So I just got the Season 1 disk

So I had ordered the Season 1 Combo Breaker disk, and it just arrived today. I thought I’d give my thoughts on it. I want to qualify that I’m not a pro, and I was a “filthy casual” at best during S1 so I never got into the advanced bug-exploiting game-breaking play a lot of pros did.

It was neat to go back and see all the older UI and asthetics. So far I’ve only played with Jago and Glacius. Jago doesn’t seem to have changed much on the broader strokes IMHO…obviously there are several differences like Instinct (This build seemed like he gained health from simply attacking…also no double fireballs). Glacius…wow that was like playing with one hand tied behind my back. 1 hail at a time, no moving puddle moves…medium PP was back to an opener, but it was definitely different. I’m looking forward to playing Fulgore with his heavy sk-eye laser and manual reactor charging.

If anyone is interested, there have been threads about it, but I didn’t want to necro a year-old thread…it’s not hard to play it. You need an account that hasn’t played KI before (I’d recommend a new account just for playing S1), make sure the Xbox can’t access the current build of KI (either just delete it completely or save it to an external HDD and then unplug it) and then go offline and load the game from disk. Then make sure when you play you do so offline.

If you purchased the S1 Ultra pack are careful about it you can also dig through your KI download files on another profile and download it again/copy from the external HDD and it’ll unlock a few retros…I think just Jago, Glacius, and Saberwulf. The others didn’t seem to be on the build.

Overall, what I’ve played of S1 so far…IMHO it’s rather dull. A lot of the additions IG have made such as flip-outs, aerial combos/aerial breakers, etc makes the game much more dynamic and fluid. It’s neat to go back and visit S1…but I have no intention of staying there.

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My thoughts exactly.

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If there was one thing that I’d like to bring back from Season 1, it’d be Sabrewulf’s original Instinct Mode, where he would get a 10% damage boost, in addition to the chip damage bonus he has now.

Why? Wulf’s Feral Cancel is incredibly situational, and I rarely even think to use it, as opposed to the Glacius ice armor, always-fired-up Cinder, Riptor’s tail & fire extenders, and other passive boosts, which players probably should just go ahead and activate Instinct Mode, as the “instinct buffs” are likely to help you in some way or another since they’re constantly helping you as instinct is on. :wolf:

I can’t speak for everyone, but man- it felt SO cool to launch Instinct to see Wulf’s muscles grow to silverback gorilla levels, while KNOWING and SEEING that it meant something as you’re clawing Sadira’s face off with the temporary damage boost. I miss that…

-Zenek

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I agree, IMHO Sabrewulf’s instinct in S1 was more useful and more importantly easier to understand and use the boon he got from it. To a less advanced player Feral Cancel basically equates to hit FP+FK= get rekt. But 10% damage boost, if you can land a hit you can use it.
There are things I miss about Fulgore as well. I honestly liked his S1 design of zoning until a point then change to rushdown…and also the heavy sk-eye laser, as well as being able to manually charge his reactor at any time if you choose to leave him wide open to attack. However I’ve been noticing that those elements that I miss from S1 Fulgore have made their way into Kilgore and Eagle’s designs. Kilgore adopted the zoner into rushdown trait and Eagle’s back+HP is comparable to the sk-eye laser. So you can’t really say they’re not still in the game…just not for Fulgore.

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Something worth noting is that Jago’s manuals were absolutely nuts! He could practically combo off anything and do even more shinanigans during his instinct.

My favorite thing about him is that he had the ability to cancel his wallsplat ended by using instinct and going back into a combo for additional health gain.

The Grimmmz special is also pretty neat, though it’s still in the game.

This is the version that had the fireballs light up darkened parts of arena?
And I’m assuming the pre- grenade Orchid
The better character zoom in screen

Yeah all the light-emitting moves seem to be more pronounced. As far as I can tell in the current build fireballs & such still light up, but there’s more subtlety to it…the screen doesn’t go as dark and the fireballs don’t light up as much. It’s hard to say if that’s a good thing or not though…it’s a little rough on the eyes when you’re playing in a dark room, even though it’s shiny and cool.
Also yes, Orchid got her grenade in season 2, and the character zoom-in had more detailed controls seems like.

I also want to address the water effects on Thunder’s stage on season 1. I think I recall someone saying there was like a water drip or something you could see on the characters…not entirely accurate. The effect had a look like a sheet of water was flowing over their skin, the whole thing glossy & such. From the looks of it, it was tied heavily to the lighting effects of the stage, so it’s understandable why that’s no longer in the game.
If you ask me though the color pallets of the stages prior to the stage relighting were better. Thunder’s stage looks washed out grayish now compared to the vibrant colors of the S1 version, but that’s just me.

I agree on stages’ washed up colors. I hope Steam version will get some proper SweetFX mods.

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Agreed 100%.

Also agree. I watch pros use it and I think “wow, that looks useful.” But when I pop instinct, I either forget about it entirely or I just don’t use it in the right situations or time it well enough. That’s on me, obviously. But it doesn’t change the fact that, for me at least, popping instinct with him used to be fun and badass and now I really only use it to reset my combo meter.

Absolutely! I loved that. It was honestly one of the coolest things about Wulf in season one. That feeling of popping instinct and going on the attack with this sort of “oh yeah? We’ll now you’re gonna GET IT!” feeling.

Now, maybe the way damage is balanced in the game makes this impractical in the current build of KI, but I really wish there was something else they could do with his instinct that would make it fun, as it’s currently my least favorite in the whole game.

