Really missed this on season 3. Shadow Lords is not a replacement for this and is its own mode. We need to be able to go through each character individually and experience each characters story (without micro transactions). As a long time fan of this game since the arcades I really feel like you pulled a Street Fighter 5 move with this and it really left a sour taste in my mouth. You want to bring some of us back put that in. I loved completing s1 and s2 was very disappointed to not have this for s3.
Shadow Lords is free, so I don’t really see how microtransactions play a role in playing the mode or getting unlocks from it. If you are talking about the mimic skins, you can grind battles against mimics or Gargos to get them, and Shadow skins can be farmed through shadow lab stuff and certain shadow lords battles, though the fastest way is challenging 1000 point shadows. If you want to buy KI gold to get those skins, then technically there’s microtransactions, but considering those are vanity items, I’m not really counting them.
If you mean that you have to buy characters in order to use them in shadow lords, there are ways around that, but for the most part, the characters are what you are paying for to play the game. You can buy individual characters or buy whole seasons for a price that is reasonable in contrast to what SF5 offered.
On top of that SF5 made a promise of a story mode, but didn’t say it would be day one or not, which it obviously wasn’t. IG has been really transparent in their development of KI, and they promised a big story based experience, but they did have the courtesy of mentioning it wouldn’t be present at launch, a courtesy Capcom didn’t extend at all. If you remember too, neither S1 or S2 had a story or ladder mode present at their launches either, but the developers still made mention that they were coming, without misleading you into thinking it was coming on day 1 of the season launch.
While that may not be much to settle your disappointment, the comparison to SF5 is a bit unfair when you take into account what content they kept delivering and the time table in which they present it, the transparency by which they keep their fan base informed compared to SF5 promising all the content they had planned on day 1 with a $60 price tag, and not even having the transparency to at least give a timeline or keep fans informed. Heck, they don’t even explain their changelists when they make changes to the game, leaving a lot of people to question “what were they thinking?” It’s an apples and oranges argument I feel had to be mentioned.
I will give you this though. I wouldn’t mind a simple ladder mode of some kind which all characters of all seasons can play. Something small, 8 opponents and a boss battle, maybe like an old MK style ladder, with a simple still shot ending. Currently, we have something like that but the season 3 characters can’t play them, and neither can the extra characters like Shadow Jago, Omen, Kilgore, and Shin Hisako.
If you are looking for a large cinematic experience like what Injustice and MK do, until MS thinks the game should get a larger budget, you may be waiting a while.
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It’s about expectations. They set an expectation on season one and season two when they had this mode. Even if it came after, it still had this mode. Season three should’ve had this mode. When I mentioned Street Fighter 5 they are doing the same thing. Something that was tradition and in every single game not there. They can say what they want it’s tradition it needs to be in there. Onto the micro transactions with shadow lords .I don’t want to grind something to unlock dossiers for specific items that you have to pay for like Crimson whatever. Which seem time base because they come and go. Shadow Lord gets boring it’s a lot of the same dialogue. You also get the same ending for every single group. Also, I could care less it’s free I’d pay for season three Traditional story / arcade
I too would like a simplified story mode with subtle stills for cutscenes for each cutscene. A unique boss with hidden bosses based on requirements would also be swell.
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I never thought shadow lords was a good replacement for arcade mode I just want a classic ki ladder with endings based on what you do
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I agree with you @IronFlame also let’s not forget: IG didn’t put ■■■■■■’ malware in your PC if you tried to play the PC version of SF.
On that note I liked SL to an extent and I enjoyed. I wouldn’t mind the next KI game having a bit more of a traditional story though.
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There’s a ton where SF5 messed up. The stuff I mentioned I find is really just the tip of the ice burg, compared to the near non working servers they launched with that took forever to fix, even though they already went through that once with the beta. Seriously, how could you fix it for the beta and then NOT having it work for the actual game?
And since they didn’t have much single player content at the time of launch, it sounds to me like they were banking on the online competitive crowd to really save them, which given the above issue, doubly messed them up.
At least when Double Helix launched Killer Instinct, they didn’t have the attitude to charge you $60 for what was clearly not a full price tag experience. Over the course of three seasons and tons of content later, KI has earned that full price tag, but I paid the $20 at launch and never regretted it. I pretty much bought the One for KI because I was burnt out on SF4 and all it’s “upgrades” and the constant changelists with no understanding as to why, their dime and nickel policies on the dlc, locking away completed content on disc and charging you extra for integral chunks of the game, and just Capcom’s shady business in general.
The incident with SFxTekken really made me mad, and since then I’ve sworn off almost all Capcom games. If they announce that the RE2 remake is cancelled, consider me forever lost to any Capcom game ever again, because that’s the ONE game of theirs I care about right now at all. If that launches well, I may eventually try to get RE7.
Basically KI gave a competing experience with what I considered was higher quality at a fairer price. To that, I also enjoyed the character design much better, and while the mechanics took a little getting used to, after I did it was second nature. Unlike SF or MvC, it didn’t feel like you were ever powerless. In MvC, losing a neutral exchange can often cost you a whole character, and in SF it can cost you a lot of health with the right character.
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I agree I would rather have a season 3 story mode, Shadow Lords is boring to me and never seems to continue any kind of excitement. I own definitive edition and would really like to see Stories behind the S3 characters.
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