Fancy a little Fighting Game?

It seems we don’t have a recent fighting game topic in the QT3 forums. It has begun!

Given how the developers toned down the costumes in Dead or Alive 6 I suspect they weren’t making nearly as much money off this installment of the franchise.

Alternate source:

Ah that site I’ve blacklisted for being pro-GH anti-SJW.

DOA6 is widely considered to be bad.

What’s getting the most positive press right now is

SF5- mostly fixed their netcode, it’s in a great spot right now

Granblue Fantasy Versus- it’s the SF of anime games, but horrible netcode.

Soul Calibur 6- just added Haohmaru and put in another nice patch. Netcode stinks but not as important for 3d fighters due to slower attack speeds and generous 8WR.

I stick to mostly Calibur, occasionally SF5 these days myself, I refused to touch Granblue due to the netcode.

Does 6 have all tons of power and outfit customization’s like the one that had Yoda in it (4 or 5)?

The base game is mostly on par with 4/5, the customization DLC adds a good bit.

People do spend a ton of time in the char creator, and there is a ton you can customize, though some of it has to be unlocked with in-game currency (fairly trivial to unlock, and can be done either SP or MP)

Cool thanks!

I’m still mad Divekick didn’t take over the world. Distilled essence of fighting game without the need to memorize ridiculously long input sequences. And it was funny as hell to boot.



King of Fighters XIV just showed today on GOG. Should I? I love fighting games but I never played and KoF.

I posted an alternate site for you.

So, those of you plugged into the fighting game scene, what would be your top recommendation for a genre newcomer looking to take a semi-serious stab at it?

For context, I missed most of the genre’s heyday due to parental restrictions, with the only exception being a fair amount of Soul Calibur with friends on the Dreamcast and GameCube. But even then we were fairly casual about it and never put time into seriously trying to learn the deeper mechanics and movesets.

The past couple of months, I’ve been playing a fair amount of tournament-rules Smash Bros. (which I had previously only played in FFA-party-game mode) with coworkers at a new job, and have been surprised to find myself actually enjoying the process of trying to develop a modicum of mastery, to the point of spending time in training mode and checking out videos on tactics and advanced techniques. But that’s kind of its own subgenre, so I was thinking of checking out something a bit more traditional to see what I’ve been missing all these years. There are a whole lot of these things, though, and I’m kind of at a loss where to start.

I’ve passively accumulated access to several older titles via Gamepass / Humble (Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite, Killer Instinct, Tekken 7, Mortal Kombat XL, Soulcalibur VI, BlazBlue: Chonophantasma Extend, Skullgirls, Injustice, and Guilty Gear Isuka, at a cursory check). I’ve installed a few and poked around, but definitely get the sense that it’ll take a significant time investment to get to the point of being able to act deliberately and strategically. If one of those happens to be a great starting point, so much the better, but I’d rather spend some money than put a bunch of time into something that turns out to be a dead end because the only people still playing it online are masters with thousands of hours under their belts.

Ok, of those games you mentioned, rating the games on netcode, gameplay quality (very subjective), single-player content quality (slightly subjective), and ease of learning (I think I’m good at parsing this):

Smash Bros is garbage online 1/5 netcode. Only good if you play offline vs CPU.

Killer Instinct is the best overall package. 5/5 netcode 4/5 gameplay 5/5 content 3/5 learnability. It is a pretty complex game, with a lot of unique features, but it’s so worth it.

MKXL is a version old, and MK11 is getting an expansion very soon, so I’d move onto that. 5/5 netcode 3/5 gameplay 4/5 content 3/5 learnability. Quantity of content is 5/5, but scummy practices make me knock it down a pag.

Soul Calibur VI is my best game 2/5 netcode 5/5 gameplay 3/5 content 5/5 learnability. Hard to recommend due to netcode. Soul Calibur , at least on PC , does have the most folks are masters right now though.

Tekken 7 2/5 netcode 4/5 gameplay 3/5 content 1/5 learnability. To play this game properly hurts your hands.

Blazblue, you’re a version or two behind on that. The anime game of choice right now is Granblue Fantasy. Guilty Gear Strive might be big in 2021, and Arcsys is finally making a game that might have good netcode

Skullgirls just had a small update, it’s getting a revival due to EVO online:
5/5 netcode 4/5 gameplay 2/5 content 2/5 learnability

Injustice 2 is very old and dead. Only playable for single player.

