DNA wrote:BlazingFiddlesticks what you are saying is all fair, and everyone's contributions have been fair really. That being said, a game like Super Dragon Ball Z would be the type of game to enter EVO, but unfortunately it wasn't polished enough for consoles, they literally just crammed it into a PS2 disc and called it a day, no decent modifications for the engine were made.
Then again, the fact that Hyper Dragon Ball Z is entering EVO says a lot about the issue. It had to be a team of fans to make a Dragon Ball game decent enough to enter competitions. This may be the white gloved slap that Bandai needs, although there's the possibility of nothing changing since Japanese people are known for being too prideful and not really accepting input from "baka gaijins".
So Hyper is going to be a sub-event at EVO? I clearly have not checked the thread in too long, nobody ever told me this! Requested, too? I guess swarming the front page of the gaming internet for a couple of days is great publicity indeed! Very happy for all you, great job. I hope there's a stream!
dbboxkaifan wrote:BlazingFiddlesticks wrote:Dragon Ball's issue is that it's an annual franchise- you cannot maintain a dedicated tournament audience with that level of turn over, particularly when you're liable to swap developers (and thus your entire game engine and mechanics!) after three games or so.
Blazing, aren't you forgetting that this EVO 2014 they'll be playing
Super Smash Bros. Melee despite that there's
Super Smash Bros. Brawl and
Super Smash Bros. for Wii U (yes it's the final title) so if we take
Super Smash Bros. for example we can see that hardcore gamers have vouched for
Melee over the others, the same could happen to
Dragon Ball Z game(s) but the fanbase isn't like the rest.
First and foremost, Super Smash Brothers is a once-a-hardware-cycle game- as far opposite of an annual franchise as you can get. It's situation is such a unique combination of factors that its example cannot be applied to basically
any other fighting game.
It required a strong grassroots community concentrated enough to form and congregate, keeping momentum despite
zero official support from Nintendo,
long swaths of time between sequels to let the metagame develop with no fear of being compelled to drop it for a new very game, which unlike other fighters would be
entirely new in Super Smash Brothers, and sequels that sell ridiculously well. If you were Nintendo, would you agitate the 1% of Smash Brothers buyers the tournament community makes up for still playing Melee when Brawl sold 11 million copies and most of that 1% probably bought Brawl as well? The tournament scene was neither or threat nor a crown asset (both for philosophical and conduct reasons).
This creates a wonderful bubble where the Smash community got to decide the competitive scene's values entirely on their own because Nintendo does not need them to sell games, and EVO is not their only tournament outlet (not that it is for other fighters) so they were free to emphasize Melee (not that competitive Brawl was never a thing, it absolutely was). This will likely will not be challenged at this point simply because of how set in their ways much of that community is, it's too late. Also because the absence of Wii and DS selling hotcakes money leaves Nintendo no one but their serious fans to fall back on right now, and a group as vocal as the Smash community is one they want on their side. I can tell you a lot of people do understand that Nintendo is using them as publicity for Smash 4 right now, but no one cares because they are far happier that Nintendo is officially acknowledging them in a positive way.
Dragon Ball, as I last wrote, simply has too much going against it to do that, as if Namco did try to reserve a spot, they would do what ever other developer does and change the hosted game as they came out every year so they could still use EVO to monetize the annual game, and with console DBZ games coming out so fast that developers have to change, crashing and burning by endorsing a new game with a different playstyle than the last is inevitable. Super Dragon Ball Z actually could have been this outlier; a tournament-styled fighter that would exist
alongside the Sparking/Tenkaichi games. But it had not only the lack of marketing by comparison to deal with, but seemed to have the same problem as Battle of Z: the developer knew it was too sophisticated a concept for most of the Dragon Ball playerbase to grasp, to the point where the publisher itself did not seem to have confidence in the product. I just don't think the sales or brand confidence are there to keep an older "mainline" game in the spotlight while simultaneously selling a newer one.