I don’t mean to sound salty about it. It is what it is and I know there are certainly players that find it useful and fun. But for a character that’s really kind of designed to be easy to use, his instinct mode is on of the more difficult to successfully utilize in the whole game, which kinda seems at odds with what he’s always been.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to see Wulf get some more toys, especially on Run, where he seems to have fewer options than TJ has on powerline, but if you’re going to keep it simple, then keep it simple. If you want him to be more complex and strategic, maybe add some more stuff to him. That’s all I’m saying. :slight_smile:

raises hand :no_mouth:

Yeah honestly, I’ve tried to use feral cancel in situations that I see pros use it in and it just doesn’t work well for me. It somehow feels counterintuitive; like this sort of odd, intentional stop in the animation and then I have to immediately time what I’m going to do next correctly. For me, at least, it feels rather wonky.

I’m probably not describing it well, but suffice to say, I’ve never been able to consistently make this move work to my advantage to the point where I’ve seen popping instinct as any type of boon at all.

Maybe I just come off like I’m frustrated because I really liked the old way, but it’s not just that. If the feral cancel instinct was something that I could utilize well, I’d have minimal complaints. But now, something that used to be both fun and useful gives me a twinge of frustration because I know I’m about to try something stupid and get smacked for it lol.

Most low level players can utilize a substantial portion of Wulf’s move list and from what I’ve always assumed, he was sort of meant to be more of an intro character. Maybe the devs thought putting a more high execution instinct on him would make him more challenging for higher level players, but for me at least, I think they went too high with this move, and I’d rather see them go all in and add to his move list, making him more of a complex character with a lot of different tools, or just give him a new instinct that lower level players can enjoy.

That’s just me though. :slight_smile:

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Well, after thinking about it, if you can wield feral cancel it would likely give you much better than a 10% boost simply due to being able to string more hits together without a blowout, so that’s probably what they were thinking when they redesigned that.
Though it still equates to FP+FK=Get Rekt for those that can’t. Risk vs Reward I supoose.:confused:

S1 is definitely a much slower game. Combo breakers cause hard knockdown so every break is like a 3-4 second lull in the action (and you really feel it going back to it now). Defense was easier as well, with better backdashes (Wulf’s is basically Akuma’s teleport in 20 frames), safer shadows (Spinal/Jago’s fireballs are safe on block and invincible before the freeze lol), and considerably better reward for guess breaking + less punishment for lockouts. Although, the punishment for lockouts doesn’t really matter too much because one-chance into shadow is so clearly the best strategy for every character that it’s pretty optimal to simply guess break the first chance while your opponent accepts being broken ~1/3 and cashes out the other ~2/3 times.

I like the color scheme of both S1 and S2 more than S3 (the purple/green is a very odd mix for me), and in particular I quite dislike the S3 VS screen (after char select but before the match starts), so the older ones look nicer there for me. S1’s character select screen is pretty bad, though. Even with only 8 characters it is annoying to scroll through a line where you can’t see more than 3 characters at a time.

I agree that the stage lighting is hugely improved in S1 and S2; despite them spending a lot of time on the re-lighting in S3, it falls extremely flat for me on almost every stage. S1 and S2 are much more vibrant and colorful… most of S3 stages are dull-looking, like they were once colorful and got intentionally muted (most notably Thunder’s stage suffers from this). I also much prefer the blue shadow meter in S1 (you can actually see how much meter you have!).

The gameplay in S1 doesn’t really do much for me now though. Was definitely fun back in its time, but it’s been surpassed by generally better ideas in both S2 and S3, which keep the good ideas from S1 mostly intact as well. Not to mention S1 was actually quite buggy overall… not counting things like spin to win (which is a bug with Sadira’s openers), there were lots of odd bugs, including the health bars never correctly displaying how much white life you have, random moves being unbreakable mid-combo (Sabrewulf’s target combo), etc. I would be kinda interested to go back and watch people explore S1 Fulgore a bit more though, now that we know a lot more about the game.

To be honest, I actually still watch a decent amount of S1 footage (mostly the huge amount of content on Grimmmz’s channel), because seeing and hearing people having the time of their lives as they explore a new fighting game (ie, loving the positives and mostly ignoring or dealing with the negatives) is therapeutic for me after the last two years of hearing the sky is falling every day.

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I’m starting to wonder if the relighting was perhaps done more out of necessity than preference…like they redid it in order to stabilize it. Either that or since it was done around the time they were making the 4k capable PC version perhaps it didn’t look as good the further upscaled it was. I dunno, I’m mostly spitballing here.

@TempusChaoti @developers just curious, would you guys be willing to pull back the wizard’s curtain on this one since it’s been awhile now and the new lighting isn’t exactly a selling point for the game anymore?

Hm. I think the lighting does look better for some stages (Kan-Ra, Sadira, Orchid, Aria’s), but it’s a bit of a mixed bag for me. The S1 and S2 stages were designed to make the characters “pop” quite a bit more, which was a really nice effect. There’s no question to me though that the re-lighting really messed up Spinal and Thunder (especially Thunder’s) stages though. Also, the S1/S2 shadow effects were super balling. They compressed themselves to all hell on anything less than Class A capture device, but in motion they were absolutely gorgeous.

In terms of UI, I think the menus and such have improved every season. I actually love the S3 design, with my only gripe being that I can’t see my character’s feet on the select screen and so have no idea what the foot accessories look like most of the time :joy:

Gameplay wise though, S1 is definitely the weakest IMO. S1 Fulgore is my favorite iteration of the character, but other than that I prefer the later versions of basically the entire cast.

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I mainly miss the UI and main menu from season 1. Those flames on the press menu screen! <3
Also I’m rather happy with the new lighting in S3 but those rain effects on Thunders stage were godlike back in S1/2.

I don’t think many people remember all the bugs we had. The constant desynchs online being the big one for me.

I think everything IG did after season 1 made it better. EVERYTHING… minus that season 2 title screen. Ew… so boring.