I agree WarGods had more potential than has ever been realized. I have two competing theories about what happened there - both utterly speculative.
When making the jump to 3D, Midway (what became NRS) said “this technology is not ready to do justice to our big fighting franchise. Let’s test the waters with a new IP and develop our experience with the new technology before starting MK in the 3D realm.” This seems unlikely because the effort to design completely new characters and lore seems high.
Midway/NRS intended to move into the relatively new 3D fighting game space by starting a new franchise with WarGods. Heavily influenced by MK. But the downturn in popularity of arcades and the general poor performance of WarGods commercially (not popular in arcades not popular in home consoles) made them abandon it and instead stick with their marquee franchise in the 3D realm.
I think scenario 2 is more likely and probably 100% the right decision. But it’s also a sad outcome because the lesson for fighting game developers is “don’t wast time developing new IP. Just sell version 38 of the fighter that got you rich,” which I think is bad for the genre over the long term.
Edit: something else that’s easy to forget about WarGods is that they used digitized images of actors for the textures on the models. This was because the poly count was pretty terrible but probably also because digitized images were a hallmark of Mortal Kombat and separated it from the anime cartoons of all the other fighters. But it just didn’t work. So MK 4 which came out a year later and looked tons better just dropped the digitization completely.
My brother would frequently get a comment on our Primal Rage videos about Tao Feng by one individual. They must’ve been a big fan of Tao Feng. It didn’t make me and jeff think bad about it though, I’m sure it was a great game for many.
I remember this series as well. This was this was before we had our first Godzilla games here in the US. About 10 years or so. Granted the sequel’s neo geo and snes versions were more of the beat em up style. But sega genesis stuck to the roots of the game.
The comment below it is for Kakuto Chojin, not that it matters. Just clarifying in case anyone is confused, since that game got more or less recalled / banned for its use of the Koran in the music on a stage.
But yeah, this game, Tao Feng, was pretty fun. Not a great game by any means, but when it launched on the original Xbox, it’s graphics were pretty solid, and the story (from John Tobias of Mortal Kombat fame) was a fun one about two rival gangs in this sort of neo-Tokyo type atmosphere. It has some cool concepts, some fun ideas, etc.
Familiar rant incoming:
It kinda bums me out a bit that Microsoft doesn’t do more with a lot of their long lost, abandoned franchises like this one, Kakuto Chojin, Crimson Skies, MechAssault, Lost Odyssey and several others. Rare, for example, has a whole treasure trove of classics that just sitting and collecting dust. It’s a minor miracle that Killer Instinct ever came back to begin with. It’d be nice if Wizards & Warriors, RC Pro Am, Kameo, Perfect Dark, Banjo, Conker, Jet Force Gemini etc got the same treatment.
Of course, the 360 era did see several franchises return. Still, we’ve had 6 years of Xbox One, going on 7, and there are still tons of dormant franchises. Whatever happened to Rallisport? Or Amped? Or Blood Wake? Do they not see any potential for a baseball game like High Heat, or are they content with Xbox owners only having that garbage RBI Baseball franchise? The list goes on.
Sorry, don’t mean to break off on a tangent / rant here. I just look at a lot of these games, Tao Feng included, and I see games that made me want to buy in to Microsoft’s ecosystem in the first place. Which makes it kinda suck a bit that each generation has more or less seen the abandonment of franchises that came before, unless your names happen to be Halo, Gears or Forza.
New IPs are great, but is it really that hard to do both? You can bring back Crackdown and Killer Instinct and also have Ori and Sunset Overdrive, but isn’t it possible to get more from both? Hopefully with more studios, we’ll see more classics return, but I’m skeptical. These studios they’ve purchased likely have their own franchises they want to work on, whether it’s stuff they’ve done before or new ideas they want to bring to the market.
It’s just a shame. I look at Sony and Nintendo and I see several new IPs along with several beloved franchises. Sony has Horizon, Spider Man, The Last Guardian, Days Gone, Bloodborne, Ghost of Tsushima and Until Dawn, but they also have God of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Ratchet & Clank, Gran Tourismo, MLB, MediEvil, Final Fantasy VII Remake, Shadow of the Colossus, Killzone, etc.
