Shadow lords/story mode

It’s kind of like XCOM, but with the actual skirmishes being KI matches instead of turn based strategy. You choose a main, make alliances with some fighters and travel the world fighting rivals and Gargos minions. You can also get items for crafting/buying stuff from Kan-Ra that adds a sort of rpg-ish element to things. Your goal is to complete tasks to weaken Gargos’s power, so that when you’re finally ready to take him on you’ll have the best possible chance of winning. (IG has confirmed that he’s designed to completely unfair if you try to challenge Gargos right away)

sigh Fine.

Basics:
-You play as a team of three characters of your choice, with one character assigned as your captain.
-Story content you uncover will mainly be focused on your captain.
-Characters have set health that can only be restored over the in-game days or through items. If they are defeated you will need a special item to revive them.
-Random missions will spawn on multiple continents around the world, and completing those missions will lower the corruption in the area. These missions involve defeating characters with extra buffs applied to them.
-Sometimes you are able bet on missions and get more in-game currency for it (not KI gold).
-You can deploy team members to take care of missions without being player controlled. The advantage of this is that even if the character fails they cannot be killed.
-Sometimes after a mission the game will prompt you to make a random choice that could reward you or harm you.
-You can equip your fighters with consumables to tip the scales in your favor, like infinite instinct for 30 seconds or preventing the opponent from breaking your combos.
-You can equip your fighters with small buff equipment like extra damage or less meter use.
-The biggest buffs you can apply to your characters come in the form of the guardians. You can equip one guardian to each character, and they have some pretty severe buffs. These include turning every ender into a burnout ender (adding potential damage) or regenerating armor.
-All equipment has rarity and effectiveness levels, with Killer being the best.

Your goal:
-If the corruption level reaches max on three continents, Gargos will appear and you are forced to fight him or die trying.
-Gargos begins Shadow Lords with 5 randomly picked buffs, in addition to general gameplay buffs he always has. His buffs are crazy powerful.
-Omens will show up in missions holding one of Gargos’ buffs. If you defeat the Omen, the buff is cancelled for the Gargos fight. If you lose, there is no way to remove it again.
-You main goal is to delay Gargos’ arrival as much as possible and defeat as many Omens as you can before he inevitably shows up.

So are you able to create multiple teams to uncover story content for everyone should you so choose?

From what I have seen so far. I don’t know if every character has cutscenes.

I’m not so sure… From what we know of already is that you can have three characters in a team, I have no idea about multiple teams.

Yeah, IG if you are reading this make sure cut-scenes for all characters are accessible regardless of team.

I really think you shouldn’t put much stock in these cut scenes. All I’m expecting is an intro to the mode, and maybe a generic cut scene for the “Omen” fights, and probably an intro/outro to the Gargos battle. All the actual story stuff I think will be regulated to text.

We already know the general story of Season 3 (invasion of Earth by Gargos), all that is left is individual character arcs and whatnot. Do people really think we will get actual cut scene for every character? I really just don’t see it.

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I actually expect there to be “hidden” quests, or quests that require a specific set of events to unlock that, once complete will have a cutscene that gives some more detail to what’s going on with certain characters.

I’ve already seen some stuff that I shouldn’t post about on the forum, so yeah.

I’ve been avoiding much of the stuff out there as not to ruin anything, but still my expectations are pretty low.

More hope than think, really.

I think there are. Or they hinted at those during the breakdown with Rukari. Will confirm once I get home.

I can’t stress enough that fighting games are much better with character/story content than not. SF figured it out, Tekken figured it out, with the development of season 2 vs season 1 it seemed like KI understood this. Let’s not take a bold step backwards IG.

While I agree with what you say, I dont think it necessarily has to be with cutting edge cgi cutscenes. If done with enough depth of story I dont mind it if we only get text and pictures (I dont love the marvel movies any more than I do the marvel comics) in the end its all about the quality what they give you has, not the format that is used.

For example you can have bad cgi story with several set fights where you’re stuck with characters you might not have an interest in or you can have good text based character and story development with tactical decision making/managing and fights using selectable characters/teams.

Now people can have a preference for format, but that doesnt guarantee quality, and sure I wouldnt say no to some nice cgi, but doing in another way doesnt immediately mean its less good.

If you’re hungry for information and/or discussion, you could always try the long running, already existing thread about Shadow Lords. :slight_smile:

No dispute here.

What kind of “character/story content” are you looking for in KI?

Back in 2011 MK9 paved the way for SFV and Tekken 7’s story modes. Before then it was all about the cut scenes, and before then it was all text in game and/or additive media like comics and movies and whatnot.

KI has been ramping up its story endeavors.

  • S1 started with an the old “arcade” way of telling a story with a block of text, a couple fights, and multiple endings.
  • S2 saw the inclusion of an intro, rival, and ending cut scenes for each S2 character, and later they added expanded backstories all the S1 and S2 characters.
  • S3 so far has the Novella

Are you looking for KI to have a more cinematic story? (I’d personally love for that to happen) Or are you looking for something new.

I think the coming Shadow Lord mode is something new (at least new to me/something I’ve never seen in a fighting game), so I’m not really looking for something like what we have seen from the more cinematic stories of the most recent FGs.

Edit: Let me add that if we do get more focused character cut scenes in the new SL mode, they more than likely will be centered around S3 characters. I think MS said that the SL story would revolve more around the S3 characters than anything else anyway, so I’m not expecting any choreographed fight scenes, or in depth story between any S1 or S2 characters.

My biggest thing with shadow lords story is I don’t have whoever you played as beats Gargos as their story. I want you to have to play everyone to see why happened to them. For example maybe jago Kim and orchid ending all have them getting to Gargos together but only one of them has a ending as being the one to defeat Gargos. Or like thunder and aganos ending have nothing to do with Gargos it has them going after kan rah and finding eagle at ultratech during all the chaos.

I think i just played your Glacius Shadow lol. He got wrecked!

He’s not designed for S3 lol, I haven’t done much testing with him.

Maybe when I’m really bored one day I’ll grind him out again.

That’s a great point. If the depth is there it really negates the CGI, but having the depth and the CGI is the ideal I guess.

Honestly, I am pretty open minded about how they ultimately achieve the goal of exploring the characters motiations, backgrounds, futures and just overall place in the KI Universe. Voice acting, CGI and a narrative help in that but it isn’t necessary. If they can accomplish immersing us in the KI story through this new mode i’m open to a different approach. But if it is something more like MKX living towers that will be a major disappointment for me.