When DOA6 first was announced in June of 2018, the community had excitement levels of that I had never seen in my life.
The trailer came to us as somewhat of a surprise as DOA5LR, even with a complete cycle of content and no more developer support still felt like we had at least a full year to go. We were so hyped about how fast it was coming. What we weren't thinking about was the speed of the release was one of the most detrimental factors to the way DOA6 was handled. From marketing standpoints, what was included in the package (content), and most-importantly - the gameplay.
After 2 years of the game's release and my disappearance from being active in the community: I feel I can finally articulate the way crapoZK feels about DOA6.
(Not Including Story Here, We Don't Play Those)
I've put this thread into chapters so you have the choice to read it all or just the bits that you want to get to.
This is a think-piece. I am not here to speak for the community, nor am I here to claim what I'm saying as facts. But I want to start a dialogue to talk about what we're not impressed with in one place.
Thanks for reading y'all. I will probably make a more detailed thread about how I personally would fix the gameplay for 6 in the Gameplay Discussion Forum, but this post took so long to write you will probably have to wait for it if I got around to it.
The trailer came to us as somewhat of a surprise as DOA5LR, even with a complete cycle of content and no more developer support still felt like we had at least a full year to go. We were so hyped about how fast it was coming. What we weren't thinking about was the speed of the release was one of the most detrimental factors to the way DOA6 was handled. From marketing standpoints, what was included in the package (content), and most-importantly - the gameplay.
After 2 years of the game's release and my disappearance from being active in the community: I feel I can finally articulate the way crapoZK feels about DOA6.
(Not Including Story Here, We Don't Play Those)
I've put this thread into chapters so you have the choice to read it all or just the bits that you want to get to.
This is a think-piece. I am not here to speak for the community, nor am I here to claim what I'm saying as facts. But I want to start a dialogue to talk about what we're not impressed with in one place.
The thing about DOA6, is that it was marketed so well until the month it was supposed to come out. Shimbori and TN were seeming to be clear about wanting to be taken seriously as a fighting game, releasing extremely interesting trailers. What I initially was enjoying to watch was each character being revealed and seeing their new main costumes that aligned with what we know about their personality and fighting styles. What they were showing us before the 2 new characters was making for great content. The introduction of the Fatal Rush mechanic seemed amazing to us at first (Before we knew what it actually was, see Ch.3). We had no idea what the Break Holds were doing. Platforms like IGN and Gamespot (I don't necessarily like them either) were giving DOA6 limelight on their websites and media outlets, increasing the reach of this game.
But just when things were looking up for DOA6, it seemed to fall back down just as fast. Whatever Shimbori was telling us over here in the west was definitely not what he was telling Japan, or there were major communication issues within the dev team, since we now know that people were outsourced to make this game as majority of the labour force were busy with Nioh 2. I still reckon it was both, but the main issue/thing that tore down everything DOA6 was attempting to build in the marketing sense was EVO JAPAN.
But just when things were looking up for DOA6, it seemed to fall back down just as fast. Whatever Shimbori was telling us over here in the west was definitely not what he was telling Japan, or there were major communication issues within the dev team, since we now know that people were outsourced to make this game as majority of the labour force were busy with Nioh 2. I still reckon it was both, but the main issue/thing that tore down everything DOA6 was attempting to build in the marketing sense was EVO JAPAN.
While in the moment for some, it was funny. I was definitely not laughing. The reason why I didn't find the Evo Japan debacle amusing in the slightest was because I knew exactly where this stunt Shimbori pulled at this major event was going to put us. It was going to (and succesfully) reduce DOA6 to where the FGC wanted it to be for some reason ever since "She Kicks High" for DOA3. A meme. Evo Japan reduced DOA6 into a meme within minutes and from then onwards, there was no coming back for Team Ninja. The FGC laughed at the fact the penguin-looking and now world reknown pedophile and groomer "Mr. Wizard" cut the EVO stream because of the T&A at play (Which is crazily hypocritical, even for him), and more importantly the term: "Core Values".