With Nintendo, you know you’re going to get Mario games, Zelda games, Smash Bros, Kirby, Metroid, Fire Emblem, Mario Kart, but they do all of them in new and unique ways, plus they add franchises like Splatoon, Arms, Octopath, Bayonetta, Xenoblade along with their usual litany of unique, sort of oddity titles like 1-2-Switch.
With Microsoft, so far this time around, we’ve had Sunset Overdrive, Quantum Break, Ori, Sea of Thieves, Cuphead, Killer Instinct and then the usual suspects returning from Halo, Gears and Forza. One could argue that the Switch has a more exciting group of exclusive experiences than the Xbox One and they’ve done it in one third of the time.
TL/DR: Okay, rant over (this time for realz lol). I’m just hoping that MS can really go all out for their next console and give us some stellar new experiences along with new and fun iterations of games that many of us signed up with Xbox for to begin with, whether during the 360 generation or the OG Xbox.
Yeah, this generation, especially in the early years of the Xbox One, Microsoft really lost touch with their core consumer base, and the console itself didn’t seem to have a proper identity/direction.
Don Mattrick became the President of the Interactive Entertainment Business division of Microsoft in 2010, and it was around this time that I found the Xbox division and Xbox 360 platform began going in a direction that I didn’t agree with, and I recall finding them getting rather pompous. Sony, who started that generation as arrogant, seemed to have an about-face and by the end of that generation, I personally believed the PlayStation 3 was the better product over the Xbox 360 for multiple reasons.
When this generation launched, it seemed to me Microsoft was like Sony from the beginning of last gen, arrogant and telling their customer what they should want, while Sony was now the ones listening to their consumers and actually providing them what they wanted.
When Phil Spencer took over for Mattick, the overall focus and direction of the Xbox One and overall Xbox platform seemed to about-face, though it seems to be a little to late for this generation.
I can’t prove anything factually, of course, but I feel that Mattick’s leadership is what’s hurt the Xbox division overall. Hopefully Spencer and his direction will work better for the brand next generation.
This is hard to argue with. Especially when what we were supposed to want was to pay an extra $100 for Kinect 2 that doesn’t really work any better than Kinect 1 (which is to say, in my hands, it works very very poorly).
But it didn’t take Sony all that long to fall back into old habits. It is promising though that PS5 will have backward compatibility with PS4.
As far as MS and old IP, I couldn’t agree more with @Iago407. They have made some attempts at obscure IP with Phantom Dust (weird choice) and now with Battletoads. But I think there’s a lot of unexplored territory left in the pile that they could dust off. I’m such a huge fan of how they treated KI, but there were some cracks in even that process that I admit undercut my confidence in MS as a supporter of game development. Being an armchair critic is easy, but I just don’t have a ton of faith in their in house project management. Hopefully they can restore that soon.
I don’t know if the game was just mishandled (marketing, battle mechanics, etc) or that lack of past sales really is the only reason Capcom isn’t bringing the game back.
I was a fan of the game’s artistic style and most characters but I have to admit that I never liked the gameplay… But I do want to see a modern version or have some characters appear in next gen form.
Honestly? I think they were still considering it until the demise of MvCi. They made a new Darkstalkers character for that game who was very well received. But I honestly wouldn’t blame them if they never release another fighting game other than Street Fighter. The fans beg and beg for the games and then absolutely trash them.
Yeah, I never cared for Kinect. I thought it was a cool product, but one that didn’t mesh with my way of gaming. I actually only know one guy who liked Kinect (on his Xbox 360), and it was actually for his toddler to enjoy.
When they were forcing it with every Xbox One at launch, that was a huge turn-off for me.
For me, I typically game on a PC or a console, and have rotated through my life as to which was my primary platform. I went from PC to an Xbox Console in late 2004, and then picked up an Xbox 360 Pro in late 2006. The Xbox 360 was my dedicated gaming platform from then on until around 2015.
I’ve never been a big Sony guy, and I wanted to support Microsoft and the Xbox platform with the launch of the Xbox One, but it seriously gave me no reason to:
Extremely high price tag
Forcing a peripheral (Kinect) I had no interest in
A more limiting model of game distribution (that they went back on at the time)
Lackluster launch titles (I generally think Killer Instinct was the best one, and it was basically a supped up Xbox LIVE Arcade game at the time)
A muddled focus on controlling the living room as opposed to providing me with outstanding gaming experiences
In 2014 my PC died and I replaced it, but I figured I’d still need to pick up a console for Mortal Kombat X, until I found out it was coming to PC at launch and my system met the requirements.
