Guilty Gear Strive Team Of 3 Open Beta
This was so much sillier than I had expected back when this mode was announced.
To my surprise there's Assists, an on command Tag, and even Guilty Gear Xrd M.O.M. style Skills.
Also to my surprise, the online isn't just totally broken. It's not totally functional either which does lessen the surprise, but my expectations were really low. I wasn't expecting to be able to get into a match at all on Night 1, but it turns out I was able to get into a handful.
Seeing it in action also, I'm surprised it doesn't really lag (at least a noticable amount) when a bajillion things are on screen at once. I play on base PS4 by the way.
Unfortunately it does require 6 players to play, but it actually feels fairly justified since the players have stuff to juggle even when they're just using Assists and Skills. If you really tried, I think it'd be possible to make the game mode playable with only 2 players, but it'd probably be super overwhelming. Regardless, it's probably gonna suck years down the line once Guilty Gear Strive loses relevancy and it becomes really difficult to find people to play this mode with on a whim.
Even with 6 players it's overwhelming at first, since there's a ton of visual noise.
As for the mechanics, I think they're pretty cool, but pretty weird some for better or for worse.
Assists are hella cranked. Many of them have multiple hits which make them especially strong for combos and pressure, some of those hits are highs or lows which also helps for pressure, some do insane damage like Sol's Volcanic Viper Assist, but craziest of all I think, they're all fully invulnerable (from what I could tell). You could also argue the most insane part of them though is that they can be used regardless of whether or not the point character on your team is in hitstun or blockstun. Both of those last two traits though have insane synergy, since they allow Assists to get point characters out of combos and blockstrings really easily. Presumably to balance Assists a tiny bit, they aren't allowed to kill (Note: Players set to Tag out also cannot kill), but that trait, combined with all the previous traits, cause Assits to completely dominate and slow down some matches which I'm not the biggest fan of.
The Skills are pretty similar to the Assists, just with their own cooldowns, and they don't change depending on the character. I don't really care for all of the Skills, since some of them barely help, but they're neat regardless.
Tension gain is seemingly halved in 3v3, which I think can also make it difficult to build any sort of momentum in a match.
Here's a clip from Sajam's Twitter:
And here's the combo that Nago did at roundstart, but done in 1v1 for comparison:
The Tag system is pretty insane on paper, since after Tagging somebody in, you get 5 seconds of nearly full actionability to fight with your fully actionable teammate before your Tagged out which could lead to you mauling your opponent (as shown in Sajam's clip above). Most of the time though, since you still can't really do anything about Assists, you an your teammate might just get stuck in blockstun for so long that you don't really get to do anything. Or worst case scenario, you both get hit and take double damage (which can at least end up being funny):
I really don't like that there's nothing to force players to Tag out. It's my least favorite part of this mode even, since there ends up being a ton of rounds (or even matches or sets) in which you never get to play on point simply because your teammate(s) never decided to Tag you in. If I had to guess, it was probably designed for to not have to play on point in order to appeal to beginners. My problem can be remedied though by queuing up to play on point, or by playing with friends that you can tell to Tag you in.
A lot of the problems I have with this mode can be seen by watching this match:
That match also just highlights the horrors of not having an online benchmark test, but that's something that permeates this whole game (or even fighting games as a genre). Thankfully, I was in a pretty chill mindset while playing that match, which prevented it from knocking my mood down.
One last thing I'm surprised about is the presence of what I think might be a ranked system. It's not actually available in this beta, but you can see hints of it in the menus. I haven't really heard anything about this ranked mode, so I don't know if it'll be particularly different from the Tower system, or if it'll basically just be 3v3's lobiless alternative to the Tower. Regardless, I'm surprised the devs are bothering with any sort of skill based matchmaking for 3v3's considering it's filled with radical design choices that seemingly shatter the core gameplay's intended balance.
