MultiVersus Part 2
This is a follow-up on my first MultiVersus post. This is about the game changed during Seasons 3 and onward.
Character Unlocks
I talked before about the monetization the character unlock systems, and even defended them somewhat, but as time went on, I do think they were the biggest lesson to learn from. From my own observations, not being able to play all the characters seemed to be the number 1 complaint with the game, and unfortunately I have a lot to say on how things didn't get better.
The only events after Season 2 to have any characters unlockable were the Batman '85 event, and the ValentiNeon Login, but each of those only had a single character. As for the Starter Packs which I said before were the most reasonable way to purchase characters, there was the "Ultimate Collection" which featured 7 of the post launch characters for 7000 Glemuim which isn't a deal at all unless it went on sale (the wiki doesn't seem to list how much things went on sale for). There was also the Marceline Starter pack which just featured Marceline, the Battlepass, and Gem XP for 2500 Glemuim which is I'd say was a terrible price, especially since the Battlepass at that point was half as long, didn't feature a character, and in general had more filler items (according to the wiki the pack was originally listed at $10 on the Epic Games Store, which I think would've been much more in line with previous prices).
There was also also the Unlock The Fighter Road bundle for 31,000 Glemuim ($250) which just gave you all the characters (beside Shaggy and Banana Guard who you essentially start off with), which again wasn't a good deal unless it ever went on sale for WAY cheaper (the wiki doesn't mention this, but I do recall it being cheaper depending on how many characters you had left to unlock). Speaking of The Fighter Road, that replaced Fighter Currency as the free way of unlocking characters. It's main appeal was that you could finally unlock characters again by simply grinding matches, but for some reason it granted way less choice for which order to unlock characters in. This particularly sucked because the newest characters were slapped onto the very end of The Fighter Road, and each character still took hours to unlock, so anyone that was ever drawn into playing the game for the new characters was met with a long grind ahead of them (this particular sucks to me because one of my favorite characters, Marceline, was on the very back of the fighter road, making her the most unreasonable to recommend for newcomers). It also introduced an issue for long-time players like me, because there wasn't any proper way to store up Fighter Road XP in-between character releases, you couldn't unlock characters immediately as they released, or well, released for free to play users. Starting with Betelgeuse, characters were time gated to release a few days early through expensive (like $30) bundles, which kinda hampered the hype for a lot of character releases.
Gamemodes
There were a couple new gamemodes added since my MultiVersus Part 1 post. Casual is just Co-op Vs Bots which was in the beta, Testing Grounds was a neat way to demo the Shield mechanic, but what I'm really interested in talking about is Wacky Weekend and Arena.
Wacky Weekend (introduced in Season 3) is like if Smash Bros made a matchmaking queue just for Special Smash, and I thought it was a lot of fun. The gamemodes were derived from stuff in the Rift mode, which is what I hopped for, although they wouldn't be added to Local until Season 5 (and when they were, they were weirdly split up into gamemodes and modifiers, some of which had overlap). They get pretty unbalanced, but that's a consequence I expect from such silly gamemodes.
I'm disappointed they never added the instant cooldowns modifier (Cunning) though, because to me that was always the most obvious silly gamemode to add. Even in Rifts, it only ever got to appear in like 1 or 2 battles.
To my surprise, Arena was added in Season 4, which featured equipable Items that modified your characters, but they were different and separate from the Rift Gems. For the format of the mode, 16 team tournaments in which you purchase items in between matches, it makes sense for the Items to have out of match mechanical differences from Gems, but for so many Items to not even be based on Gems is strange to me. The mode itself was fun though, although it legitimately might have been the most unbalanced thing in all of MultiVersus. In particular, Embrace The Elements could synergize with other Items to constantly grant 100% damage resistance (or maybe even more since getting hot would actually heal you), which was virtually impossible to counteract, which lead to winning strategies feeling really linear.
To my surprise, rather than nerfing Embrace The Elements in Season 5 (there were indeed some balance changes to Arenas), an additional broken defensive item, Heroic Landing, was added (it's the thing triggering constant Armor in the second clip).
Arena was also the buggiest mode, very frequently disconnecting players far more than any other mode.
I think it's also worth mentioning the Rift mode. Seasons 3 and 4 were about on par with the quality of Season 2, with many of the gimmicks feeling incredibly under-explored. I wanna note the Season 4 Rift "Welcome To Mystic Vista", not that I consider it a big step above other Rifts, but it had really cohesive theming. It felt like it had an actual narrative with structure, and was more than just a bunch of random fights.
