with PC Port which should be top priority btw, making sure it launches with the caliber of the console version, assuring the net code and all aspects of cross play functions as near flawless as on console, making adjustments for the allowing added quality that can be squeezed out on PC vs the console limits… There is a lot more going into S3 than just the game release… they did state that the other characters are at least Beta finished, but they will continue to roll them out over the course of the season, that could easily also include modes, and other functional assets to the game… from last Tuesday to this past Tuesday we’ve already seen a new feature in shadow ender animation, which most likely was an unfinished build… we have the pre-order date, which means we will get pricing that day, we already know the release date, and were still getting weekly content leading up to the 29th… plus we did get backstories for the entire S1 & S2… We have received a load of content, it may seem underwhelming for some because we aren’t used to waiting for the lapse of time we did for S3… but I believe in faith, they have never failed us and I don’t see them starting now…
I’m confused- those that say the level 4 Enders are saying it looks unfinished? I thought these were always in the game.
How does a close up make it any less than what we saw in game season 2, unless you are
Saying the animations never looked appealing in the start?
I think they look amazing and add drama and I’m an artist I see where it’s going towards completion. Once it’s finessed, I think a lot of people will be amazed
I see where people come from.
The original animations didn’t have different camera angles, they just played like regular moves in the game.
Now that we have camera angles that means some enders could show parts of the stage not meant to be shown (basically the reason Shadow Jago ultimate previously only worked on his stage). To have the camera angles in all stages they did the same they did with Shadow Jago and ARIA’s instinct, put a black background covering the stage.
The solution is simple in theory: remove the black background and just have cool looking camera angles and zoom ins (like the original KI S1 had in the Jago trailer) but I believe this isn’t feasible in practice since they probably would have to edit all stages to make sure all enders look good.
Well, one of the tricks used to make animation manageable is to generally only animate what you need to, and to leave parts that the viewer doesn’t see alone. On a 2D plane this is fairly easy, and with the addition of shockwaves and hitstop and other effects you further obscure what’s actually going on with your character. It allows you to create an overall impression (wow, Wulf’s level 4 looks like it hurts) without necessarily dotting every single “i” or crossing every “t”. You focus your efforts on exactly what you want the viewer to see.
With a fully dynamic camera that’s panning around on each hit, you’ve now got no place to hide any jankiness or less-than-quality components of your animation. It’s kind of all out there, and anything that’s less than perfect is much more apt to be seen and noticed. To be fair, I don’t think the issue is necessarily that there are “bad” animations in the level 4’s - it’s more that these animations were designed to be seen on a 2D plane in the first place. They’re optimized to look good in that space, and not in any other.
I’m not like some people who think it’s incredibly jarring and can’t work, but I do think that there may need to be some more TLC given to the new level 4’s. Now that they’re going to show us the enders in a fully 3D space, the enders should be optimized for being viewed in that 3D space. Some of the skipped frames and hitstops that worked in S1 and S2 might not work in this new context, and that should be addressed. They’re also still working within a limited timespace as well, as the 3D level 4’s have to finish in the same amount of time as the current ones to avoid breaking the flow of the match.
I do think the idea has potential though. Hopefully IG is able to meet it. 
This is what I am hoping those who are quick to post negativity think about.
Maybe even these Enders could be finessed further when the new characters come in fall.
It’s only a great thing IMO
The idea is there. Just needs some more polish I think.
What disturbs me most it is that this new effect justifies nothing (besides being badly made). He justifies the Ender level 4? OK. But the Ender level 4 does not represent anything exceptional… Ender shadow removes more life, and will have no this effect…
The strongest event in the fight at the gameplay level is, for me, the counter breaker; this would have justified a more marked effect, may be.
OK, reach the level 4 of Ender show a beautiful performance of variety of combo (or of an attractive counter breaker ^^), but not in the point to darken the stage, an effect on the character would have is enough, or on the opponent (a enlightens, the wind which blows the ground and écarte of the fragments, etc.)
This is correct. I dislike virtually every aspect of how the new level 4 enders work.
