I’m in an educational / show how the sausage is made mood today.
Shadow Jago’s original ultimate was built into the level itself, with all the camera splines and targets, plus character setups, baked into the specific level. That stage also has a large skybox that can handle seeing “up” more than other stages can. Fighting game stages are much like TV & movie sets - you build for what the audience sees, not what you don’t.
We have 20 stages at present. No two stages are built exactly the same because we use their budgets differently depending on its intended role as an effect stage or a destruction stage. Also, they’re vastly different - some are underground, some not, some day, some night, some claustrophobic, some open, and many don’t have skyboxes or can handle the views set up for Shago’s ultimate, so copying it across to all the stages won’t work - by hand, someone has to go in and tweak every one in order to make just that one ultimate work. That’s 20 audits just for one ultimate, and what if one stage just can’t handle the ultimate you really want because of camera angles? What if they don’t have a skybox to imply height really well? It has to be reworked for the lowest common denominator in terms of height, view, etc. and then re-tweaked again across all 20 stages.
Let’s say every character has an ultimate that is stage appropriate. That’s 26 characters x 20 stages = 520 ultimate animations to tweak and tune. This doesn’t include the actual creation of each ultimate either, which is typically all custom animations and audio / fx work.
So how to not get buried by that amount of work? Either make all the stages the same in terms of skyboxes, ceiling heights, wall heights, etc. Which is what some other games do, which in our opinion ruins the unique feel of each of the stages, or… remove the background during the ultimate so that it works anywhere.
In the future, you could imagine that if others get ultimates, we’d build them with the stages in mind, which at least helps somewhat in the creation, but you still have the issue of having to check them vs. every stage and tweak appropriately, because we care a lot about the stages we make.
I get it that as fans, none of this matters to you, and that’s cool - you want great things for KI and want it to be more epic and hype in all possible ways. We do too – we just have to deal with the reality of making that happen.
Note that we’ve not given up on the idea of ultimates, there’s just a lot of “this or this?” conversations we have constantly over every feature we consider.