"Core Values" almost became a laughing point for DOA6, even though it was funny for the community to laugh and be mad at when it happened, in hindsight I have come to the conclusion that the term tarnished the "We Want To Be Serious" marketing scheme TN was going for the entire press run of the game. And the worst part about it was that it was self-inflicted. You don't talk about seriousness and break that tone of voice by having women groping each other in the same breath. You dont show off your camera mechanic by performing NyoTengu Ryona. It's not about what they did, because at any other event it would've been fine. But EVO JAPAN?When it was made abundantly clear that DOA6 was intended for E-Sports? Of course DOA was going to have some kind of sexy, fan-servicey side to it. But my god was this the wrong place to show this at. It was at this point I knew they had run out of shit to show us. But hey, as a community we were still hoping for some more good shit. We got a beta though which was fun, simply due to the honeymoon effect we were having with the game. It was a new DOA! How could we miss playing it! Boy how we were wrong.
"Core Values" almost became a laughing point for DOA6, even though it was funny for the community to laugh and be mad at when it happened, in hindsight I have come to the conclusion that the term tarnished the "We Want To Be Serious" marketing scheme TN was going for the entire press run of the game. And the worst part about it was that it was self-inflicted. You don't talk about seriousness and break that tone of voice by having women groping each other in the same breath. You dont show off your camera mechanic by performing NyoTengu Ryona. It's not about what they did, because at any other event it would've been fine. But EVO JAPAN?When it was made abundantly clear that DOA6 was intended for E-Sports? Of course DOA was going to have some kind of sexy, fan-servicey side to it. But my god was this the wrong place to show this at. It was at this point I knew they had run out of shit to show us. But hey, as a community we were still hoping for some more good shit. We got a beta though which was fun, simply due to the honeymoon effect we were having with the game. It was a new DOA! How could we miss playing it! Boy how we were wrong.
Now don't get it twisted. If your product is needing to be polished for a certain date and you feel like you don't have the time to complete it on or before the time required, by all means delay that shit. At the end of the day, all the fans want is to play the game and have fun with it. The reason why I am claiming this point as a mishandling comes in the main part of chapter 2. It's about WHY delaying the game was bad for DOA6 and not the act of.
Imagine you're Team NINJA. Shit is going downhill at rapid rates for the external hopes for this game, and you feel like you can't fulfil the promises that you gave to your fanbase which in turn forces you into the position to delay the release for it - So you can focus on fulfilling said promises. You release a trailer showcasing what will be included in this final product on day one, everything unlocked on "Presentation Mode" and looking extremely pretty - polished. Your time finally comes to release your game to the masses. And you release it with some of the content that you promised in it MISSING, and lock everything behind a disgusting F2P grind system for your players to pain through in order to get the shit that they spent 60 dollars on, in addition to hiding 2 ready-to-use characters behind DLC paywalls when they could've and should've been free additions since they were in the last game and.... barely touched designwise since then. Of course you can expect your fanbase to be mad if you're not doing the bare minimum to present the game as what was advertised.
To us it was like: "What was the delay even for?" They literally gave us a beta with a story mode attached (Hyperbole). They advertised over 100 costumes on launch date. What we got? 3-4 colourswaps for 4-5 costumes (Unless you were Kasumi, Marie Rose, Honoka or NyoTengu) sold as new costumes that you have to grind just as hard to get the chance to unlock, JUST the chance to unlock. God forbid you didn't have the money to actually get what you were grinding for. When DOA6 released, unlocking things was actually a myth. You could run through the difficulties of all the offline modes as Bayman and only serving unlocks for Helena and Christie. The costume points you tried to earn for the character you were using, were being randomly distributed to the rest of the cast. It just made the offline modes pointless since you couldn't actually get anything. The only way you were unlocking things for your character in the first 2 weeks of DOA6 was grinding Ranked Online. Are we still not seeing the issue at hand? The only way to get your casual content... was to play in a professional setting. Not even mentioning they failed to add in Lobby Matches, forcing the PC community to find a weird ass hack work-around to actually be able to play with each other without having to deal with 10 Sidestepping NiCO players before you find your friend for 2 games. Yeah, it was FT2 back then, so actually finding a worthy opponent if good was almost not even worth the stress. In DOA, the game where majority of the player base stays in lobbies to play the game instead of searching ranked, since there aren't enough of us on the game at once to get a consistent queue going: TN forgot to give us lobbies for what seemed to be around a month or 2 before we didn't have to break the game to get into them anymore.By this point there were already so much negative critical acclaim everywhere you could look, and first month sales absolutely tanked for the game. The stages were bland, the costume selection was bland and I will not lie to you, the soundtrack (Except for Virtue) was also bland. The game came out stale.
