Thank you sir, that’s good to hear. Was there anything specific that you wanted to know about?
Guess i’ll start with truendymion’s questions and provide as much information as i can. Keep in mind that everything i’m about to say could change over the next few months, but this is where we’re at right now with Battle Royale.
1) There’s no hitstun increase like Smash, because it wouldn’t really add anything to our game engine or resolve any problems that we might face. There’s no hitstun deterioration like Marvel, because although it’s a convenient system, none of us really like the idea of basic reactions changing halfway through a combo. We feel it’s better to keep attack behavior consistent as much as possible, so that players can move combo pieces around freely.
2) Currently throws are untechable, but this is a perfect example of something that could easily change over the next few weeks as we buckle down on playtesting for balance. Judging by the current state of the game, i personally happen to think that we can get away with oldschool untechable throws. But it’s not a terribly difficult feature to add, so we’ll see how it goes.
3) There’s no air control during hitstun, but i’m sure you’ve seen characters automatically flipping out of air reactions to regain mobility. Ed Ma has been experimenting with adding SFA3-style directional control to our automatic tech flips. You still wouldn’t be able to escape early out of true hitstun, but you’d have some control over how you recover in the air. We’re actually trying to be very careful about how our characters recoup from scary situations like air reactions, knockdowns, and things like that. You should always have a few defensive options under pressure.
4) Most characters can cancel moves into other moves, but it’s not as fomulaic as SF4′s normal -> special -> super. Canceling between attacks is much more of a character-specific feature in Battle Royale, but it’s still pretty intuitive once you actually get your hands on a character. I think you guys will have a lot of fun exploring our roster.
5) At the moment, quite a few characters can combo into their super moves in various unique ways. Everyone seems to have a different way of approaching it. Generally speaking, lvl2 supers are the easiest to combo into, but that ends up being kind of an expensive way to guarantee a single KO. There’s definitely a cost vs benefit decision to consider here, and those choices shift frequently over the course of a match.
6) All super attacks are unblockable, but as you’ve seen by now, there are many other ways to avoid them. We wanted to give people that exciting moment of figuring out a way to dodge Drake’s crumbling wall or Fat Princess’ giant chicken. I’m sure you’ll agree that having everyone stand around blocking supers would’ve led to incredibly boring gameplay. (We tried it a long time ago, and sure enough, it made us all sleepy.)
7?) Beating Sly on paper and beating Sly in a real match are two different things. He’s quite difficult to pin down! Mobility is never an issue for him and he can definitely hold his own in a fight. But really, what makes me happy is that we’ve got creative designers like Ray Ray Shen who come up with interesting gameplay proposals for unorthodox characters like Sly – and that Omar and Paul are willing to roll the dice on stuff like this.
At the very least, the Battle Royale community will have some extremely interesting discussions about Sly Cooper a year from now. And i think the fighting game community as a whole will benefit from those discussions.
