Suggested Improvements to the Music Select Screen

Game Suggestions & Feedback
1

I like that you can now pick whatever musical theme we want, no matter what stage we are playing on. However, I’m concerned that I basically won’t ever hear some of the character themes because the current music select menu is a little frustrating to use and lacking some options. I have some suggestions for these issues that I think are (hopefully) relatively easy to fix.

Problem 1: Missing some important options

Right now, we have access to Default theme (which plays the regular stage theme) and each character’s theme individually in a large list. Most of us will probably be leaving the theme on Default, just because it’s easy; this means, unless we go into the menu music and pick Rash’s theme deliberately (and then un-pick it later), we can never hear Rash’s theme in the game. I imagine there will be a fairly decent-sized percentage of KI players that will literally never hear Rash’s theme ever, and not even know it exists. And this will be true of the remaining 4 character themes as well.

I suggest you add the following options to the list:

  • Player 1 Theme (matches P1’s character)
  • Player 2 Theme (matches P2’s character)
  • P1 or P2 Theme (picks one at random when the stage loads the first time, stays this way until character select is picked)
  • Random (picks a theme at random from the entire list)

These options are great for a number of reasons. Random theme should give us some variation to hear music that isn’t typically heard, especially if me or my friends tend to only play a few characters. I think the most valuable one in the list is the “P1 or P2 theme”, though. It lets us get in the mood of one of the charcters in the fight (but not always the same one), and will let us experience a lot of musical variation when we play online. Lots of other fighting games have this problem of always forcing the P1 or P2 music. If you’re playing local games, if your friend only plays one character while you’re switching often, you’ll have to literally trade controllers to not hear the same song for 3 straight hours. Giving us the P1 or P2 random option removes this problem entirely.

Problem 2: The list is too long

Especially if you add in those 4 extra options above, and with 4 new themes being added by July, the list will just be way too long to constantly scroll through. This is also why I think I will never manually select Rash’s theme (e.g.) from the list right now, because switching to Rash’s theme and switching BACK to Default is such a pain in the butt.

I suggest you split the theme select into two columns. Put the 4 new options + “Default theme” in the left-most column; this list will never scroll and always be easily accessible because there are only 5 options in the list. In the right-most column, put all the character themes in a big list like you do now. This way, if we want to hear Rash’s theme specifically, we can find it in the list once, but switching back to “Default” is very easy (just tap left and pick it). It also makes sure that the most important options, like Default, Random, and P1/P2 theme, are extremely visible and clear. Right now “Default” is hiding in a 22-option cyclical list, despite it being clearly the most searched-for option in there.

I’m hoping that the team can agree with my reasoning here, and I’m also hoping that the implementation cost is pretty small (it’s basically keeping the list they currently have and placing it next to another list, then picking which list you want with left/right, then adding a few extra selections). It would definitely mean I would be way more willing to explore KI’s awesome music, and I imagine others would feel the same!

13 Likes
2

Yep, totally agree with all of this. The options you suggested would be a nice addition.

3

What a great idea! If the only way to hear a variety of the music is to leave it on default, there will be so much music no one will ever hear. It would be a shame to put all that time into the music and have no one hear it. Really digging the new songs so far.

4

If selecting “Random” for stage music would cause the system to choose another random song each time “Rematch” is chosen, that would be fantastic!

The list is long, but I think that having “Stage Default” and both “P1 Default” “P2 Default” in their own separate list would be great separated; I also think the list should be alphabetical order, which I don’t think it’s currently doing.

5

This would be really cool, yeah, but I imagine it’s a lot harder on the devs to do this. They probably load the music in addition to the stage/characters once at the start of the match. In order to get new music, they would probably have to reload everything or write a very special loader just for the music (which would make Rematch a lot slower, as well, which I really want to avoid). It probably makes the suggestion too expensive to develop, and having random music select work just once until you reselect the stage is fine to me.

Alphabetical order is fine. Another suggestion (which requires a bit of modification to the list, but might be better) is to put Season 1, Season 2, and Season 3 unselectable headers in the list with some spacing around them, so it nicely segments the giant list into 3 blocks that are easy to navigate and find.