I will not sit here and lie by say I wasn't backing this game with my entire chest in the first 2 months of the release. I was 100%, wholeheartedly one of those "Just wait, it gets better" people in the community for this game until and shortly after it actually came out. But my main issue, which is everybody's main issue...
Is how DOA6 plays.
To us it was like: "What was the delay even for?" They literally gave us a beta with a story mode attached (Hyperbole). They advertised over 100 costumes on launch date. What we got? 3-4 colourswaps for 4-5 costumes (Unless you were Kasumi, Marie Rose, Honoka or NyoTengu) sold as new costumes that you have to grind just as hard to get the chance to unlock, JUST the chance to unlock. God forbid you didn't have the money to actually get what you were grinding for. When DOA6 released, unlocking things was actually a myth. You could run through the difficulties of all the offline modes as Bayman and only serving unlocks for Helena and Christie. The costume points you tried to earn for the character you were using, were being randomly distributed to the rest of the cast. It just made the offline modes pointless since you couldn't actually get anything. The only way you were unlocking things for your character in the first 2 weeks of DOA6 was grinding Ranked Online. Are we still not seeing the issue at hand? The only way to get your casual content... was to play in a professional setting. Not even mentioning they failed to add in Lobby Matches, forcing the PC community to find a weird ass hack work-around to actually be able to play with each other without having to deal with 10 Sidestepping NiCO players before you find your friend for 2 games. Yeah, it was FT2 back then, so actually finding a worthy opponent if good was almost not even worth the stress. In DOA, the game where majority of the player base stays in lobbies to play the game instead of searching ranked, since there aren't enough of us on the game at once to get a consistent queue going: TN forgot to give us lobbies for what seemed to be around a month or 2 before we didn't have to break the game to get into them anymore.By this point there were already so much negative critical acclaim everywhere you could look, and first month sales absolutely tanked for the game. The stages were bland, the costume selection was bland and I will not lie to you, the soundtrack (Except for Virtue) was also bland. The game came out stale.
I will not sit here and lie by say I wasn't backing this game with my entire chest in the first 2 months of the release. I was 100%, wholeheartedly one of those "Just wait, it gets better" people in the community for this game until and shortly after it actually came out. But my main issue, which is everybody's main issue...
Is how DOA6 plays.
The worst thing for me about DOA6 are the new mechanics and the gameplay overall.
I can understand why the cronies at TN wanted to make the game easier for newcoming players. But taking away all the nuance that DOA once had before 6 is essentially gone with this title. At first we thought that having meter in DOA was going to make up for some crazy stuff. We thought we'd actually have to use our brains a little bit more than we had to now that meter management was coming to play in this game. Nope. The meter gains way too fast for it to ever be a problem in your mind that you don't have meter. We used to think "Yeah the Break Hold sounds a bit broken but it's okay! It's metered!" Nah. Whenever you use your break hold in DOA6 you just get it right back, you barely need to regular hold in DOA6 since you might as well escape everything before it starts with your free unlimited combo breaker.
The much anticipated Fatal Rush mechanic turned out to be nothing but a auto combo feature to make new players feel like they're doing something. "Yes! It stops holds!" Nooo. It literally just made people more inclined to use the Break Hold since it just about deflects everything for a good second, since its active frames window lasts for around a whole 365 days until it's done.
Back in DOA5 we did use to complain about the sidestep being too weak for a while. But TN's reaction to this was nothing short of outrageous. In early DOA6, if your move/ entire string was not officially put down in the frame works as tracking, you would be able to go through it with a "Special Step" and knock your enemy to the other side of the screen. For free. On block or on hit if you weren't already in stun, which you would just Break Hold out of if you were "really" in trouble (every time you get stunned), you could sidestep through strings and attacks like they didn't exist. The SS and the BH absolutely neutered the concept of pressure with faster moves, since most character's fast tracking moves were gutted in the transition between DOA5 and 6, but if TN forgot to remove your fastest tracking string - your character was instantly top-tier i.e. Hayabusa's PK, Kasumi's 6PK.