Right before the beta released, I theory crafted a bit (without bothering to read the blog which notes that each player can only play on point once per round), and guessed that Happy Chaos would be really strong in 3v3's. After trying him out on the first night though, I determined I was wrong since Assists seem to hurt his zoning and pressure moreso than they help it, plus the nerfed Tension gain really hurts him since he arguably relies the most on Supers out of any character. The aforementioned, his relatively poor Assists, plus some more factors which I don't care to list, led to him feeling really lackluster in 3v3's. The one time I was able to Deus Ex Machina into Tag felt pretty good though.
The next day I decided to switch to Ramlethal, and she seems a lot better for this mode due to her multi-hitting Assists, big normals, and occasionally explosive damage output. Ram was always a character I thought I might end up maining just from what I'd generally seen and heard about her, but after playing her for like a day, yeah no, I'm not interested in playing her outside of 3v3's. I really just don't vibe with her gameplay. Even when 3v3's actually release, I'll probably just play as Sol since I already main him, and he seems pretty good in this mode. Volcanic Viper from what I've seen is a contender for best Assist in the game. Still, this mode happened to be a nice reason for me to try out Ram.
Overall, while this mode had far from my favorite fighting game team mechanics, I found it to be a (generally) fun time.
Beta 2
This section was added on the 17th of November, 2024.
For better or for worse Assists and Skills can now be interrupted by hitting them (I think "Interference" Skills specifically might be exempt from this, but I didn't use any of those very much, so I'm not really sure). As funny as they were before, I think this is for the best. While I still ran into some players that struggled to approach against Assists/Skills, it seemed like a much less prominent issue this time around. Now that my opponents couldn't just call Assists/Skills to stop me from doing combos and pressure, it was much easier to actually take advantage of my teammates Assists.
Rest in peace that fire floor (I don't remember the actual name) Skill's ability to stagger on hit. It will be at least a little missed, but eh it was pretty reasonable to remove that Skill's ability to do that. It was so rewarding for something so frequent and easy to hit. Now the fire floor doesn't even have a hitbox, it's just passive unlockable damage, which I think is neat. There's also a new Skill, I think called "Liquid Prison", which fills a similar niche as the old fire floor due to its insane amount of hitstun.
Unsurprisingly, the new Skills and the Skill Customization are nice and expected additions. There's also Stats now which make things more interesting. I imagine the Stats were probably partially implemented in the first beta, and that having that terrible 50% Tension gain was probably just the default Tension Gain Stat, but I can't really prove that was the case.
One addition I don't like so much is the Skill level-up system. In general I just don't like getting stat checked in PvP games, but at the very least there's a Ranked system to seemingly separate high and low level players (I'm not sure since a 4 day long beta isn't really long enough to judge a Ranked system), and Skills don't even seem to take that long to level up anyways. I still didn't like it though. Skill Cooldowns in particular felt especially awful at lower levels, since Rounds would oftentimes end before I even got a chance to use Skills.
From my personal experience, the online experience was smoother, but I'm not really sure how much of that was the netcode improving, or me just having better luck. There was this one fellah who took ages to load in, but I imagine this probably wasn't much fault of the game.
I was running into the same few people over and over, so perhaps the game was really prioritizing connections while matchmaking, or maybe there just weren't as many people playing this time, or maybe the matching was kinda busted I dunno. Joining random people's teams was also a much more automatic process now. Before the game would present you a list of people to join, but now you just queue up and let the game pick who you play with. While I'd probably prefer using the automatic matchmaking anyways, I do hope the proper release has both. Having options tends to be nice.
There was a 3v3 specific Training Mode this time around, and while fine enough for just trying out skills, but it was weirdly lacking ton of options from the main game, and I don't know why. Health Regen wasn't even an option, it was just set to off. Again, having options tends to be nice so hopefully that stuff ends up there later.
I'd say 3v3 was overall improved from last time, and I'm interested to play it more in the future. At this point, it's the main thing bringing me back to Stive. After last Beta, I only played Strive for an additional week after it ended, and all I've done this time around since the Beta is mess around in Training Mode a bit. To end things off, here's a match in full, because I really enjoyed the back and forth:
Update, November 20th, 2024: Oh okay, the Team Of 3 mode just released, 3 days after my last update. It doesn't seem particularly different from the recent Beta, so I don't currently have plans to post about it.
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