Very nice to finally see the roadmap for this year! I'll share my thoughts with you all, and I'd love to hear what you think about it. This is mainly feedback for devs as well, so if you are one, please please read this
(I have some words about the roadmap itself too, but I'll talk about that last)
- Brand New Game Mode
- It’s been EONS since we added a new Game Mode - it’s about time we fixed that!
- Our goal is to make up for lost time and ensure that there is plenty for everyone to do beyond “just” grinding Prize Fights and Rift Battles day after day.
- While this will be a major step towards that goal, there is much more to come!
- Monthly Fighter Drops
- Building on the extended Prize Fight duration changes we made in 2021, we’re making an effort to make our foundational monthly Live Ops content more meaningful and content-rich.
- As such, starting with our next update, you can expect to see brand new Fighters EVERY MONTH (featured in the monthly Relics) moving forward.
Very excited about the much needed new game mode, and
very pleased about getting new fighters much more frequently now. Last year I wished so bad for the old characters to get some love, either with new variants or changes to their kir/CAs... which takes me to...
Character Ability Adjustments
- Once upon a time, the notion of a Character Ability button was unheard of. Real Skullgirls Mobile players double-swiped up or down to trigger special abilities, accidental inputs and unreliability be damned!
- Well, it’s a new era, and it’s about time that folks like Peacock and Painwheel received proper Character Ability buttons of their own (along with a few tweaks to make their abilities that much more useful)!
CA adjustments! I'm SO glad you're doing this, I was about to do a thread about it but now I guess I'll just share my concerns here (that means this part will be long, sorry about that!)
It's probably not necessary to talk about the whys of the CA button being needed, so about the upcoming tweaks: Peacock needs some real help with her gameplan, in the sense that she just gets hit randomly all the time, and that
just spamming her moves won't net her much at all unless it's Inkling/Wildcard we're talking about. And Painwheel,
in my opinion she's generally powercreeped and that's it, it's not her gameplan what's flawed.
So, some of my ideas for Peacock's new CA:
- New cancels: allowing to cancel specials into hole on hit would allow to capitalize on hits (hit confirming, in fgc slang) by allowing to get a knokckdown and at least one more special to be chained (maybe a faster startup on the attack would help as well). But why stop at that? Cancelling into hole
on whiff would allow Peacock to have a safer zoning plan, and a slightly hard to use, but
very satisfying counter to pesky Annies fullscreen punishes, for example.
- Debuff on hit: another way to make Peacock's zoning more viable could be inflicting a useful debuff with her CA. I think immobilize and specials/BB disabling are the ones that would help her the most.
For Painwheel's CA, I'm not much of a PW player but I have a couple ideas as well:
- Armor: flight does evade a couple moves, but very, very few ones, and the reward on hit is abysmal. So, to adress the first problem I'm thinking about armor. Why? Because it actually sinergyzes with the more offensive MA, grudge, which is... not very useful honestly. And to be fair I think if devs go this way, they could also update the MA to trigger on armored hits instead of crits, or on any hit but without the armor, but I'm not getting my hopes up wit that heh.
- Lifesteal on hit: this is to adress the second problem I talked about! Getting that hit with flight is not an easy task, even with armor, so why not actually reward for using it instead of just abusing unblockables or the new PA? And to kill 2 birds with one stone, why not give Painwheel a much needed method to regain at least
some hp.
I know this is probably not enough to make Painwheels so much better in terms of power relative to the rest of the cast, but it's a step forward that, I think. Some of her kit needs some love as well.
- Exclusive Avatars
- As a building block towards more robust customization and expression features, we’ll be adding the ability to collect brand new Avatar portraits that go beyond your Collection and include a variety of new Characters and art styles.
- Chat Presentation Updates
- What’s the point of new Avatars if you don’t have a place to properly celebrate them?
- We’ll be updating the presentation of our Chat windows to display your chosen Avatar alongside every message you share.
- Consider this a refinement looking ahead to more improved social features in the future!
- Backstage Pass
- We all know and love Battle Passes, don’t we? Who doesn’t love more free stuff?!
- ALL players will be able to engage in “Mission”-like Daily/Weekly/Monthly goals to accumulate points over the course of a month to earn a bunch of new FREE goodies!
- A Premium Track for spending players will also be made available that provides even more juicy rewards.
I was not expecting any of this, but I do think that more profile/avatar customization and flare will bring more life to the game and its playerbase, and even more so if it's part of the road to guilds system. So I'm glad to hear it's coming soon! And about the Battle Pass, sure, I'm more eager to see QoL changes for the game, but why would I turn down new objectives and stuff to do in the game? And I even get rewards for it, I'm down for it.
New Character - Marie
- Oh, right! At long last THE SKULLGIRL HERSELF will soon be fully playable!
- Keep an eye out for all sorts of in development teasers on our social media pages leading up to her release later this year!
