Unlockables in fighting games, yay or nay?

[Maximum Bert]

It bothers me more now than it used to simply because in the old days I could just take my cartridge or memory card round a friends house and then we could play with everything I had unlocked but now with accounts its just a hassle and has done a lot to kill local gaming for me which is what I like doing in Fighters especially.

So now I prefer all characters to be unlocked from the start and other unlock requirements to be fairly simple although I have no qualms with them locking pointless stuff like titles behind ridiculous requirements. Locking characters behind ridiculous requirements is the absolute worst. Costumes arent so bad but its still annoying but titles yeah do what you want make it so you have to win 5000 straight perfect matches online if you want in ranked it just means no one will have it (except the scammers).

Locking things like concept art and maybe even music are good incentives to continue and dont effect the game at all so Im ok with them as they give a reason to keep playing beyond just getting better which will happen naturally the longer you play as long as you actually try and adapt to what you are fighting.

 

[MajorTomServo]

Unlocking is fun, but I've had many a party where people started groaning because nothing was unlocked in Smash Bros. on this wii.

I'm in the camp of "Make an 'unlock everything' code that's super long and tedious and re-locks everything not permanently unlocked once the game is turned off."

This. Though I don't see why the code has to be long and tedious. If it requires a 4 button sequence on the start screen I doubt someone will do it by mistake.

Just to incentivize you to unlock stuff so you don't have to put in that pain-in-the-ass code every time.

 

[Danny Dowling]

it's a total pain in the ass for TO's to have to unlock stuff for x amount of setups.

I'd like to see a "tournament mode" where everything is unlocked but only works for vs. Then you can unlock everything else to give the game something to achieve and everyones happy

 

[AT God]

I don't play a lot of fighting games, I have really only played two as an adult, Skull Girls and as of two weeks ago MK9 (the rebooted Mortal Kombat). I have played the Smash bros games a lot more, I know those are different but I will discuss them as well

As someone who is awful at traditional 1 vs. 1 fighting games I was pleasantly surprised by both Skull Girls and MK9 in how little content was hidden behind unlockables. Skull Girls (I think, might be remembering incorrectly) let you play as any character from the start, you could unlock bonus art and palette swaps through completing tasks.

MK9 was surprisingly well handled for unlockables as well (surprising given the amount of bad things I've been hearing about MKX). It's worth noting I bought the "Komplete Edition" for $5 a few weeks ago on Steam so I got all of the DLC content and stuff (minus the console exclusive characters like Kratos) and never had to deal with pre-order exclusives or DLC added characters. Aside from that, MK9 was really fair with it's unlocks for most things. The only character that was locked off was Quan Chi, you had to beat the story mode to unlock him. I would complain about this but if you beat the story mode on any difficulty, you would get him, so when the game brought out the incredibly over powered Shao Kahn, I switched to Beginner difficulty and googled how to cheaply kill Shao Kahn and didn't have any problems. Being incredibly bad at fighting games, I was able to beat most of the story on normal, I struggled a fair bit with a few of the later matches where it was 1 vs. 2, especially when it was with a character that didn't suit my abilities (missing a stun attack, teleport, and/or ranged attack).

MK9 did have some insanely hard unlocks, but they weren't exactly detrimental because they were for alternate skins, and not even good skins, "Classic" skins for some of the older characters. Since they weren't major content I didn't mind having to work hard to get them. But if you really wanted the classic reptile skin (which I kind of did because I like Reptile's fight style but prefer him as he was initially depicted, a reptile humanoid disguised as a human), you had to go through hell to get him. Having to get 3 flawless victories and 3 fatalities before you reached Shang Tsung in arcade mode, plus having to double flawless and fatality him was really difficult, even on beginner difficulty which they fortunately let you use.

Oddly enough, the one "fighting" game that I liked the most, Super Smash Bros (N64 and Melee were the only ones I ever played), had the worst unlock shit of any fighting game I had ever played. Since the game focused on having a large roster (relatively), the unlocks were almost exclusively new characters, often requiring stupid amount of time and effort to unlock. I could go on, but just watch Yahtzee's old Brawl review for why locking away prominently featured characters is all sorts of evil.

TLR version: Unlockable characters is a major nay, unlockable skins/palette swaps is acceptable, unlockable stages are yay unless the stages offer something more than cosmetic differences (Nay for games like Super Smash Bros.). Unlockable things like trophies, concept art, music, etc. is a yay, doesn't affect the game and rewards players for trying.

 

[The Wykydtron]

The Umineko fighting game Ougon Musou Kyoku as far as I know just unlocks new characters to announce the rounds. Like every member of the Seven Sisters level of detail. It's nice but the default announcer in the game is freaking Bernkastel, she's a great announcer type character.

I liked UMVC3, not in the DLC characters but the titles, I ran the Ridiculously Lucky title for completing the story mode on very hard with Phoenix Wright for the vast majority of the time I played the game. I can count the number of times I played against another PW on my fingers and I played UMVC3 since launch for a year and a half daily. If anyone tries to call a character underpowered in another fighting game, I will laugh at you. PW is the worst character in fighting game history and I love him.

 

[WhiteNachos]

I like them just as long as they don't require weeks worth of effort, but if they do they should put in a cheat code. Especially seeing how annoying it is to transfer save files nowadays.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

Unlocking content is the only reason that I played Smash Bros on the 3DS, Wii U, Gamecube, etc...I don't dislike fighting games but if there's nothing for me to unlock I'll simply stop playing after about an afternoon or so. When it comes to DLC though, I can see why someone would want to pay to unlock everything. If I HAVE to pay real money to unlock a character in a fighting game though, and that fighter is already on the disc, that's just kind of shitty.

 

[Aerosteam]

Having locked characters in fighting games is like locking guns in shooters. So no.

Everything else is fine though, it's all aesthetic/bonus stuff.

 

[Aetrion]

I'm a huge RPG fan and I generally enjoy games that let me go all Sun Tzu on my enemies and prepare until I can steamroll them. So in that sense, I would love a fighting game where I can unlock powers and upgrades and stuff. Of course I fully understand that that goes against the spirit of pure competition in fighting games, and fighting game fans wouldn't want anything like that. So I guess what I'm saying is, there is probably an audience for both fighting games that go as far as letting you unlock stronger characters and powerups and for fighting games that don't do any unlocking.

 

[Username Redacted]

Do you like unlockables in fighting games?

Not especially.

Do you like unlocking characters?

Fuck no. At the very least it might interfere with me picking the character I want to play. More likely though it's massively inconvenient when dealing with friends or events. There's a reason only one version of Street Fighter IV had unlockable characters. It's because the community told Capcom to pack that shit in.

Why? Why not?

It's, as mentioned above, inconvenient. It's also being used increasingly to try to nickle and dime people via disk locked content in the form of having things that are very difficult to unlock via gameplay but that you can pay to unlock if you chose to do so.

Unlockable content that I'm OK with:
BGM
Stages unless stage selection matters; i.e. Smash, Injustice, DoA
Costumes
Titles
Avatars/Icons

Basically if it doesn't actually affect how the game is played then go nuts and lockable it away. It just means I'll never see it and I'm OK with that.