A new sort of sub-mode, Rogue Rifts, were added at the end of Season 4, and they replaced traditional Rifts during the entirety of Season 5. Similarly to Arenas, they bizzarly have their own set of Power-Ups, separate from Gems, and Items (granted Gems are also available in Rogue Rifts, I just think it's strange to have 3 separate pools of equipables across the 3 mechanics). Rogue Rifts were fun in their own way, although similarly to the standard Rifts and the Arena mode, they felt somewhat shallow (it didn't help that many Power-Ups were split up across different Rogue Rifts). The Events tied to Rogue Rifts were also grindy, so most of my time playing them was focused on grinding.
Training Mode saw some pretty drastic improvements in Season 4. The singular Behavior setting got expanded into an entire menu (Bot Difficulty was also moved to that menu):
Oh yeah, I guess there's also Photo Mode. I'm not usually particularly into photo modes, but it's nice that it got added eventually. The maps clearly weren't designed for it, considering it's extremely easy to see where their geometry cuts off:
The usually hidden, omnipresent space border is also very easy to see.
Patches/Balance
I'd say about late Season 3, to early Season 4 is when the game and netcode became pretty reasonably stable. Sure, absurd technical issues would remain through to the bitter end,
Marvin's projectiles are only supposed to track when the opponent has the flag icon on them.
but drastic things like the game crashing >50% of the time on the Shop menu were ironed out. I'm pretty sure the netcode was server-based, and that I probably lived close to a server, so my experience was probably pretty biased, but by Season 4 I thought the netcode actually became really good. Genuinely, despite the waning player count, Seasons 4 and 5 of MultiVersus had some of the most consistently high quality connections I've ever experienced in a fighting game. Season 3-4 were also around the time I switched from playing on PS4 to Steam Deck, which could've also leaned my bias towards being positive (I'm sure it gave me better framerates considering the PS4 version's poor optimization).
I'd say character balance became solid around mid Season 3, only for 2v2's though. 1v1's always remained pretty polarizing due to how non-well rounded characters were designed to be. There were still clear gaps in strength in 2v2's, but the most egregious stuff like consistent, solo 0-to-deaths were ironed out. The last remaining thing I can think of as egregious is Finn's Armored Buns power-up (which grants 10 or so seconds of projectile invulnerability, which nullifies a ton of important moves throughout characters' toolkits).
The balance came with a cost though, an expected one at least. Like a lot of games, most characters generally got weaker over time. I believe Black Adam (my main) only got buffs that were given to characters across the board. While I think the devs were pretty reasonable to nerf him so continually, it felt kinda bad anyways. He remained pretty good (judging by my own personal experience) anyways, so I'm not too bitter about it. I'm bitter about 1 nerf though, his Down Attack having a cooldown applied to it is baffling considering how low reward, and easy to dodge it is:
Raven dodged it with her idle animation.
As people requested, the devs made the game faster and faster over time, kinda. Usually when people think of games being fast, they think about the movement, primarily running around, but few (if any) characters running speeds were ever actually altered. Instead a bunch of smaller things were changed across the board, like fast-falling, and attack cancel windows. Out of everything, hitstop reduction was probably the most significant speed up. A ton of things actually become slower of whiff though, but this was so things could be whiff punished more reasonably. I was pretty fine with the "gamespeed" changes, I never felt like I particularly needed them, but looking back at Season 1 footage, I think I do prefer how the game feels now.
Pretty contentiously, Shields were (properly) added as a mechanic in Season 4. I was on the side of not wanting Shields at first, since requests for the change felt very rooted in the goal of homogenizing MultiVersus to play more like other platform fighters, but I was pleasantly surprised when they were added, because their implementation felt uniquely within the spirit of the game. Shields simply being tied to the Dodge Meter I think probably did a lot to make them feel naturally implemented among the other mechanics. I'm not a fan of how slow they feel though, I'm already weirded out by Smash Bros having recovery on its shield, so this game having startup and recovery feels even weirder.
Clip of me getting hit during Shield startup.
I didn't pay much attention to the buffs to shield over time, but eventually I actually came back around to being kinda bothered by them. My main issue is that the main counter to them, shield breaks, are underpowered. The shield breaks are kinda slow making them risky to throw out, and whenever they hit an opponent that isn't shielding, then their hit effect is extremely weak, making them oftentimes unrewarding. This in turn made 1v1's even more polarizing, since some characters deal with or take advantage of shields way better than others. I think 2v2's interact with shields fine though, because if both opponents catch you shielding then they can drain a ton of your Dodge Meter.