6

The new Stage music toggle at the Stage Select screen is very cool, but I have a few suggestions on how to make it absolutely perfect:

1.) If you choose a specific character theme to play, have it revert back to ‘Default’ after that match. This way, you won’t have to go in and manually change it back, or have the same song play twice in a row unless specified.

2.) Have a ‘Random’ theme option in the menu. So randomly selecting a stage, would also randomly select a theme. This may help us discover some interesting stage/music combinations!

3.) Include the classic themes from practice mode! They’re already in the game, and what a perfect way to now implement the option.

2 Likes
7

I’m pretty sure they said a ‘Random’ selection is coming in 3.1. When that comes, I’ll probably just leave on that all the time.

The obvious big issue with is the the length of the list. Having a “quick access” column would be cool… but why not just make the selection a grid like the character select screen instead of adding another 1D list? If you want to select a Season 2 theme in the middle of the list, it would still require moving your joystick about 9 times. Even if you just placed the character select grid on screen when you press Y, it would be more functional than it is now, and it would also be more appealing than the phrase ‘Rash Theme’. ‘Rash Theme’ is like having a character select icon that says ‘Frog Character’.

8

The only thing that i would love to see in this system is changing the default stage theme, i don’t like to play like rash theme in Sadiras stage, but i think it fits in aria stage, so i could set the rash theme as a default to Aria’s, and then change later to its default again. DOA has already a similar system that you can change all the default musics in the game, and it’s pretty godlike.

9

This is probably the best idea, but I was trying to suggest something that wasn’t too expensive to implement (so that my suggestions would be reasonable). I imagine putting the character select back on screen is a lot more work than just adjusting the list that already exists.

If it’s not any harder, though, and you also give us default / P1 / P2 / P1 or P2 / Random as choices somewhere above/below the character grid, this would be best.

10

I’d like to see a sort of overlay system so when you click Y for music, the stage boxes get a clear box over them with the character’s name.

For characters without stages, they can have boxes on a new row above the stages.

For the music you want, you go to the stage you want and press A. Doing this also makes the overlay boxes disappear. They also disappear when you press Y to toggle the music menu off.

Press X on any box to hear a preview of the song.

Press B to toggle to the character’s classic song on, if they have that. The box will change color to indicate classic is toggled, but you can still hit X to preview it just in case.

Press Right Trigger to open a slide menu. From here you select up to ten of your favorite songs. At the bottom of the menu is a blank circle. Pressing A here puts a check mark in the circle and activates those ten songs and randomizes them until you turn this off.

Pressing Right Bumper pulls a slide out that says “Random: Off”. Pressing A sets it to “Random: On (All).” Press A again to change it to “Random: On (New),” press A again for “Random: On (Classic)” and A again to set it back to “Random: Off.”

I’m sure this would be more difficult to implement, but ultimately, it would be less list filled unless you wanted to customize your own. It would also allow for more tracks to be added as characters are added, as they could add more rows of boxes.

11

Is there any legitimate reason why the order is Default, Sadira, Hisako, Sabrewulf, Arbiter, Glacius, Riptor, Kan-Ra, Omen, Maya, Rash, Aria, Orchid, Tusk, TJ Combo, Thunder, Kim Wu, Spinal, Fulgore, Aganos, Cinder, Jago?

It seems that release order would be the most familiar to a lot of player, or at the very least, match the order on the character select screen.

12

yeah these options are really needed cause in all honesty… if they arnt added alot of people arnt going to listen to the great music that isnt stage default.

also i would love the option to select themes that can play on a stage…

EXample…
lets say i want a random theme but i dont think arias theme works well on lets say sabrewulfs stage…
I would love to say if sabres stage randomly select from these songs but not these.

but i feel like that might be asking for a bit much

13

What if there was also a favorites list?

14

The perfect solution for me would be a optionmenu where i can specify which music can be played on which stage.

To explain i have a menu outside of stage select where i can set the possible themes for a specific stage.

