This Week On PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale: Free Avatars, Oh Kratos... you continue to goof.

[Ming Ming Hatsune]

So, the news made it all the way to Joystiq.

 

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/02/04/sony-and-superbot-part-ways-superbot-excited-about-its-future/

[Chooch]

poor online

This didn't stop Smash Bros. in the slightest and PlayStation All-Stars' online functions completely outclass Brawl's.

 

The menus are horribly bland and it's lacking in the single player department (like most other fighting games on the market, would you look at that?), but the gameplay is solid and the attention to detail present in the stages and characters is fantastic.

 

You can't really blame SuperBot for not having Crash Bandicoot or Spyro because Activision is completely full of shit and they weren't really given the sort of budget and time frame that someone like Sakurai had for later Smash Bros titles.

 

SuperBot did a damn good job with the resources they had and I get a little annoyed when people undermine their accomplishments to such a degree.

[Ming Ming Hatsune]

This didn't stop Smash Bros. in the slightest and PlayStation All-Stars' online functions completely outclass Brawl's.

 

The menus are horribly bland and it's lacking in the single player department (like most other fighting games on the market, would you look at that?), but the gameplay is solid and the attention to detail present in the stages and characters is fantastic.

 

You can't really blame SuperBot for not having Crash Bandicoot or Spyro because Activision is completely full of shit and they weren't really given the sort of budget and time frame that someone like Sakurai had for later Smash Bros titles.

 

SuperBot did a damn good job with the resources they had and I get a little annoyed when people undermine their accomplishments to such a degree.

 

How did the online "outclass" Brawl's? Except the annoying friend codes and no lag, how exactly? Even a few pages back, Superbot released a patch that completely broke online for the Europeans. Me and my friend wanted to fight online together, and I was confused as heck on how to invite her. The game isn't clear enough.

 

I prefer Brawl's dull Adventure mode to Battle Royale's Arcade story mode. That's how bad it was.

 

And there is no polish. Like for example in stage select, why can't they use the game logos for each stage? Like example above the stage name, Dreamscope, why can't they put the LittleBigPlanet logo above it? It's these nice touches that makes the presentation better.

 

I didn't undermine Superbot with their gameplay. I did say the gameplay is great and it's fun to play. However outside that, it's dull, boring and disappointing. Oh and did I mention the arcade story mode was a snoozefest?

Edited February 5, 2013 by Merry Ming Shana

[Autosaver]

Brawl's online was excellent with friends. Random match ups were sort of bad, but it did have something Ming likes (spectate mode).

[Dobkeratops]

How did the online "outclass" Brawl's? Except the annoying friend codes and no lag, how exactly?

 

Either of those two things you mention are, alone, enough reason to consider an online mode 'broken'. Not to mention the rampant cheating.

 

Comparing that to a game with a proper network system, balance patches and little to no lag (kind of a big deal for fighting games), I'd say Chooch's adjective is correct.

[Solkia]

I don’t get how people can call PS All Stars gameplay “solid”

 

Pointlessly attacking your opponent for 10 minutes so you can gain an attack that’s just a killswitch seemed more stupid than solid to me.

 

What was wrong with actually doing damage when you attack?

 

What was wrong with trying to knock your opponent out of the stage?

 

All I saw was a neutered version of Smash bros.

 

Is there something I'm missing here?

Edited February 5, 2013 by Underaged Hot Anime Girl

[SuperLink]

I'll give it credit where due for trying something new with that gametype, but yeah I don't really think the gameplay is solid.

 

Either way it's enjoyable, my copy just arrived today and I'm trying to figure out how cross-play works.

[Ming Ming Hatsune]

Either of those two things you mention are, alone, enough reason to consider an online mode 'broken'. Not to mention the rampant cheating.

 

Comparing that to a game with a proper network system, balance patches and little to no lag (kind of a big deal for fighting games), I'd say Chooch's adjective is correct.

The online is better, but not outclassed. Sadly Brawl can't do balance patches because of the console, but if Brawl was released in Wii U, I'm sure Brawl will outclass Battle Royale online. The lack of online modes in Royale are so bad. It's like it did just enough to beat Brawl's.

[sjmaster92]

I don’t get how people can call PS All Stars gameplay “solid”

Pointlessly attacking your opponent for 10 minutes so you can gain an attack that’s just a killswitch seemed more stupid than solid to me.

What was wrong with actually doing damage when you attack?

What was wrong with trying to knock your opponent out of the stage?

All I saw was a neutered version of Smash bros.

Is there something I'm missing here?

What's wrong with doing something different? Superbot took a gamble with gameplay, and in my opinion it worked pretty well.

[Solkia]

What's wrong with doing something different? Superbot took a gamble with gameplay, and in my opinion it worked pretty well.

 

(I swear to god if someone links to TV Tropes...)

 

Nothing is wrong with doing something different. It's how they did it that bothers me.