I had a huge long diatribe planned about it, but to be perfectly honest I’m feeling really down about them and it feels really hopeless getting anything to change. I’m sure the team is planning to launch Season 3 with them (and IMO ruin a great first impression with the new PC players about how smooth and beautiful KI looks).
You guys know me, I love to support a lot about this game. I am always willing to give the benefit of the doubt. I always try to look past the things I don’t like and try to find the things I do like instead. I’ve put hundreds of volunteer hours into producing content and promoting this game. But this change is so cringe-worthy to me that… I dunno. It greatly impacts my enjoyment of watching (and probably also playing) the game to the point where I just… I dunno, man. I don’t want to see these level 4 enders 2-3 times per match. I’d rather just go do something else.
I even waited a day after seeing it to make sure I didn’t post something I would regret later. And I’m glad I did, because I would have said something way different yesterday. But my feelings on it haven’t changed. These are so bad that they suck any energy I have for KI directly out of me.
If you don’t feel the same way, I’m happy for you. You’ll get to enjoy the game a lot more than me.
Wow. As someone who’s not particularly enamored of the new level 4’s, I’ve got to say I think this is a huge overreaction. 
Sorry you feel that way though - hope it gets better for you
Why are you saying good night? Nearly half of those who voted could care less for the new effects. That’s pretty big.
Sigh, I guess I’ll try a last-ditch effort to explain why I think these are so bad. You guys have touched on a lot of these reasons here and in other threads.
- It’s a solution in search of a problem. There have been other debates about various aesthetic things in KI, from Cinder’s appearance, to how air counter breakers look, to whatever else. To me, these are way different than the level 4 ender problem, because IG/MS needed to create functionality. If air counter breakers are to exist, in order to support a bunch of fun new character ideas, then we have to create it. If Cinder is to exist, we have to design him. You might disagree with the implementation, but something needed to get created from scratch to support new functionality (probably on a tight time and money budget), so it’s a lot easier to support the team here.
This is different. This is them actively taking a system that not only looks good, but produces some of the most satisfying hits in the entire game, and changing it … why? “Just because”? “We wanted to make it cooler”? There is already a benefit for doing level 4 over other ender levels… you get an extra hit on your ender and often a totally unique camera angle (for example, Spinal’s lv4 damage ender). This works, and works very well.
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It produces negative gameplay effects. When you do a level 4 ender, you now lose all sense of stage positioning (how close you are to the corner, for example) until the black effect goes away. I’ll believe the team when they say that there is no actual change in timing for meaties/combos after an ender, but in practice, the camera swinging wildly and resetting at an odd time makes everything feel very awkward. Let’s say you’re used to watching a certain part of Jago’s arm, or how high the character is falling, so you can juggle after level 4 Endokuken ender (this is what I do). Now, all this information might be useless to you and you’ll have to retrain yourself with a new cue, since the camera doesn’t show what it used to show.
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It exposes the game’s jankiness to an absolute maximum degree. Making fighting games is a lot about tricking players into thinking stuff is happening that really isn’t, and a lot of this is camera angle stuff (look at SF4’s ultras for an example). But now, they zoom in on characters and switch to weird angles to expose every little thing that is happening, and the screen is black now so we have no choice but to look directly at it. If a character’s fist isn’t directly hitting someone during an uppercut ender, this is now immediately exposed from a lot of these new angles.
Here are two examples from the stream (link):
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At 1:55:15, Tusk does level 4 skull splitter ender. See that because the camera angle now switches to the side, we lose all impact of that final strike? We don’t see it from the front on, so it looks like he kind of waves his sword in front of the guy’s face and he just… falls over. Compare that to the old way url=https://youtu.be/dnqpvh8hnqM?t=1342[/url], which has a slight camera turn but not nearly as much, and the final blow feels MUCH more powerful. You are given the illusion the sword actually hits him, because you don’t get to see him actually whiff it from the side.
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At 1:19:15, Jago does level 4 uppercut ender, but because of the way Orchid is positioned, he is very clearly not hitting her, and they’re just rising randomly together. This actually happens in the old game too url=https://vid.me/MIul[/url], but you see how it looks way better because the camera angle isn’t zoomed in and showing it, and the hit sparks are kind of hiding the exact location of impact? It is much easier to believe Jago is actually hitting Maya in that second link. If you watch the two back to back, you might even think they are two completely different animations.