Okizeme was scrapped. People on the floor were given more invincibility on the floor and on their way up (Why?!) so they could get rid of the pressure easily by playing possum on the ground like roadkill, ruining the oppressor's okizeme since they had minimal to no ways to deal with a downed opponent. Force Tech was essentially out of the game (Which I know people were/are happy about), which again in addition to the other aggression-killing-mechanics succeeded at doing just that. Bass and Mila were very good at dealing with this problem in earlier days though. Bass's free forced techs being a character-specific trait that suddenly only he could have, for some unbeknownst reason.
EVERYTHING IS SAFE. CAN'T PUNISH SHIT IN THIS GAME. Requirements for frame knowledge went out the window for DOA6. Just press buttons, sidestep, escape pressure automatically and see where your character takes you.
Now I did like the Break Blow.
Combo creativity was out the window since characters were given 2/3 reliable launchers, guaranteed damage being cut from the game due to the fact that Sit-Down-Stuns were out, and the bound system only favouring 1 string made for such dry content after 1 week. Combo scaling made it so that doing your one and only staple Bound > Close Hit Ender for your character was the only way you'd do some damage in this game. Don't get me wrong though, I thoroughly enjoy having to sacrifice maximum damage to enforce the mix, but more designated bounds for characters and more ender options would've done this game's combo system some justice.
DOA6's gameplay after a while improved a little bit, while still being a husk of what its predecessors were. It could've been saved if they took some time to restructure the game. But we know why that didn't happen.
I can understand why the cronies at TN wanted to make the game easier for newcoming players. But taking away all the nuance that DOA once had before 6 is essentially gone with this title. At first we thought that having meter in DOA was going to make up for some crazy stuff. We thought we'd actually have to use our brains a little bit more than we had to now that meter management was coming to play in this game. Nope. The meter gains way too fast for it to ever be a problem in your mind that you don't have meter. We used to think "Yeah the Break Hold sounds a bit broken but it's okay! It's metered!" Nah. Whenever you use your break hold in DOA6 you just get it right back, you barely need to regular hold in DOA6 since you might as well escape everything before it starts with your free unlimited combo breaker.
The much anticipated Fatal Rush mechanic turned out to be nothing but a auto combo feature to make new players feel like they're doing something. "Yes! It stops holds!" Nooo. It literally just made people more inclined to use the Break Hold since it just about deflects everything for a good second, since its active frames window lasts for around a whole 365 days until it's done.
Back in DOA5 we did use to complain about the sidestep being too weak for a while. But TN's reaction to this was nothing short of outrageous. In early DOA6, if your move/ entire string was not officially put down in the frame works as tracking, you would be able to go through it with a "Special Step" and knock your enemy to the other side of the screen. For free. On block or on hit if you weren't already in stun, which you would just Break Hold out of if you were "really" in trouble (every time you get stunned), you could sidestep through strings and attacks like they didn't exist. The SS and the BH absolutely neutered the concept of pressure with faster moves, since most character's fast tracking moves were gutted in the transition between DOA5 and 6, but if TN forgot to remove your fastest tracking string - your character was instantly top-tier i.e. Hayabusa's PK, Kasumi's 6PK.
Okizeme was scrapped. People on the floor were given more invincibility on the floor and on their way up (Why?!) so they could get rid of the pressure easily by playing possum on the ground like roadkill, ruining the oppressor's okizeme since they had minimal to no ways to deal with a downed opponent. Force Tech was essentially out of the game (Which I know people were/are happy about), which again in addition to the other aggression-killing-mechanics succeeded at doing just that. Bass and Mila were very good at dealing with this problem in earlier days though. Bass's free forced techs being a character-specific trait that suddenly only he could have, for some unbeknownst reason.
