Their reddit AMA seemed to appease a lot of people, and as far as being a "soulless Melee clone," I'm not sure what you want. The whole idea is to emulate and hopefully improve on Melee.
Melee already exists, and making a f2p clone of it isn't exactly refining on anything. I was more of the opinion that they were gonna improve on the genre rather than assume Melee is the end-all-be-all of platform fighters and trying to cash in on the fanbase with a downgrade of the original game.
I won't deny the idea has potential, but that's possibly the most frustrating part of it all, that it does, and that they have talent amid their team, but are too attached to their original concept to let it properly evolve. And it burns extra hard that it came at the footend of Strongbad and Warchamp dissing like half the PMDT, and throwing away all of the hard work so many people had worked on, just cause they got cold feet that PM could hurt their precious idea. As well as how they handled that whole mess.
I have no qualms with the decisions they took, as they have every right to stop working on a free mod, but the lack of clarity and honesty behind that whole shutdown, especially toward their own colleagues, and then building up so much hype for such a mediocre product, and then refusing to listen to any of the feedback they had on reveal... well, it's no surprise people would react with such disdain.
Imo, least they could do, at least if they want some form of success, is do a radical change on the art direction. As an artist, it's the art of the game that's most off-putting to me. So much so I even did a redesign of one of their characters in hopes of inspiring them toward something more appealing:
But their sub has essentially become an echo chamber.
Ahh well, tbh, it's not my project, and not my problem. But having been so attached to PM, and excited for 4.0 (especially since the Lyn moveset was the one that I sent them), Icons being so bland can't help but leave a very sour taste in my mouth. Cause it could have been something truly awesome if only it was more inspired.
There's a few lessons to be learned here though, about biting off more than you can chew with your first game project, and not knowing when to kill your darlings. Two lessons I plan to make good use of with my own stuff in the coming years.
It just seems kind of silly to me to rag on a game that's not even out yet.
According to the devs, back in Sept, the characters that had been shown off till then were 80-90% done. I think it's safe to say this is very close to the final product.