Dodge meter changed quite a bit overtime, even outside of the addition of Shields. Dodge Attacks were slashed from costing 3 meter, all the way back down to 1 like in the beta, while Dodge Jumps got cut from 3 to 2, both changes I appreciated because I like having lots of meter to work with. But then there's also my least favorite balance change throughout the entire game, automatic Dodge Meter regeneration was outright removed. This turned Dodge Fatigue from a quick but tense punishment, into a potentially persistent and crippling one. Again, my issues are most present in 1v1's, when both players loose all their meter, it's in both of their interests to completely disengage and begin playing extremely defensively, which slows the pace of a match to a crawl. Even in 2v2's though, sometimes people will go long stretches of time without being able to perform any Dodge based actions which I think makes the gameplay more boring.
Some of the maps got adjustments. Most notably, Dexter's Lab 2 became much bigger, making it a far less cheesy stage. I was sad to see the trees on Tree Fort and boomboxes on Cromulons be removed from Ranked, I thought they were cool, dynamic stage elements. There were plenty of new stages added over time as well. Midnight Showing, Candy Kingdom 2 (1 is really large which makes matches on it slow), and Wabbit Season are all pretty cool. Candy Kingdom 2's hazards off layout is solid, but I'm disappointed that I didn't get to play on the hazards on version in Ranked, I think it's unique and interesting. There were also a handful of maps that utilized the generic Rift themes, Beach, Space, and Castle. They were lame stylistically, but more stages was functionally nice to have.
Marceline
While I frequently enjoyed the post launch characters, I wasn't expecting any of them to hook me as hard as Marceline did. Marceline as a character isn't someone I have a ton of attachment to, she's cool, but I have weird mixed feelings about Adventure Time. I watched and enjoyed most of Adventure Time growing up, but nowadays my taste has shifted away from being interested in it so I don't look back on it that fondly, even if I ultimately still respect it.
Once I tried out Marceline in Training Mode though, I was intrigued. Her combo structure feels so different from anyone I've ever played in a platform fighter, and it feels cool. As someone who most preferred fighting game subgenre is 2D Anime fighters, it feels very natural to me how cancel based a lot of Marceline's combos are. She's the most I believe I've ever labbed out for a platform fighter character.
When it comes to her animations, voicelines, and other characterizing stuff, those aspects of her are also really cool. I was a little disappointed to see her announced since she was the 4th Adventure Time character, while plenty of other Cartoon Network shows didn't get any characters, but it reads to me that the developers specifically really liked Marceline, and thus put a lot of care into her.
Gameplay wise, Marceline is actually a little scuffed. I've heard her combos utilizing dash attack were crazy broken when she launched, but that was a short period of time, when the player count was dwindling, and as elaborated on earlier she was the most out of the way character to unlock, so I never saw anyone doing crazy things with her. She got 1 pretty crazy hard nerf in Season 5 though, so I guess the devs heard or saw such things.
Her Base stance in particular straight up seems unfinished. The game itself doesn't even mention the rhythm mechanic on it, it's only named in her starter guide I believe, and it isn't actually timing based like the starter guide says. There's also a hidden buff upside to her Base stance's Down Special, when buffed with rhythm, it makes it so you don't actually have to hit your opponent in order to stun them with her cassette item (? I'm unsure whether what the item actually is). I became a top 10 Marceline player on Ranked, and even when fighting some of the few above me, I never saw literally anyone but myself utilize the whiff-attack stun. As for me, I used it all the time, it was super satisfying, and people didn't people didn't know how to play around it which gave me tons and tons of cheesy ringouts. The stun leads to some of the strangest interactions in the entire game though, I think in part because it doesn't interact with attack decay properly, stunning people multiple times in a short period of time was how I most frequently produced weird results.
That nerf to her I mentioned earlier was also pretty wack. Originally she was able to perform up to 3 normals during an instance of her Base stance, and trying to input a 4th normal would force a special to come out instead. The devs changed it so that this limiter no longer applied to each individual use of the Base stance, it instead persisted, even loosing a stock wouldn't reset it, instead it could only be reset by inputting a Base special with the normal attack button. If that sounds mind bogglingly specific, I would agree, the nerf made her quite a bit more complicated to play since you now had to track some invisible Base normals resource, and deliberately input special moves without the special button.
I'm unsure if I would call her my favorite MultiVersus character (I still really like Black Adam), but ended up loving Marceline so much that I decided to make a combo music video utilizing her. I'm pretty proud of it.
Season 5 And The End
I'd say this game ended with a whimper. I wasn't very surprised when the end was announced, I figured it was probably screwed as far back as Season 1, when the game launched in such a poorly received state. I hoped Season 5 could at least end off strong, but it ended with some strange issues.