I am very excited to see Marie as a fully playable character both in 2E and SGM (and god that animation looks GOOD), but more impnortantly, I'm glad it's just
one character being released. I think last year, with 2 new characters being released, the rest of the game was kind of put aside when we really needed some refreshing changes. Like the ones we are getting now with a new game mode, avatar customizations, weekly objectives and old characters tweaks!!! So I'm very glad for the general line of upcoming content for this year and the next.
- Collection Cap Friction Adjustments
- Nothing like eagerly heading over to open up a brand new Relic you’ve just acquired, only to be slapped in the face by a pop-up demanding you clear out space in your Collection, make your bed, take out the trash, etc.
- While some Collection limits are necessary for technical reasons, we want to find ways to minimize its impact on the Relic opening process.
- Fight Replay System
- Fight replays are currently used internally as a development/debug tool. Now we want to bring that functionality to everyone! Why? Several reasons come to mind!
- See how your opponent beat your Prize Fight or Rift Node Defense Team
- Share an epic, down to the wire performance you’re particularly proud of
- See how other players cleared a particularly challenging Story Mode node
- Hopefully this can help make it easier to share knowledge and memorable moments with the community and progressing players.
- Anti-Cheat Improvements
- The saga continues, unabated.
- We’ll keep fighting… and we’ll win!
Regarding these changes, they all sound good although I was neither expecting them, nor hoping for them. But I do have a lot of trouble when opening a bunch of relics at once (which happens frequently), and I know many people complain about cheating so that's good. And on the replay thing, it's a very cool feature that I would never asked for because it's something big to implement, but if it's already there and it just takes a couple things to fully add it to the game I think it could be worth the time!
- Auto-Leveled Fighter Slot
- We think it’d be neat to have a way to assign a single Fighter to a slot that will temporarily boost their level and Skill Tree to mirror one of your top Fighters.
- Handy for brand new Fighters that you want to try on for size prior to making the full investment to permanently level them up!
- Move Management Quality of Life (QoL) Improvements
- Reviewing, filtering, sorting, and selling moves en masse is kind of a pain. We should fix that.
- ...
- Offensive/Defensive Movesets
- Ah yes, that which was teased alongside Loadouts and Retakes, but never fully released.
- Turns out this is… complicated. Lots of strange edge cases and odd UX challenges that caused us to put this on hold for a bit. Still eager to get it in once and for all!
YES PLEASE. About the "variant demo" of sorts you are thinking of, I think it'd be a really cool addition to the game. Many of my variants sit unused in my collection because I fear to invest in them, even if I theorycraft a lot about them.
And as someone with a low-end phone who really suffers loading times, the move loadouts was a top-tier addition to the game (which I did ask for a lot, tysm!), and having a predetermined loadout for each individual fighter I think is a must-have feature alongside it. Of course I was sad it was not implemented, and even more sad when nothing more was said about it for a couple patches; but I think it's perfetly understandable if it's tough to implement atm as you informed us, so I'll wait, anxiously but with what patience I can manage to have
. This kind of takes me to talk about the roadmap itself, and what it means to us as players.
I know I'm probably not saying anything new, but I can't stress enough how important
communication with the playerbase is for games in general, non-triple A games particularly, and this game specially. And I say this game because I think devs have generally been very open about the development of the game and have engaged A LOT with the community. Hell, devs even go to the chat and talk to us sometimes. And I think this attention and engagement is a large part of what took this game this far, and I love it.
That being said, I think communication has been kind of poor as of late, and not very transparent. You guys were very open about what happened with servers last year which I highly value, yes, but I think there should be a better intention of hyping us a bit about updates, for example. The time between each update varies but it's generally long, and with very little to just no news about the game at all until it's a week before the update. And there's a lot of stuff we want that are commonly not even adressed as a problem, I'm thinking about Rift getting stale (yes, Rift did get changes to its rewards and grind problems, but gameplay/meta is still the same), about the weird damage scaling with variants like Flytrap (was this adressed as a problem? please correct me if I'm wrong), or even atk/def loadouts not being implemented and remaining silent about it for like, half a year.
Keeping that in mind, and the fact that the roadmap came in
May this year, I have to say I was not very happy to not only not see communication being adressed as a problem in this post...
Outside the usual vagaries of game development, the main reason this is going out later than usual is that I was fortunate enough to be able to give a talk at the Game Developers Conference this year about the journey and design philosophies behind Skullgirls Mobile.
...
Anyway! Even though that gobbled up more of my time than I anticipated, that’s all behind us now - eager to share our plans for the coming year at long last.
... and honestly, not happy
at all about this part minimizing the issue. I'm trying to be as polite as I can about it, as I really disliked that bit.
So, to make the feedback more constructive: why not give us a thought or two between updates? It can be a behind the scenes in development, a hint about what's coming (nothing overly specific so it doesn't mean pressure for you guys), or whatever. For reference, I think you could check out what Risk of Rain 2 devs did last year with their "dev diary". In a game where communication was far less common, I think it was a very needed measure to keep the playerbase happy and ensure we know the game is still getting love one way or another.
Well damn that's a lot so I doubt anyone will be reading this after all, but if you did please do tell me about how wrong I am and why, and I'll be glad to talk about it, whether you are a player or a dev