So you might say… okay, let’s just change those two enders. But, the problem persists across every ender I saw in that video to one extreme or another. Why should we re-do and re-fix every ender when all the old angles look great? What benefit do we gain?
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It hides the stages they worked so hard to relight. You spent a large part of your budget designing these beautiful stages (which we all love), then you spend more of your budget to re-light these stages from scratch so they look even better, and then… you cover them up with a black screen 3+ times per match? What, you don’t want us to look at them? The old level 4 camera angles might expose some really awesome part of the stage (in the corner, especially), and now we get to stare at a black screen and a weird hazy smoke effect thing as the characters float magically on nothingness while delivering the game-winning blow.
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Every single ender I saw was so bad that I had to pause, rewind, and watch again just to make sure I actually saw what I thought I saw. I showed it to some friends of mine just to make sure I wasn’t out to lunch. I got reactions ranging from “oh my GOD…” to “Those are just placeholders, right? It looks like the game is glitching out.” From the view of Glacius’s a.ss as the opponent disappears at the top of the screen (6:25 in this vid), to the claymation slide show during Aganos’s ender (16:45 in this vid), there was no ender in the video that was better than its current level 4 version, and most were way worse.
I think I could go on and on, but I’m going to stop. I sympathize with game developers, because they have an absolutely impossible job; to try and satisfy everyone all at once. No matter what they do, someone will be upset, so I really do sympathize with them. And it’s not even that them trying to give a little extra punch to level 4 enders is a bad thing! I can appreciate the idea, especially if the effect was really subtle (like, I dunno… a SFV-esque trail of particles around a character or something, with everything else the same).
But my mind is absolutely blown that nobody along the way told them “you know what, this new level 4 ender system isn’t really looking that great, maybe we should take it back to the drawing board and postpone it in the real game for now.” Everything about it screams “this wasn’t working, but we decided to try and make it work… and when it still didn’t come together, we threw it in the game anyway. Enjoy.” And, like I said in point 1, this wasn’t the best they could do on short notice to create a new gameplay feature. This is them replacing something that existed with something that doesn’t work.
Sorry for the rant. I’m really down about these and if they don’t get changed back, I just doubt I will have the energy to play this game much anymore. I was attracted to KI for a bunch of reasons, but one of the big ones was that I loved how it looked in motion. With this change making sure that I will hate looking at the screen 3 times per match, even with all the other positive changes coming this season, I just… don’t know if I want to do it.
Dev team, use this feedback however you like.
They already invested time and money on the new enders. I doubt they will do any significant changes or leave the old enders. 
It’s the end of an era and the start of lower than Naruto respect for KI.
I know, right? I was surprised at my reaction too. I heard about them and that they were a bit controversial, but I didn’t get to watch the stream live and I thought “eh, how bad could it really be?”
But they were bad enough to elicit that reaction from me, even intentionally not responding for a day so I could cool off a bit. My mind is blown 5 different ways how this feature could exist in this state in a finished, shipped product that they are giving to 100,000 new players who will form a new first impression. KI gets that rare shot at a brand new first impression with a new player base, and you’d think if they had an experimental system that needed a little more time in the oven or maybe a bit of a re-think, they would hold it back for a few patches to make sure it sparkled.
Instead, we get this. And it was such a kick in the balls for me that I had the reaction I had.
Over 35% is a ‘large’ majority, not to mention there are 18% who don’t really care for it.
Even more, I think the naysayers will be a higher if they saw the current enders side-by-side with the new ones.
Where can I see these lvl4 enders?
Watch their last few past broadcasts.
Hmm… You make very good points. I might have to look back, and compare the enders side by side.
You simply expressed the way i feel to 100%!
I really hope for a step backward of developers…
This ender lvl4 is unrefined, and badly suited to the game…
Jago does level 4 Endokuken ender at about 22:00 in this link. If somebody wants to turn this into a gif and put it next to the other one, we could do a comparison.
Very good explanation and pretty much my thoughts. There’s some I do like but overall I’m on the “nay.”