Longevity, Single Player AI and Virtua Fighter

Long after online play traffic has died down, long after the VF tournament scenes in a given town has cooled off, many of the serious but casual players of VF are still playing single player modes.

For instance, I still spend lots of time in VF 5 tournaments, VF 4 Evolution underground Tournaments, VF 5 Quest modes, VF 4 Kumite Modes, VF5 FS License Challenges , and Sparring Modes. In those modes there are dozens and dozens of AI to fight against! FAR more variety than the handful of human players that lurk around in Rank Mode online. In a good month I run into the same 10 player over and over. I've got most of their game memorized at this point.

I know all the arguments that the hard core players give about online modes, all the yada yada about the it hard core online players keeping the the scene alive. That's just bull!@#$. Where are all those hard core players now!

Sure we still have a tournament here and there and a little online activity here and there. Lately I've been recently diggin Beat tribe 2018,2019 on Youtube. But fortunately I've got some single player content to fall back on for those times when online is a Fuckin ghost town, and I'm tired of playing the same hand full of human players over and over.

Maybe now some of the hardcore "online only crowd" will give us some slack when we ask for more single player content. Because at this point most of the VF that's being played (at least outside of Japan) on a daily basis is in single player modes

As far as I'm concerned VF6 if there ever is one can make online mode DLC The core game should FOCUS on single player and two player modes that consist of:

Improved Adaptable AI in Single Player
Survival Modes
License Modes
Quest Modes
Tournament Modes
Team Battle Modes
Customizable Arcade Routes
Dynamic Stages
If There is budget ( A Story Mode)

These are the modes that keep players playing long after the online scene is DEAD These are the modes that keep player playing when there is nobody local to play. Online is not the answer. Even if we had perfect netcode (And VF5FS is fucking good) schedules, timezones, other games prevent there from being a sufficient amount of VF players online to keep everything fresh

Sega/AM2 if your listening. I hope you realize that the online-only crowd represents the minority of VF fans. The majority of the folks out there quietly playing the game every day do so in single player or two player modes (at least that's the case in the U.S.

The next VF6 if there is going to be one should focus on single player modes and lots of single player content.

The FGC are victims of their own competitive obsessions. Those in the competitive scene get better and better and demand more and more esoteric features that casual players and noobs could care less about.

The real way forward for fighting games is not is not online game modes, but to the contrary the way forward for Virtua Fighter and all fighting games for that matter is:

Improved, adaptable, single player AI
more diverse and robust single player AI
user configurable AI
Survival Modes
License Modes
Quest Modes
Tournament Modes
Team Battle Modes
Event Modes
Customizable Arcade Routes
Finally if there is budget ( A decent Story Mode)

These features would catapult VF purchases into the millions. Not the promise of better and better netcode, not the promise of more lobby features. Not the promise of more social media features tied to online play. Leave the online content for DLC and give the biggest part of the VF fanbase more single player/two player content

The real longevity of VF is tied to its high quality single player AI. So what we really need is more better, diverse, adaptable, trainable, configurable, scaleable AI. This is future of Fighting games, where there are fewer and fewer online scenarios that really work.

Notice that as the focus of all the fighting games moves to online play, the quality, diversity, and robustness of the single player AI goes down, and consequently so do sales and interest in the game.

 

If there was a new VF i bet it won't have Quest mode... All the items are just gonna be DLC.
Also ''Sega/AM2 if your listening. I hope you realize that the online-only crowd represents the minority of VF fans.'' Is targeting VF fans really a good idea?
Wouldn't it be better to target the casual consumer to maximize profit? specially in the US, making online into DLC would look bad in the eyes of most people, the best thing would be if there were no DLCs but sadly that just seems impossible nowadays.
All these extra features sound cool but would SEGA really be willing to actually provide the time and budget for them? most people will always care more about playing real people online, It seems only Yu Suzuki cared about AI related stuff. Ever since he left all those AI concepts were excluded from new entries in the series.

 

I hope not.

 

As far as fighting games go, as online became more and more the focus, the quality of the AI in most fighting games degraded. It makes the game cheaper if the developers don't have to worry about programming a balanced, challenging AI. And the focus on online mode gave many fight game developers the excuse they were looking for to skip all the hard work and extra expense of developing the AI.

I'm on record saying this, I'll repeat it here. In the end we're all going to be fighting against AI. We'll get online just to battle AI. 80% of the players in the lobby will be bots. As PvE (Player vs Environment) becomes the dominant form of online team based game play, AI will once again become to primary focus. Because there aren't enough players to play all the games out there, game developers will ultimately have to get into the business of making really good, challenging AI that can 'fool' players or 'satisfy' players. Today's online game demands hundreds of hours from a player. These days a player has to decide which games they just won't have the hours to invest in. This fact will force innovation in the area of AI. Since nobody wants to log in to a dead game (thing Anthem) the developers will have to populate the lobby , and online teams with credible, viable, legitimate AI that are fun to coop with or fight against. The developers won't have a choice.

 

@masterpo The AI in Soul Calibur 1 on the dreamcast was amazing, moreso on the harder difficulties. They would actually fake attacks, and do all sorts of different, crazy tactics against you. I actually learned alot of crazy tactics, just from fighting them. And it actually helped me win battles, against human opponents back then.

 

@masterpo
Hopefully, they don't make the AI for VF6 too smart.
Otherwise, most of us wouldn't stand a chance.

But if they did, I would use it as an endurance match, to prepare for actual VF competitions.