That solidified the PC as my primary platform from then on, though I recently picked up an Xbox One X as well to partake in Xbox Play Anywhere.
Gaming-wise overall, I find this generation has taking game design as a whole in a direction that doesn’t resonate with me, and I find myself playing older games and remasters over actual new titles. The Mortal Kombat franchise is the only one where I’m still buying games at launch.
I’m terrible with names but I think it was Jedah. Definitely not Dmitry (he’s the vampire right?). I’m too lazy to google it. But I’ve never been a huge MvC fan - despite trying pretty hard to like it since people talk about how great it is. I picked up MvCi late despite everyone hating it because it seemed more manageable to me with teams of 2 and the DLC characters really are terrifically done. It’s almost like they come from a different game than the base roster. I think the mechanics are cool and the game is much easier to approach for people like me - fighting game literate but inexpert at MvC. I know there were some legitimate beefs with the game on release but I’m really convinced that mob mentality killed it more than any real issues. And people went right to saying “capcom should release another MvC that…”. How stupid can you be? Why the heck would Capcom ever want to touch MvC again and why would Disney let them? We live in an era of toxic fandom and wonder why we don’t get the stuff we want…
Which segues back to @Juxtapose13 and the Xbox One. I totally get where you’re coming from. The launch was pretty terrible but frankly I think the only detail that matters is $500 at launch vs $400. That’s more than enough to explain why people bought 2 PS4 for every Xbox One. Keep in mind the Best selling launch game for both systems was CoD not any fantastic exclusive. If it hadn’t been for KI I would have sat out the first year of the new consoles and then who knows? I started life as a Nintendo fan, got into PlayStation reluctantly and Xbox even more reluctantly but I’ve owned essentially everything since the Dreamcast until this generation. But although it has some great exclusive games, Sony never really convinced me I needed a PS4. We will see what happens next.
I have a competent gaming PC but I can’t really make the transition to playing at my computer desk versus in front of the tv. The consoles are much friendlier for the kids so I don’t think that’s ever going away. I admit I love the idea of cross play and cross save between consoles and PC so I hope that continues to expand.
As far as game design, I think this generation started with a lot of promise. We have seen a lot of asynchronous multiplayer, for example. But a lot of great ideas either got cancelled (Fable Legends) or didn’t live up to their promise (Evolve). The under appreciated trend is the emergence of truly excellent, smaller budget games that don’t need to sell GTA V numbers to be successful. The Ori’s and Cuphead’s of the world are able to break new ground and do stuff that huge budget titles will always see as too risky.
But I think we place a lot of blame on developers and publishers (the faceless evil corporations of gaming) when in reality gamers only want to keep buying the same games over and over. When things are different or try to develop new ideas we essentially reject them. This is how a game like Tekken 7 (where I can pick up Jin Kazama and do the exact same combos I’ve been doing since Tekken 3, by memory) can be considered the generations best fighting game by so many in the FGC who refuse to even look at KI.
I could go on and on but I will close my novel here. Sorry for the wall of text.
No harm in a well written wall of text man, that’s part of excellent discussion!
If the Xbox One would have launched with a $400.00 Kinectless bundle as well, I agree that it would have launched much better. Give people the option to buy Kinect if they want it, but don’t force it. Looking back as well, I actually do think Microsoft was ahead of the times in some ways. They’re always connected, digital game distribution concept is generally what’s standard today, especially in PC gaming. They were even going to let you gift or sell your digital games; something I don’t believe you can do in any service today!
Anyway, it was what it was and life has gone on.
In terms of consoles, I’ve owned the following through my life:
Sega Master System
Nintendo Game Boy
Nintendo Entertainment System (used)
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (used)
Xbox
Xbox 360 (Pro, then a few refurbished models under warranty, and finally an E)
PlayStation Vita
Xbox One X
So I was a Nintendo guy during my childhood, and an Xbox guy as an adult. I got my first PC after the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and switched back to consoles when I found I wasn’t keen on the direction PC gaming was going in. Ended up shifting back when I was less keen on the direction consoles were going in.
