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Ishmael
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"2XKO" , posted Tue 3 Feb 01:22

I finally tried out 2XKO, so here are a few random thoughts:

I'm used to games looking better when in-person than through screenshots and YouTube videos. When you finally get to sit down with a game and see how everything fits together it works much better than piece it together through snippets. 2XKO is rare game that looks worse when I played it. I was not a big fan of the character animation, plus I was playing on console so that didn't help matters.

The game itself felt fine to play. The tagging system felt fun and flexible. The roster, while quite small, still had several different character archetypes so it didn't feel like the matches and teams were too repetitive.

Outside of the loony simultaneous two player situation, the groove system wasn't that remarkable. Some online chatter tried to puff up this mode by saying that it expanded the roster by making the characters play so differently depending on style choice. Nobody is claiming that CvS2 has 288 characters, so this feels like an overstatement.

The control system was interesting... maybe not good, but interesting. I could understand that the game is trying to be unique with no motion inputs, but it doesn't necessarily feel any easier. There's still a learning curve with the game, and removing joystick waggling doesn't really change much. It reminded me of playing Fantasy Strike, which isn't a comparison any game should strive for.

The options for playing 2XKO is either Grind Rank, or Rank Grind. It makes the launch of SF5 look robust. Even worse, part of the roster is locked behind ranked play. Since I have zero interest in trying to learn a tag fighter by being obliterated online I'm not going to be playing 2XKO. Good luck to the folks who enjoy that sort of thing, and I hope you enjoy the overpriced cosmetics.

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Ishmael
7429th Post

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"Re(1):2XKO KO'd" , posted Tue 10 Feb 05:29

Welp

If this is the news coming out less than a month after console release the player retention and sales on store items must be terrible.

Baines
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"Re(2):2XKO KO'd" , posted Tue 10 Feb 10:57

quote:
Welp

If this is the news coming out less than a month after console release the player retention and sales on store items must be terrible.

I don't think it is just player retention and sales. It arguably is Riot reducing their losses after coming to view 2XKO as a seemingly directionless decade-long money sink.

One of the people laid off posted that they'd been working on 2XKO for 10 years. One site has apparently claimed Riot had 160 people working on 2XKO, of which they've laid off around half.

2XKO had at least one major restart during development (going from a 1v1 fighter reportedly very much like Street Fighter to a 2v2 team fighter with a heavy focus on four-player matches). Then its console release was almost immediately followed by an announcement that they felt they needed to redesign the gameplay again.

10 years of development, a team that by the end was reportedly around 160 people, all to deliver a team fighter that launched with only 10 characters, with major balance issues, a problematic console release even with its extra delay, and gameplay that apparently still wasn't what the dev team (or at least the dev leadership) wanted.

Maou
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"Re(2):2XKO KO'd" , posted Tue 10 Feb 16:25

quote:
2XKO is rare game that looks worse when I played it
characters locked behind ranked play, not quest mode

Ouch! Amusing thread title for an unfortunate game. It all comes down to what Baines says, or maybe something even simpler: why would I play a clearly Japanese-inspired American fighting game with not-quite-good-enough anime-esque designs made by an arena game developer, when I could just play Guilty Gear or Arc or SF or so many other things by actual Japanese fighting game makers? I try to avoid cliched modern phrases, but this game looked like a classic case of “stay in your lane.”

While I have zero desire to play MK and as a game it’s obviously worse than other popular fighters, at least it’s something distinct enough that some people have a lot of fun with it. 2XKO reminds me of that equally tragic phase of game design in Japan around maybe 2010 or so when people were trying to make half-@$$ed “Western-style” action games in the hope that they would sell abroad rather going with what they were good at, or at least something unique.

人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．