EVERYTHING IS SAFE. CAN'T PUNISH SHIT IN THIS GAME. Requirements for frame knowledge went out the window for DOA6. Just press buttons, sidestep, escape pressure automatically and see where your character takes you.
Now I did like the Break Blow.
Combo creativity was out the window since characters were given 2/3 reliable launchers, guaranteed damage being cut from the game due to the fact that Sit-Down-Stuns were out, and the bound system only favouring 1 string made for such dry content after 1 week. Combo scaling made it so that doing your one and only staple Bound > Close Hit Ender for your character was the only way you'd do some damage in this game. Don't get me wrong though, I thoroughly enjoy having to sacrifice maximum damage to enforce the mix, but more designated bounds for characters and more ender options would've done this game's combo system some justice.
DOA6's gameplay after a while improved a little bit, while still being a husk of what its predecessors were. It could've been saved if they took some time to restructure the game. But we know why that didn't happen.
Y'all, the DLC for 6 was ASS. I know it's optional content and all, but charging 26USD for a pack of costumes where everybody gets the same costume is actually a mockery. The DLC for this game quite literally was shared content using one asset from another character (Every suit from the Wedding Pack being pure black or pure white versions of Zack's C1) or old assets from DOA5 and selling it back as brand new content. Criminal acts for the prices being commanded. At LEAST by the time DOA5 was doing season passes it was content that was interesting to buy or look at times. This? Was shit.
I will refrain from talking about the hair situation that put the final nail in DOA6's coffin, since we all know what happened there and we all agree that we don't know what the flying fuck the guys at TN were thinking/forced into when they tried to get away with this fuckery. Whatever the remainder of players were trying to achieve with DOA6 had had enough of the shit. It was calling for a whole DOA6 boycott and a lot of people actually left to Tekken 7 or other games. They fixed that problem up quite quickly though, and I will not lie... they were fixing up in the content side of things as far as costume packs for the girls were going. The costumes for the Male characters had been forgotten about by Pack 3.
That's the part that pains me the most though. The moment they started to fix DOA6 in the ways they could, it was done.
Developer support stripped from the game until an unforeseeable future, putting the community in a DOA4-after-7-years-like position.
Where do we go from here?
I will refrain from talking about the hair situation that put the final nail in DOA6's coffin, since we all know what happened there and we all agree that we don't know what the flying fuck the guys at TN were thinking/forced into when they tried to get away with this fuckery. Whatever the remainder of players were trying to achieve with DOA6 had had enough of the shit. It was calling for a whole DOA6 boycott and a lot of people actually left to Tekken 7 or other games. They fixed that problem up quite quickly though, and I will not lie... they were fixing up in the content side of things as far as costume packs for the girls were going. The costumes for the Male characters had been forgotten about by Pack 3.
That's the part that pains me the most though. The moment they started to fix DOA6 in the ways they could, it was done.
Developer support stripped from the game until an unforeseeable future, putting the community in a DOA4-after-7-years-like position.
Where do we go from here?
Let me not lie. Regardless of how annoying DOA6 is in it's current state, I'm still glad that people are stil playing it competitively and streaming DOA content. It gives me little hope that TN will be allowed to work on DOA6 again and redeem themselves with some changes that makes DOA6 something worth playing for more than 20 minutes before you feel like you've done it all. And I still get to pop in and talk to all the OGs as if I never left, even if I haven't played the game since August 2019.
DOA6 was truly mishandled from the day it was revealed. We just didn't get to see that until we got the game in our hard drives. If you watch everything from the start, the same content was being recycled over and over in each trailer after a certain point. I would obviously wish for it to have gone literally any other way. But I'm content with DOA6 is at. I'm just not playing that shit until better days come.
DOA6 was truly mishandled from the day it was revealed. We just didn't get to see that until we got the game in our hard drives. If you watch everything from the start, the same content was being recycled over and over in each trailer after a certain point. I would obviously wish for it to have gone literally any other way. But I'm content with DOA6 is at. I'm just not playing that shit until better days come.
Thanks for reading y'all. I will probably make a more detailed thread about how I personally would fix the gameplay for 6 in the Gameplay Discussion Forum, but this post took so long to write you will probably have to wait for it if I got around to it.
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