Game Balance is Continually Heading in the Wrong Direction#77

Huge wall of text incoming

To preface, I love rivals 2 and all of its inspirations. Rivals 1, melee, pm, and the rest of the smash series are simply the most impactful and important games to me. I have thousands of hours across the series. I have 1.4k hours in rivals 2 alone, and many, many more hours enjoying the game as a spectator. I’m no stranger to the complex design of these games as I think about them constantly. I’m not here to hate, I am writing this out of a genuine want for the betterment of the game.

I am incredibly unhappy with the current balance of the characters and the game as a whole. And unfortunately, it seems it will continue to fall in this direction. The game has found its niche, and the rest of the players have already moved on, or will only be playing with workshop. Since launch, the continual nerfs across the board have made playing the game, even casually, a chore. In addition, it feels like all of the problems with the core character and mechanical designs of the game have simply fallen on deaf ears, or even doubled down on. Low percent feeling bad, shields being too strong, floorhugging being too strong, the game promoting defensive play, grabs being overcentralizing, etc, are all completely valid points to make about the current state of the game, even as a spectator. Compared to its contemporaries and inspirations, rivals 2 falls flat in having characters that feel strong and appealing.

This is in no small part due to the constant complaints and cries for nerfs from the community, that the devs continue to succumb to time and time again. People will never, and I mean never, stop asking for nerfs. It makes sense, right? If the characters you have trouble with get nerfed, you’ll perform better. No one asks for nerfs of their own character. I was actually one of the people who would want those same nerfs for around the first year and a half or so (plus the kickstarter betas), but it has gotten exhausting to try and defend the nerf heavy patches that plague the game. Nerfs are a necessity in any competitive game of course, but constantly chasing a perfectly “balanced” game will always result in dull gameplay loops and muted core character designs. Take Olympia for example, she was an incredibly fun and expressive character on launch, probably the most fun I’ve ever had with a character release both as a player and a spectator. Instead of tuning this strength and seeing the positive side, the devs saw the complaints and tournament/online results, and they proceeded to spend the next several patches gutting not only all of her core moves, but all of her movement stats. And now, it’s commonly repeated that she’s “still good” or “still viable”, but that isn’t the point. Sandstorm was a player that pushed the character to her limits and had a crazy flashy, clip worthy advantage state that was a treat to watch, and inspires people to play the game. “I want to do that” should be on the minds of every spectator for a tournament. Sandstorm’s Olympia in recent memory was the exact opposite, and it’s no wonder he moved on to a different character. His opponents were living to super high percentages, and cool combos just weren’t happening. But guess what? Now Galvan too is the target of nerfs that are directly targeting Sandstorm’s optimization and playstyle of the character.

Creativity and freedom are obviously things that everybody wants in their platform fighters. On the fly combos, tight neutral, and quick decision making on both offense and defense are defining for the genre, but this is not a case of “limitations breed creativity”. In order to have creative and expressive characters in a platform fighter, I believe that their strengths (and weaknesses) simply need to be overtuned. The spacies in melee are a total playground because of the way they allow you to realize all of the ideas you have on the fly, as long as you have the execution to make it happen. When a character is underpowered or limiting, it feels as if the only way you’re “allowed” to play is the dev’s intended playstyle, rather than a mixture of your own preferences and the powers of the character.

People will always play platform fighters in incredibly risk-averse and defensive ways. The nature of character movement being mirrored means that this is an unsolvable issue, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be discouraged. Rivals 2 is a game that actively encourages defensive play, and it is also a game that has only gotten more and more defensive over time. All competitive games will naturally fall more defensive over time of course, but the patch mentality of rivals 2 has expedited this process by significantly nerfing the power of combos, and the movement speeds of several characters. The current reward per hit in rivals 2 is probably some of the lowest I’ve experienced in any fighting game. Nearly every interaction either returns the game state to neutral, or is met with a counter attack, usually a grab either out of shield or out of floorhug (or even without fh since base knockback is so low). It feels like the devs have fallen into a trap of thinking that, since you can use these mechanics offensively (run up fh, run up shield), it means that they can’t be nerfed in a significant way, or offense will get worse. This is not the case at all. Using shield and fh in already low risk situations, such as doing retreating aerials or safe pokes, will always be more effective than using it in a higher risk situation, such as an advancing or overshoot aerial. Dan mentioned recently that they’ve been looking at increasing move scaling as an approach to this issue, which is a good step in the right direction. To me, floorhug and shield should be survival mechanics, like di, not reversal mechanics.

Another trap the devs have fallen into is the fear of having an overly campy meta resulting from having an overly strong advantage state, almost always referring to smash 64’s intense punish game. The problem with this line of thinking is that their solution was to nerf characters’ advantage states into the ground. The reason that smash 64 is as campy as it is isn’t because of its strong advantage, but because of how limited movement is in neutral. The same thing applies to smash ultimate. Take rivals 1 for example. Most characters in that game have incredible burst options and threatening empty movement that make neutral a conversation in a way that couldn’t exist with the limited movement of 64. In addition, being closer to the edge of the stage was leagues more punishing in r1 than it is in r2. With the constant easy access to ledge intangibility, it sometimes feels like it’s genuinely just better to stay in the corner and abuse it, rather than trying to hold a more traditional stage position. Being in the corner should either be very limiting, forcing you to bad options and risky plays to get out, or in the case of melee, have edgeguarding be so punishing that getting sniped offstage is near certain death. It’s also much harder to abuse ledge intangibility in melee, not only because of melee’s lack of buffer and harder movement, but because of the community ruleset that discourages planking. I just do not understand why the devs have constantly insisted on the idea that characters shouldn’t be allowed to have a decisive punish game despite all of its inspirations being known for their flashy combos.

It may sound silly, but the workshop release has really cemented my opinion on this topic. Falco feels amazing in this engine, reinforcing the idea that the problem is in the low power level of the base game’s characters. I wish the solution when I was losing would be to “play better”, but it’s almost always “play more defensive”. I hope in the future, the entire cast gets buffed to make them feel closer in power to the game’s inspirations. It doesn’t add up that they’d be this weak feeling when there are already so many defensive mechanics. I also hope the new characters have their identities figured out, the buffs to slade and gouie already feel amazing.

Based no waste bc you ate?