In terms of blame overall, lots of people like to blame publishers and developers, but really, it’s us, the consumer, who’s to blame. We make the purchasing choices and show what we’re will to pay for and what we aren’t, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned about gamers in general, they’re great at raising a freakstorm over something they don’t like, swear they’ll never buy a product from evil corporation of the week again, and then immediately pre-order the next title from said corporation a week later.
I basically play what I like to play, support what I like to support, and vote with my wallet.
All of the blowback MS got about their digital games strategy was mob mentality nonsense. As you say, essentially everything they proposed is standard practice for most gaming platforms at this point (including “beloved” ones like Blizzard prior to last month anyway), and the “games as service” model is hear to stay. Other companies just implemented it quietly and no one made a fuss. I am firmly convinced that MS’s policies were developed in deep consultation with the big developers (like EA and Activision) and that Sony was planning to do more or less exactly the same thing until they saw the blowback on MS.
This x1000. While companies do sometimes do dumb things, they stop really quickly if nobody buys their products. And despite everyone’s bizarre fixation on how the internet triumphed with the Sonic the Hedgehog movie (which will still be horrible and still flop at the box office and certainly not recoup any money the spent reworking the digital character, but I digress), most of the time the internet outrage just works to kill the things we love and accomplished nothing. Everyone complains bitterly about DLC but then people buy horse armor for Oblivion. Companies get the message.
Look at KI. People howled about the small launch roster, complained about the release schedule and the seasonal model. And now literally every fighting game is following this model.
I never had the luck to play Primal Rage and experience the game like most fans. I can see how it has charm and personality, but I was too much into hand-to-hand fighting games that I glossed over many other FGs at the time…unfortunately.
That’s fine, I could see why folks love games like DOA and even tekken now. Granted I lost interested in the later back in 2002. But for me Primal Rage will always be a favorite.
Yeah, don’t get me started on internet mob mentality. Not just on the internet, but overall and in real life, I find critical thinking is truly dying. And that’s pretty scary.
Mattrick… Yeah. That was an unfortunate time. Dude should never have been anywhere near a microphone, and the policies they had back then were either far too ahead of their time or just plain bad to the point of being anti-consumer. If Sony was too arrogant after the PS2 era, then Mattrick was the face of Microsoft’s arrogance post 360.
Oddly enough, I think the early years of the Xbox One were its best in terms of software, as we got Killer Instinct, Dead Rising 3, Sunset Overdrive, Halo 5, Ori and the Blind Forest, Ryse, D4 and Titanfall within the first two years. Meanwhile, PS4 had Killzone, Infamous, Bloodborne, The Order… Not really much else.
Of course, the script flipped not long after and suddenly PS4 was churning out high tier single player experiences while MS kinda just fell in to this Gears, Forza loop with some indies and the occasional game they’d hype up that wouldn’t do a whole lot to turn heads like Halo Wars 2, Super Lucky’s Tale or ReCore. Quantum Break and Cuphead were pretty good, but not really system sellers. So yeah… Taken together, from the last four years, MS has had kind of a rough go.
I think they had to have an about face. They came in to the market $100 more expensive and fully invested in their own hype. After a while, they kinda had to do a marketing strategy change and they became all about the player and all that. To give them credit, every Mattrick mistake that came about prior to launch, Sony was right there to rub their noses in it and let players know that unlike the corporate overlords at MS, Sony was your buddy. Hey, let’s share a game, or whatever.
As for the PS3 being better, I personally prefer Xbox’s UI and controller for the last two generations, but that’s just me.
Yeah, I agree. For all of Phil’s talks about how its all about the games and its all about the players and all that, there’s no way MS was coming close to catching Sony this generation. It’ll be interesting to see how each of them will come in to the next generation. Will Sony be arrogant again like they were post PS2, or have they learned their lesson? Can MS somehow drum up support for their next system given what a wasteland the Xbox One has been for new and old IPs alike? Is there anything MS can do to stop Sony’s momentum or at least outpace them in that department?
Yeah I’ll be curious to see what happens. MS has acquired several studios since Spencer came on board, but none of them really have a litany of AAA titles that fans can look to and expect big things from. Obsidian just crushed it with Outer Worlds, so I suppose that’s one. But on the whole, I think Microsoft’s a rather big unknown at this point.