All monetization was removed right before Season 5 began, giving me and a lot of other people hope that the game would get to be a lot more generous near the end, but it wasn't to that great of an extent. If I remember correctly, all the bundles were marked down 50%, but plenty of them were so expensive in the first place that they remained expensive, plus a bunch of cosmetics weren't even available through bundles anyways. Loot boxes were added in place of some Daily and Weekly XP, they could give Glemuim alongside seemingly any item in the game (including characters), but the odds of getting anything worthwhile were very low. Oftentimes the loot boxes would straight up just give less XP than the XP they had taken the place of. The loot boxes used to only be part of the battle pass, and I actually just straight up don't know how they were in Season 1, but I know back in Season 2 they were way more generous with giving Gleamium. At least both of the new characters, Lola and Aquaman, as well as the battlepass were free.
The most baffling thing to me, throughout this game's entirety, is the disappearance of most of the Season 5 cosmetics. Most of the new cosmetics were available through the shop during the very start of Season 5, but after day 1 most of them vanished. You could use them if you happened to obtain them on that first day, but otherwise you were just screwed over for no clear reason. I held out hope that maybe they were just gonna be drip fed throughout the season, but then a thread of official tweets advertising the the Valentine's Day costumes released, but then got deleted presumably because the costumes weren't properly available.
Then I thought maybe they were simply being delayed until the second half of the Season, since during then there didn't seem to be anything lined up for then, but they didn't even come then. There was even a surprise mid-Season patch that left the costumes completely unaddressed. Adding insult to injury, 2 unfinished Arya costumes appeared in everyone's inventories after that mid-Season patch, and those also mysteriously disappeared after a day.
Throughout the entire 4 month Season, I was particularly hoping I could get a second chance to obtain this Cat Burglar Lola costume, but it simply never came, which left me with a bitter feeling as the game ended.
I don't think it was some sort of maliciously calculated attempt to upset people, I imagine it was probably the result of an abruptly ended development period which screwed things up, but I was annoyed regardless. A silver lining was in Offline mode, the unfinished Arya costumes remained fully available in there, and most if not straight up all costumes are available in the Offline Rift mode.
Aside from that cosmetic ordeal, and some of the balance, I enjoyed my time with the end of the game. There was a Ranked Season 6 for some reason (and a mysterious Ranked Season 7 at one point), that took place during the second half of Season 5 alongside re-runs of Season 5's non-Ranked events, and it didn't feature any unlockable costumes. I got Master Rank anyways, so I could say that I got Master Rank in all (non-beta) Ranked Seasons.
I talked about in part 1 why I don't think Ranked is well designed, it never got much better, but it took enough effort that I'm proud of the accomplishment. I was never able to get Master Rank in 1v1's, the highest I got was the middle of Diamond (the previous Rank), but I came to accept that before the game ended. Instead of tryharding, I spent the last couple of weeks playing unranked 2v2's, being reminded of how chill of an experience they can be. I wasn't straight up playing passive taunt matches, but I wasn't caring much about winning or loosing which was nice.
Offline mode is about what I expected. It has most gamemodes, obviously nothing Online related. The Arena mode is something I'll particularly miss. It's unfortunate that local multiplayer was never added to the Rift mode, all the Rifts, including Rogue Rifts are available though. Also unfortunately, MultiVersus isn't available on storefronts anymore, so new players can't check out the game anymore.
People didn't really seem to come back to the game during Season 5 like I'd hoped. From my experience, the game's playercount at least remained at comfortably playable levels. Arena and Casual would frequently fill with bots (Casual is meant to have at least 2 bots anyways), but queue times usually didn't take much more than a single minute outside of Arena which took like 3-5. I wasn't expecting some sort of mass resurgence to hail mary the game back into popularity, but it's unfortunate that people seemed so turned off by the game's launch, that they didn't even care to see how the game improved over time. I'm glad I got to play it though, it may have actually turned into one of my favorite fighting games. I've heard there are 2 mods in development, 1 based on the beta, 1 based on Season 5, but I've had my fill on MultiVersus for now.
I wasn't sure where to put this, I guess it can be a high note to end on, I thought it was cool that the devs added a Justice Lord Black Adam costume. I didn't even know he was ever part of the Justice Lords beforehand, looking it up it seems like his presence in the group has barely ever been acknowledged online (I only found like 2 instances of websites mentioning the incarnation outside of MultiVersus). I think it's cool that the devs went and added a deep cut like that.
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