make, as you say, such a surprisingly unlaggy experience.
November 4th, 2007 at 4:30 am
I’ve been told “unable to join session” means someone else was seeking at the same time as you, and managed to join before you did. Just means too many people seeking, and not enough hosting, pretty much.
The PR string was supposedly removed by M$ because it’s completely unmonitored, and they didn’t want swear words showing up everywhere.
Read up on the “sega ballon trick” regarding item battles… it makes it ridiculously easy to earn items in quest mode.
November 4th, 2007 at 4:57 pm
It’s sad to hear about VF5’s online experience. It sounds like it actually reaches some new lows :(
Crappy matchmaking and badly designed online experiences have recently become my new pet peeve. I swear it’s as if every game I go to play lately just assaults me with ways to make playing online a chore. With most of these games, I have to wonder if the developers tried even once to get online and play with a handful of other people.
On a tangent to that, if you guys do end up patching Puzzle Fighter at some point, do you think there’s a chance of adding an option so that you don’t have to hold down the triggers to talk? Or is there some way to do that already that I’ve missed? Sometimes my friends and I will make a room and just shoot the shit while we play PF. Having to hold down the triggers almost constantly is a drag, so we all end up taping our triggers down…which is kinda lame ;p
November 6th, 2007 at 10:25 am
So this is a promise that Street Fighter HD will have none of these issues, right? :-) Can’t wait…
November 7th, 2007 at 12:14 am
Some very strange (read ‘Japanese’) design choices. They all seem very authoritarian and restrictive, stopping the player playing how they want.
That is except the fact that you can choose who to fight in a RANKED game, and whether to have walls etc. which sounds ridiculous.
What a mess.
Gogo Street Fighter HD tbh
November 11th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
VF’s design choices do leave something to be desired. I do agree that the game is the best experience online for fighting when it comes to connections and feeling natural. I mean I was playing people in Europe, Canada, and the Carribean without any lag. I honestly haven’t experienced that since ZSNES Street Fighter. However the strange button configuration issue (2P online) and the lack of rooms with watch mode is truly sad. Having Ranked matches without rematch ability is fine, and the fact that you can see your character’s stats is completely countered by the fact you must commit to your character before you enter the mode. On ranked matches this helps resembles the arcade version where you can’t change your character when you win. Tournaments or not, this is a reality for arcade games like VF and SF, it just now Sega went with it on their online system. Not being able to change characters in player match sucks, since there is no rank, there should be no restrictions. The perfect online ranked mode would be completely blind on character selection and ranking until the end of the match, but no one has figured that out yet.
November 13th, 2007 at 11:50 pm
The rest sounds bad but this.. “people just disconnect whenever they feel they are going to lose” is just awful. SF2′ seems to have the same problem though. I’m stunned that no-one fixes it, but I guess the Leaderboards are useless for a multitude of other reasons so they don’t care. But useless Leaderboards is a lot less frustrating than having anyone higher ranked than you ‘drop’ when they are losing. :(
November 14th, 2007 at 3:04 am
I would take that with a grain of salt… I’ve been playing every day since the game came out, and I’ve only seen one disconnect so far in all that time (nearly 200 matches), and it was probably a legitimate one.
Also, let it be known… VF5 leaderboards are just based on a number calculated from your wins x4, plus your losses x1… it ranks how much you play, not how well you play, so there’s really no incentive for disconnects.
November 14th, 2007 at 6:25 pm
Thanks Claytus. Game already ordered anyway, but that’s great to know :) Still a shame about useless ranking systems/leaderboards/matching but that’s far less painful than having the individual matches spoilt. Overall it just means that the “Play to Win the Leaderboard” game is totally broken - as with almost all games’ online implementations these days, sadly. It’s especially sad since it’s not really too hard to work out good ways to do it, and 1on1 fighting games ought to be a fairly simple environment to do it in. XBL SF2′ seems to be going in the right direction, but something as fundamental as how it deals with disconnects, breaks it.
February 5th, 2008 at 6:54 am
The fairly recent patch has solved a couple of issues.
During player matches, you now have the option to choose ‘rematch’ (they don’t have to be friends). You also see the connection of the person about to play you (no option to filter by connection though).
The rematching option is a really significant thing. I’ve enjoyed this game more than ever online since.
I absolutely agree regarding the button mapping and ranked options (choosing your own type of stage).
February 5th, 2008 at 12:32 pm
Sir Stiff, oh that’s good to hear. I might even try it out if my Xbox 360 could play discs anymore. I am now the owner of two broken Xbox 360s.
February 6th, 2008 at 2:30 am
I thought MS had a decent warranty for the 360. Can’t you get them repaired or replaced?
February 6th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Depends what the error is, forty. The Red rings of death they just replace for you. But the disc drives also have some issues, and getting continual disc read errors isn’t covered under their big 3-year replacement plan thing they added to the warranty 6 months ago.
March 2nd, 2008 at 7:54 am
Guilty Gear X2 # Reload on Xbox had a pretty bad bug online about the button config too.
When you connected to someone that was hosting a game, you took his 2P button config to play with…
Which mean a lot of problems to play if the host has a different button config.
That was on the european version of the game though.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:04 am
To be contrary to everyone else, I actually like the way VF5 assigns buttons (one function per button), because it allows me to have two buttons mapped to Block.
My down and right buttons are Block, my left button is Punch and my top button is Kick. That in turn makes it easier on the gamepad to do the combinations Punch+Block as well as Kick+Block.
In games that assign one button per function instead, I can’t do this.
April 3rd, 2008 at 11:53 am
Thelo, that is not a real argument. I listed two very bad features of the button config in VF5. I’m pretty sure you hate both of those too. You listed a completely different feature (the ability to assign multiple buttons to one function). Capcom Classics Collection 2 (and SF HD Remix) have the good feature you mentioned, yet they don’t have the absurdly bad other 2 features I called out.
April 4th, 2008 at 9:23 pm
I like one of the features that Super Smash Bros. Brawl has, where you can save your button setups to a name and load them from the character select. It even has a Rotation mode for when you’re doing the winner-stays-in type play that switches out the names automatically so you don’t have to waste time doing it after every match.
April 8th, 2008 at 6:52 am
As long as you can assign multiple buttons to one function, then yes, pushing the button corresponding to the function on screen is the better way to configure buttons. The designer just has to remember to put that feature in, because many games that use push-the-button configuration don’t. My hat is off to you for including it in Capcom Classics Collection 2 - it really does make for the best of both worlds.