Outside of Halo 6 and probably a new Forza game, what can we realistically expect at this point at launch? I’m sure every studio is working on stuff. We know Fable’s in development. But given how MS has more or less abandoned about 90% of their IPs from each prior generation, I’ll be really curious to see what they’re going to put out there.
I honestly didn’t mind the Kinect, since my wife loves herself some Dance Central, but the crazy part was that you had to pay extra for it and it just didn’t have anything at all worthwhile to play. I mean, how did they not see this during the run up to release? Everything they had on it was more or less garbage. It’s also kind of amazing that they hadn’t figured out by that point that the motion control era was over and the Wii’s mystical power to get nana to play bowling with a controller was done with.
Yeah I dunno how psyched I am about that. I feel like Sony does a pretty good job of porting games forward to begin with. At least they did in getting Last of Us, Injustice and others from PS3 to PS4. If Sony announced that all PSone, PS2 and PS3 games were both backward compatible and available for purchase on the Playstation Store, I’d be a lot more interested.
I personally love the fact that Scarlett will have all three generations before backward compatible. I’m just curious to see how easy it’ll be to transfer the 150+ games I currently have saved on my Xbox One over to Scarlett. Hope it’s an easy process and I can just move the stuff over and sell the Xbox One.
Yeah, I’m right there with you on this. I initially hated that KI was launching with six characters and they were doing the “worlds most generous demo” thing, but while I’m sure at least part of that was because they wanted to put it out at launch, I wound up loving the slow drip of characters. It allowed me to concentrate on that new character and learn them backwards and forwards. I’m not saying I was “good” with a lot of them, but it definitely made me look at them and use them a lot more than I would’ve had the roster of 27 come out at launch. It was also great to get other stuff like new modes and rebalance patches and stuff like that. KI had a great run IMO.
But then I look at the other times they’ve attempted this. Crackdown 3 failing to impress. Phantom Dust sequel getting cancelled, then the original getting remade. A Voodoo Vince remake that felt very old school and not in a good way. Master Chief Collection launching with tons of issues. Battletoads looking the way it does. The earlier attempt to bring Fable back as a kinect game.
There have been a lot of VERY strange decisions and an overall lacking in quality when it comes to the franchises they’ve brought back. It’s honestly a minor miracle that KI was as good as it was. It shouldn’t have been. The way it was released, switching developers… Most other games would’ve crashed and burned.
So yeah, my faith is somewhat lacking for two reasons: For one thing, they have several game series that actually did well in the past in terms of quality that are just collecting dust. I won’t list them off again, but the number isn’t overly small. Yet the franchises they’re going back to, for the most part, were either rather obscure (as you said), or not particularly beloved or known for their high level of quality.
But then there’s also the fact that a lot of the games they’ve put out this generation have largely failed to impress. On the ten point scale, they’ve had some eights here and there, but not many nines and definitely no tens. So all of these new studios are great, but if they don’t have a lot of high tier IPs, and MS doesn’t seem to want to go back in to their library and carry forward some of their best franchises, then what exactly do they have to lure fans in to their ecosystem again? That’s what I worry about.
I say “worry” because I’ve liked so many of their games in the past generations and even in the first few years of this one. I want more Killer Instinct, I want more Lost Odyssey, more Crimson Skies, MechAssault… I’d love to see them make an honest push to bring fighting game fans back, perhaps by bringing Tao Feng and Kakuto Chojin back with more capable developers, or contracting with Sega or Capcom to help bring back some games like Virtua Fighter or Darkstalkers or whatever. It’d be great if they could have multiple tent pole franchises in a wide variety of genres and not just the holy trinity of Halo, Gears and Forza.
They’ve been saying for years that they’ve been listening and they know fans want them to bring back this game or that game and they’ve been saying all the right things about how important the games are and the player and what not, but now they have to actually back that talk up with products and I haven’t really seen anything int he last three to four years that says they’ll be able to do it, but hey… Here’s hoping, right?
Who was the new Darkstalkers character in MvCi? Are you talking about Jedah? If so, he was honestly my favorite character in that game. Wow did they do a good job with him. His supers were easily my favorite.
