3SOE Title Update Plan/Details

June 15, 2012 Dave Uncategorized

First off we’d like to thank everyone for all the feedback.  It’s kind of a lengthy post but please read the whole thing if you are interested in the hows/whys of what we chose to fix, and what we are not addressing.

Things we are confident we can fix:

• Replacing Ping Colors with actual numbers (in milliseconds)
• Matchmaking filters for region (can be set to same region you are in, or “any region”) & ping time
• Lobby can be restricted to players from same region as you, or any region
• EX Bars correct length
• Improved Netcode (I talked about this a bit during the panel, if you want more details please refer to that)
• Max 8 lobbies visible bug on PS3
• Disable Stun as a Training Option
• Rounds and Time Settings affect Arcade
• Default Gill to “banned” in Player Match
• Multi-match modes retains player’s super choice
• Rank Cap resetting to 0
• Option to disable the Challenge HUD from the sides in modes where they are visible

Below is a list of things we’d like to fix but need to investigate further before committing.  This stuff is just as high a priority as the above list (meaning: if everything below proves fixable within a reasonable amount of time we will address it all, but if some fixes prove troubling it will get cut from the list).

• Investigate Gameplay Speed issue.  We’re not sure what to do about this currently but agree it’s a “Big Deal.”
• Investigate Dropped EXs.  Having trouble reproducing this, if anyone has any tips please get in touch.
• Investigate Player Color Choices being reflected in HUD (character portraits).  We can’t use the original portraits due to the DLC we issued, so we need to find a way to integrate this into the existing portraits.
• Investigate Lobby ready/unready on separate buttons.
• Investigate Urien’s Refelctor 2p color issue.  We need to dig into the game code a bit and see what’s going on.
• Investigate Ryu’s bag not flopping over properly.  Need to dig into the game code a bit and see what’s going on.
• Investigate bug where P1 & P2’s characters can swap colors.  We can repro this occasionally, so hopefully we can squash it.
• Investigate Save State in Parry Training bug.
• Investigate Consecutive Wins not being correct.  The reason it’s broken now is related to a choice we made about multi-match modes, and it’s clear our choice was incorrect.
• Investigate Mute/Mute All for Online Modes (PS3 Only).
• Investigate Sound Cutting out mid-match.  We’ve seen this, but it seems pretty rare (therefore hard to catch/fix).
• Investigate Poison/Roxy 2p Color.  Need to dig into the game code a bit and see what’s going on.
• Investigate “Trashcan” Shoryu.
• Investigate players getting kicked to player select inappropriately in online matches.
• Investigate possibility of refining “region” choices more than “North America, Europe, Japan, Hong Kong.”  This would be closer to the Skullgirls style of matchmaking, but is a bit more work than our proposed solution.  If it is possible we will do this, as we agree it’s a “better” solution.
• Investigate higher resolution for YouTube videos on 360.
• Investigate graphical glitch in Remy’s stage w/ Scan Lines on.

 

Stuff we are absolutely not addressing (and why).  This isn’t a comprehensive list of every single request we received, but does cover most of the frequently requested features:

• Any kind of rebalance.  We talked about this a lot already, but if we were to change the balance in the game, we really should change the name of the game, as it would be different in a lot of meaningful ways.
• Characters/Backgrounds from NG or GA.  This isn’t intended to be a Street Fighter III anthology, this is 3SOE.  This would also have to be DLC due to the size of the data, and some of the rules about maximum sizes of Title Updates made by the platform holders.  There are no current plans to make new DLC.
• Classic Music.  Same as above, this would only be available as DLC as it would be entirely too large to be part of a Title Update.  There are no current plans to make new DLC.
• Input displays in replays and training.  Agree this would be a nice addition, but there are concerns about 1) The amount of work to implement this and 2) There are patents around this stuff that make it a legal grey area.
• Re-doing the Rating System.  On 360 we use TrueSkill and on PS3 some approximation thereof.  The amount of work to re-do this is substantial, and would require us to cut a nice chunk of features from the list of things we are already fixing (i.e. we think changing this is not good bang for buck).
• Settable GGPO delay per-match like Skullgirls has.  We personally don’t see much value in this, as this is largely just a personal preference the player has (how much delay am I willing to tolerate versus how much teleporting am I willing to tolerate), and the connection to your current opponent shouldn’t affect your personal threshold there at all.  If you are a high level player who can feel the difference a few frames of lag makes and you drop combos, you will want that as low as possible no matter what.  If you hate teleporting and are willing to deal with slightly slower reaction times you should make it higher.  We also think that looking at ping in a lobby versus during a 3-minute match isn’t the best metric for setting that delay value.
• Twelve’s X-Copy Voice.  The CPS3 hardware had the ability to easily add effects to any sound on the fly, and while this is certainly possible to do on modern consoles, it is a significant amount of work (another case of not giving much bang for buck item in our view).  This would require us to not fix other issues that affect the game 100% of the time, not just when you are playing as (or playing against) Twelve.
• Color Editor.  Would be better as DLC, is a relatively “big feature” in the grand scheme of things.
• 360 YouTube to “private” channels.  We are not allowed by Microsoft to do this, they won’t let us collect user names and passwords from players (which we would need to do to post to YouTube) under any circumstances.

That’s not a complete list of items we received but it does represent the most-often asked for stuff.

We will be starting on this soon, and we don’t have an end date in mind yet.  We will update you when we have something meaningful to share.  If you’ve got questions/comments feel free to reach out.

-Dave http://blog.irongalaxystudios.com