If I was to recommend something given your guidelines:

If you like NRS games, MKXI has a lot of bad players and great online, you could improve in that.
Granblue Fantasy might be a great choice, it’s simpler, if you can tolerate the shitty netcode.
Killer Instinct is a great package with limited XB1/PC crossplay (ranked is separate, player match isn’t)

(KI on Gamepass better choice than Steam for this reason)

Guilty Gear Strive should likely be your game of choice for next year.

I won’t sugarcoat it, fighting games are the toughest genre around next to RTS’s. 1 vs 1 so you can’t be carried, and 50%+ failure rates all the time until you reach a good level. It is frustrating, but if you enjoy it’s the most rewarding thing, to the point it’s hard for me to enjoy anything else.


If you do decide to go with Calibur- I’m pretty competent in the game (got into semis at EVO), I can look at your gameplay vids and maybe give some tips.

You didn’t mention UNDER NIGHT IN-BIRTH Exe:Late cl-r, which is awesome. No idea about netcode though.

Tekken is a great franchise. I had a friend in college, a black-belt in Taekwondo and sparring partner, who was really into it: there was a PS2 set up in the dorm lounge. I had some of King’s combos memorized and when I would begin pulling one off he would get up and walk around the room.

I’ve been playing fighting games pretty consistently since the 90s. Even today, Id probably pick them as my “favorite genre”, but I’m still objectively pretty bad.

There’s just a huge gulf between casual and competitive play, and I just don’t have what it takes for the latter. I’ve made a handful of attempts: I put some serious hours into MvC3 and SFIV online in their day and recently put some semi-serious effort into learning some of the classic KoFs (that I had played casually as a kid) earlier this year, but I’m pretty sure I know where my skill ceiling lies.

Honestly, at this point, Indivisible (a single player JRPG with a lot of fighting game aesthetic) is more my speed these days.

Partial to some Tekken 7 personally, probably owing to growing up with Tekken 3 on the Playstation back in the day. Character roster getting back towards the size of Tag Tournament 2 with all the season passes that 7 has received and ironically I still can’t settle on a main character, haha. So you could say that I rotate my way through a portion of the roster, while being no where near Knee levels of good enough to justify it. I have fun playing who I feel like when I feel like though, so that’s the main thing.

I should boot up Absolver again. I kept getting my ass kicked by other players. Very few of those around anymore, it seems. I enjoyed Virtua Fighter back in the “old” days, too, but I’ve never really been able to get into fighting games that have fireballs and all that kind of stuff. I mean, I sort of enjoy them, but I prefer “realistic” ones far and away. There just, like, aren’t any anymore (Shaolin vs Wu-Tang, I guess? It’s…ok.).

Put in a few hours with KI yesterday, and am gradually getting my head around the mechanics. The combo system feels overwhelming at first, but the dojo mode does a pretty nice job breaking it down into manageable chunks, and it was pretty satisfying to actually pull one off for 50% damage (the lone bright spot of my 1-9 record in ranked placement matches).

Somewhat concerned by the emphasis on combos, and the idea that competence requires being able to visually recognize each character’s light/medium/heavy attacks in a split second to break out of them.

But I see what you mean about the netcode. It felt completely fluid the whole time I was playing it, in sharp contrast to Soulcalibur VI, which I also spent some time with. In that, the basic mechanics came right back to me, and I prefer the aesthetics, but there was a much longer wait trying to find opponents, and many of them turned out to be laggy messes. I’d happily stick with that if I had a local group of opponents, but it doesn’t seem to be viable online.

Looked into Granblue and MK11. Granblue looks really appealing, both visually and what I can tell of the mechanics, but I’m pretty concerned about your comment on the netcode, and some of the Steam reviews complain that the player base is almost all on PS4 instead, so it’s hard to find matches. If the netcode is as janky as SC6, seems like I might as well just stick with that. MK11 seems like it would make a lot of sense, with an expansion about to drop, good netcode, and reviews praising the in-depth training modes. I could do without the juvenile aesthetics and apparent emphasis on nostalgic fan service that won’t do anything for me, but I could push past those.

KI’s netcode is best in genre. They improved on GGPO a bit. The combo system is pretty free-flow, as the visual recognition you doesn’t really see outside of very high level (and it’s tough there, and there are ways to get around it) One thing about KI is that the combos themselves aren’t that hard, they’re just varied/long.

SCVI- the netcode gets better as you get better, because you start avoiding the wifi users/potato PC folks. It’s still bad though. Generally, the low levels of fighting games on PC tend to have a worse experience than when you get to mid-level and run into the folks who put time in. This is pretty universal.

MK11- I’ll admit I have bias against it, I’ve never liked the series or gameplay, and MK11 is considered a boring MK by many of the vets of the series. It gets much of the same criticism SF5 does for being oversanitized/boring.