Well, to be fair, the fans trashed Street Fighter V for a loooong time. Some of it rightly so, perhaps. But yeah, I think the whole Darkstalkers issue was that they put out a collection to see how well fans would take to it and it didn’t sell. Or at least that’s the industry rumor I’ve seen. Shame. I honestly prefer Darkstalkers to SF.
This is an oft overlooked truth that I think about a lot. Unfortunately the message is that you don’t need exclusive games and they won’t help you move hardware.
Yes Jedah. I should clarify - he wasn’t a new Darkstalker creates for the game but he was new to the vs. games and the first time he appeared in a 3D model.
Yeah, it is an unfortunate message. I’d argue that Dreamcast absolutely trounced PS2 early on in terms of quality exclusives. A comparison of their launch lineups is downright laughable (to me, at least), yet Sony still steamrolled over Sega.
However, unlike Sega, I think Microsoft has both the will and the money to compete with Sony. So in that regard, I think the full picture of the original launches of Xbox One and PS4, along with the first few years that I suppose we can refer to as the launch window, is that games can be important, but against Sony, you have to have more.
Although I’d argue that MS had a far better lineup early on, Microsoft had virtually everything else working against them. They had the ill will of the hardcore player base due to their decisions made early on. They also had the weaker system in terms of specs, yet they were also selling their system for $100 more and essentially forcing an antiquated peripheral on their audience.
So in theory, at least, if all things were equal, I think games would play a much larger role. Sega and Sony were not on equal footing coming out of the gate. Microsoft and Sony were not on equal footing coming out of the previous generation due the reasons I mentioned above.
Of course, I don’t know that there is really and “equal footing” in this race. Sony will always have Japan and Microsoft never will, so not only will overall sales numbers always favor Sony, but Sony will almost assuredly get the lion’s share of Japanese exclusives and while that might not matter as much as it did during the PSone era, it still matters to some extent.
Still, if MS can come out with a more powerful console, for equal or less of the cost than PS5 AND have the better launch window in terms of games? I think they could compete a LOT better than they did this generation. Unfortunately, they’ll still likely need Sony to step in it from a PR perspective, as Sony certainly seems to have the more dedicated fan base.
I still remember the general sentiment, as I could gather it, during the years of this generation’s “competition.” Early on, Sony fans touted having the most powerful console and the fact that it was cheaper. By the time MS launched the 1X and lowered the price of the original 1 and 1S, Sony fans were touting the fact that they had the games. At no point during this generation was MS “winning” on hardware AND software.
So we’ll see what happens in this next generation. Phil Spencer’s been saying all the right things from a software perspective for a while now, but that hasn’t come anywhere close to fruition in terms of both game quality or quantity this generation. Hopefully all the new studios can change that, and we don’t end up with stuff like Crackdown 3, ReCore and Super Lucky’s Tale being the type of games MS has to market while Sony’s marketing much better titles.
I think they’ve learned their lesson from a pricing and hardware perspective. Now they just need to show that they can compete on software. Something they haven’t been able to do for years now. I won’t rant again about the number of quality exclusives they’ve had in the past and their litany of dormant franchises, but I will say that to me, they at least have the ammo in their IP list needed to compete. We’ll see if they actually use it.
Yeah exactly. He was new to MvC. Man… Ya know? That game was actually kinda fun. I would’ve liked to have seen how the roster might’ve turned out if Capcom had supported it with DLC. Oh well, I guess if Chun Li’s face doesn’t look good enough, nothing else matters… ::eyeroll emoji::
I know that SNK is getting some love lately with guest appearances in other FGs by their more famous characters. Also, KOF is not at all dead.
However, before anything I used to play Fatal Fury and that was my favorite series of all time.
I don’t have much hope for a new Fatal Fury / Mark of the Wolf game as it is maybe too niche and small of a brand that is overtaken by the KOF brand and recently SamSho brand. Therefore, I consider Fatal Fury a non-current FG much like Virtua Fighter, my other favorite game.
Anyway, great but old vid on Rock Howard and his animation below. Probably a great vid that shows how in love I was with the Fatal Fury characters. So much personality in the designs for years.
I have yet to play Halo Wars 2, but as an RTS fan, I loved Halo Wars. For a console RTS, it was fantastic. Intuitive to play, pretty good balance, and simple yet fun gameplay.