A example:

I set Mira Theme, Sabrewulf Theme and Kan Ra Theme as possible Themes for the Sabrewulf Stage.

If Sabrewulf Stage gets chosen (manually or via random select) one of those three themes will be picked and played. No need to set the theme manually - decide one time which themes on which stage and im good to go.

Tekken had this implemented and it was plain awesome.

15

I have a sort of update on this. Apparently, the developers are aware of the need for a theme preview for the selection list. So that’s one of my major gripes with the system solved if it exists. If it’s not in there now, I remember them saying that they have added a couple of shortcuts to the music selection screen - one is default theme and I’m not sure what the other one is.

Moreover, I’d suggest having it in a grid where the theme follows the character - the stage list could reflect this too.

For example:
Fulgore is currently one to the left when you start on Jago in p1’s character select. What if the stage select (which is still a mess right now access wise) had UltraTech Industries as one to the left and if I wanted to select a different stage and his theme as an alternative, I could press y, then left then a.

If we had, say, Tusk, He’s down two and right one. So the stage would thus be down two and right one and if I selected a different stage but wanted his theme, I’d press Y, go down two and right one.

Hope I’m making sense.

16

This is also how Smash Bros (Brawl and Wii U) handle stage music.

I think such an idea would also suit KI, because music is such a strong part of its identity (much like Smash), so giving us tons of freedom to find stage/music combinations would be really fun, I think.

If the team has the spare budget and time (haha, I’m sure they’re laughing even at the thought of that), it would be cool if they incorporated this screen into the options somewhere, and then also let us override it as we do now on the actual stage select screen. Like, for example, the “random” option would pick from our predetermined random list, but we could still force the default theme or any individual character theme.

If they did that, then also gave us “Default” and “Player Theme” options (instead of giving us P1 / P2 / P1 or P2, just give us P1 or P2 at random), it’d be lots of fun to mess around with.

1 Like
17

I’m glad it sounds like the selecting of music will get some streamlining. My main gripe however is being player 2 online. You are at the mercy of how much time player 1 takes to pick a stage. The majority of the time you just hit random immediately, so player 2 has no chance of selecting music if they want.

I don’t want to slow down the time it takes to get a match started, but if the selection of music is going to remain on the stage select screen I would like to see a mandatory 5 second timer be put up

1 Like
18

Is it a bug that player two can select the music on a ranked/exhibition match while player 1 is selecting the stage?

I believe no but then unless we’re using a mic to communicate to the other player we want time to select a different song, player 1 will just select his stage and we’ll have no time to select a song.

One solution could be that both players select a stage/song and hit “Confirm” and the game will randomly select one of the choices.

If this introduces too much wait time between matches then maybe a good solution would be to remove player 2 option to select songs in online matches while adding an option in the Settings menu that will define what are the defaults regarding music selection.

Basically we would still have “Default Theme” on the music selection screen, but in Settings we would have two extra options under “Audio”. The first is to set what “Default Theme” means, either the selected stage’s theme, my character’s theme or the opponent’s theme. The second option would be to say what we’ll hear when we’re player 2, either whatever player 1 selects or my “default” that I just defined in the first option.

19

Unless I’m mistaken, you’re only setting your own music. I have yet to have a single situation where I was selecting a specific theme (as either player) and heard something else.

20

Sorry but I didn’t understand what you meant.

I know you hear whatever you set, that’s not the bug I’m talking about. The possible bug I’m talking about is the fact when you’re player 2 you can select the music but you have no way to ask player 1 to wait for you to select the song.

Specially with stageless characters I most probably want to hear my song, but if I’m player 2 I have to rush to select my music in hopes that player 1 takes enough time selecting a stage so I can select a song. My selection sticks between matches but if I want a different music and I’m again player 2 I’ll suffer through this again.

It’s just odd to me that player 2 can select a song at all, yet there is no way to guarantee I’ll have the time to do so. I believe that either only player one should select songs or that the game implements some kind of voting system where both players can select what they want and the game will randomly select between the choices.