 

Why does attacking not have any significant meaning other than "Hit enemy X amount of times to get a killswitch"?

 

When I play this game, I don't feel like I'm doing damage. I don't feel like I'm doing anything.  Smash Bros may get boring to me pretty fast but at least I feel like I'm doing something by racking up damage.

 

Look at footage of MK9 and how X-Ray attacks are used. I think the Supers would have been much better off if they were actually just a super strong attack you could use whenever, not your only means of winning.

Edited February 5, 2013 by Underaged Hot Anime Girl

[Chooch]

Your problem immediately starts the second you label all of the normal attacks as "pointless." How can they be pointless when they are what builds AP and building AP is what the entire fucking game is built around? You're not looking at things from the correct perspective. Also I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before, but you could make the same point about Smash Bros. gameplay?

 

Getting hit at 0% percent up to around 85% ultimately means nothing in Smash Bros. even for the lightest characters. Your attacks become "kill switches" only once you rack up enough of a percentage that you can actually send your opponent far enough to either edge guard them (if you're in to that sort of thing) or completely knock them beyond the blast zone and get a knock out for it.

 

PlayStation All-Stars is basically a giant arms race between you and your opponents. Depending on the character you're playing as and the match up, you're either rushing your opponent down or spacing / zoning them out with keep away tactics in order to 1) build AP for yourself and more importantly 2) prevent your opponent from building AP. Like any other fighting game, properly avoiding and countering your opponent's attacks while landing your own is the key to victory. No reason to claim attacking is pointless.

 

There's nothing wrong with doing damage to attack or knocking opponents off of the stage, obviously, but there's also nothing wrong with building meter to kill other players with combos, proper usage of your character's defensive tools and set ups. It's just a different way to go about things.

 

And for the fucking record, just because knocking opponents off-screen in PlayStation All-Stars doesn't immediately kill them like in Smash Bros., it doesn't mean you aren't completely fucking screwed when it does happen. You're forcibly teleported back on to the stage in a stunned state, you lose AP, and it allows your opponent to punish you with anything and everything available to them including supers. Chances are you're fucking dead, so it's more or less the same thing.

 

All you saw was "a neutered Smash Bros." because you immediately came into the game with a closed minded and stubborn attitude and insisted on not looking at PlayStation All-Stars as its own fucking game.

 

Every character in the game has combos. A lot of these characters have combos into their supers or guaranteed kills off of certain hit-confirms (Fat Princess, Sweet Tooth, both Coles, Dante, Raiden, Spike, Toro) and if they can't land supers that way, they have inescapable set ups off of things like a grab (Kratos, Ratchet, Nathan Drake). You can not be ignorant to a lot of these combos and set ups when playing against these characters otherwise you're going to get fucking destroyed by a competent player.

 

tl;dr What are you missing? Everything

Edited February 5, 2013 by Chooch

[Carbo]

That's nice and all but being it's own thing or not it's still completely unsatisfying when on a fundamental surface value it's similar enough to a closely perfected and universal formula that changing vital elements only serve to make it different by design, not concept. Saying that people apparently "don't get it" is almost besides the point in and of itself, a pathetic point because it implies that games exist in a vacuum, and I don't see that discrediting a ton of people complaining about this asinine system that's been criticized since it's inception well beyond just the "why isn't this like Smash" argument. What is there to get when there is little to be compelled thanks to an incredibly divisive formula that's supported by an awful roster of characters, little additional content, bad online and awful, fucking awful artistic design? Not very much.

[buba]

awful roster of characters

 

Outside of 3rd party characters the roster is pretty good and even there the only stuff missing is a FF rep, Crash and Spyro.

I know that Raiden and Dante are not the most iconic characters from their franchise, but they are at least representing it.

Edited February 5, 2013 by Tmsp

[Sean]

The kill mechanic diminished any major hype I had in the game since it was first revealed. There's no good reason why it couldn't have done it the way Smash does it or any sane fighting game ever does it since it copies the Smash formula so closely otherwise, that the kill mechanic just reeks of being different for the sake of being different.

 

I tried this out at a kiosk recently and it was kind of not too fun.

[SuperLink]

I'm having a fair bit of fun with it!!

 

But there really isn't much strategy or balancing to this game at all, Raiden's combos are very easy to do, his reach is huge and he racks up Supers like it's nothing. If someone says the game is good for a good romp I won't argue, but there's no way I believe that being a "competent player" can really make that much difference with characters like Raiden and Kratos in the game. Some characters are factually far better than others and it makes any chance of this game being played competitively well.. no-chance'd.

 

I'll give credit in that it tried to be its own thing and actually succeeded where most Smash Bros-alikes fail. It's a very competant party game.

But it's nowhere near being some intricate complex battle system with each character having their own curious little niches in the playing field, they're either pretty obvious or they're not there at all.

[Carbo]

Outside of 3rd party characters the roster is pretty good and even there the only stuff missing is a FF rep, Crash and Spyro.

I know that Raiden and Dante are not the most iconic characters from the franchise, but they are at least representing it.

It's a flaw that, I very much realize, is one that was out of SuperBot's hands. But it generally adds up to a plethora of reasons as to why the game lacks a lot of compelling elements supporting it. It's all very commercialized because of the massive third party interest in using the game as a marketing vehicle when in this kind of scenario the best options in approaching a completely new crossover would be either downscaling it massively as an experiment download-only title with first party characters, or let Sony have gone all out with the budget and advertising so they could support the kind of audience they were aiming to get with the title. After all, it wasn't the fighting system that made Smash Bros soar into sky high popularity.

[SuperLink]

I heard that SuperBot were actively antagonistic to letting Abe in the game when Abe's developers wanted him in? Not sure how much truth there is to that.

[SilentDoom]

Getting hit at 0% percent up to around 85% ultimately means nothing in Smash Bros. even for the lightest characters. Your attacks become "kill switches" only once you rack up enough of a percentage that you can actually send your opponent far enough to either edge guard them (if you're in to that sort of thing) or completely knock them beyond the blast zone and get a knock out for it.

 

 

I'd have to disagree with this statement.  Because of the dynamic of how knockback scaling works in Smash Bros, every hit means something and it's not always about simply aiming for the kill.  Percentage affects how you and your opponent approach each other and what attacks to use in which situations.  When players are at low %s comparative to high %s, the dynamic of the match changes completely.

 

Not to mention you don't even require to get your foe to a high % to necessarily kill them.  Force the foe off stage and keep aggressive so they can't recover and with some characters you can get the gimp on them at sub 30%.  So not only do you have a shift of dynamic at different percentages but also on different parts of the stage.  The offstage game feels so much more different to the onstage game.

 

Thing about PSASBR is that whilst I agree it's nothing like Smash and it is indeed its own game, I don't think it has those kind of engaging and tactical dynamics Smash does (Melee in particular).  Regardless of how much AP you've built up, you can always apply the same tactics against your opponent.  Not to mention because of the unintuitive and sluggish movement of the game, approach options feel comparatively limited and shallow.  Approaching and defending are just as important (no scratch that, MORE important) than actually dealing the hits themselves because when it comes down to it they're what really help define the dynamic of the game in my opinion.  

[buba]

I heard that SuperBot were actively antagonistic to letting Abe in the game when Abe's developers wanted him in? Not sure how much truth there is to that.

 

There are lots of developers that wanted their characters in the game, but SB never talked about or showed interest in them.

Oddworld Inhabitants wanted Abe to be in like you said, NIS wanted a Disgaea character, Ed Boon talked about Scorpion, Krome Studios said that they would let Ty the Tasmanian Tiger be in the game if they asked for it and an Atlus employee joked about a Teddie petition but later Atlus said that a Persona character being in the game would have been amazing.

[Soniman]

There are lots of developers that wanted their characters in the game, but SB never talked about or showed interest in them.

Oddworld Inhabitants wanted Abe to be in like you said, NIS wanted a Disgaea character, Ed Boon talked about Scorpion, Krome Studios said that they would let Ty the Tasmanian Tiger be in the game if they asked for it and an Atlus employee joked about a Teddie petition but later Atlus said that a Persona character being in the game would have been amazing.

 

 

WHY WASN'T THIS MADE A REALITY!? ;_;

[buba]

Well, it looks like we aren't getting shit after Kat and Emmett.

 

 

https://twitter.com/stewartgilray/status/298905443672133634

 

 

[Cola]

Well, it looks like we aren't getting shit after Kat and Emmett.

 

 

https://twitter.com/stewartgilray/status/298905443672133634

 

Well, shit.

 

I wanted more DLC.

[SuperLink]

What the fuck!

That's bullshit! God dammit Sony.

[Ming Ming Hatsune]

To make this clear to everyone: I am not moaning about how Battle Royale's gameplay works. It's great, solid and fun.

 

What I'm moaning about is everything outside of that. Online especially. They could have made it sooo much better, and that's why I'm so disappointed.

 

I heard about NIS wanting to add Disgaea characters before...imagine Flonne, Etna and Prinny in Battle Royale. What a dream. Can't believe SuperBot didn't approach them.

 

And now we may not get any more DLC? After Kat (& some other character) and that new stage? It's to be expected after poor to mediocre sales...if only they put more work and polish to the game, this would have been avoided.

[Badnik Mechanic]

They cancelled Abe!

 

Wait... do we know for certain that's definately true? Until someone else comes out to support that I'm not going to buy that just yet.

 

Well, it looks like we aren't getting shit after Kat and Emmett.

 

 

https://twitter.com/stewartgilray/status/298905443672133634

 

Something's not right with this, That tweet has now been deleted and he's posted another one which sorta semi pokes Gaf.

I was right.

 

Future DLC is NOT cancelled. But there won't be abe.

 

https://twitter.com/SonySantaMonica/status/298923333163028480