As long as the game captures Aubrey Edwards in all her glory, it will be great.

Aug 4, 2022 22:28:18 GMT NATH45 said:

As long as the game captures Aubrey Edwards in all her glory, it will be great.

Don Stevens should be the Noob Saibot of AEW: Fight Forever. Very tough to unlock but is so worth it.

Aug 3, 2022 15:01:53 GMT Blindy said:

How fitting that CM Diva is the guy in the middle of the cover. Probably would have thrown a hissy fit if he wasn't.

Crazy they are charging full price for this, the quality must be very good and much better than what was shown for AEW to do this.

That is just good marketing to hook people into buying it. Same way he normally opens Dynamite.

I like some of the idea considering it AEW like weapons staying on a person. The transition from the Russian Legsweep into the Lockjaw looked pretty nice if those were two different moves. I am concern if this is all they have to show a month before release since it should be in the debugging phase.

I don't think it needs minigames but not opposed to good ones. The ones shown here look like trash.

Did The Bucks see the work-in-progress and 'nope' out of the cover?

This looks really bad, this was playable at Gamescom. Think it's one of those times that this game needs a delay into 2023 just for more polish. 

Looks like the No Mercy engine. Which is funny as it is what people claimed to want, and now they see it, they do not like it LUL.

No Mercy? More like No Selling from Big Show!

Aug 25, 2022 0:35:20 GMT c said:

Looks like the No Mercy engine. Which is funny as it is what people claimed to want, and now they see it, they do not like it LUL.

That game came out in the late 90's, it's over 2 decades later. Trying to be different than what WWE2K is...is fine. This from a graphical and polish standpoint just isn't it. 

That's like if a 2022 platformer ripped off Crash Bandicoot 1 because everyone loved Crash Bandicoot 1. All the wrinkles and everything. 

One positive change they made is that the spirit metre depends on varied offense. You can't just spam a back body drop like you could in No Mercy and access your Special ASAP.

The big change is the addition of Signature Moves which you can access when you're ready to hit Special.

One concern with the demo is that instead of the spirit metre resetting after going into Special, it appears that it goes just a stage down.

The other issue is that the trailer didn't capture the flow of the AKI engine. The AKI engine was built largely on momentum and the back and forth of hitting reversals until one opponent got ahead. It's half-way there on presentation, but the game still needs far more dynamic camera actions and meatier sound effects to give it the satisfying crunch and weight the AKI games had. The animations are also skipping frames and need to be slowed down a touch. Right now it looks more like Virtual Pro Wrestling on PS1 than No Mercy in that regard. Even then, I'd argue some of the moves looked better in VPW.

All I'm really seeing is another Wrestlemania XIX/Day of Reckoning type knock off.

Aug 25, 2022 1:00:43 GMT Blindy said:

Aug 25, 2022 0:35:20 GMT c said:

Looks like the No Mercy engine. Which is funny as it is what people claimed to want, and now they see it, they do not like it LUL.

That game came out in the late 90's, it's over 2 decades later. Trying to be different than what WWE2K is...is fine. This from a graphical and polish standpoint just isn't it. 

That's like if a 2022 platformer ripped off Crash Bandicoot 1 because everyone loved Crash Bandicoot 1. All the wrinkles and everything. 

Even then, that would be fine since Crash Bandicoot 1 still holds up as an enjoyable experience to this day. The issue these games have is that they don't go the extra mile games like Crash did and they half-ass animation, sound-effects, character designs, physics etc.

It's like they're following a recipe but they don't exactly understand what made those games work.

It looks good. Just good. Nothing more than that. It definitely has a throwback vibe to the late 90s/early 00s wrestling games, even down to the graphics, which are remarkably unimpressive for 2022. I'm not versed in how the WWE games have played for the last 10 years or so, if the WWE games play differently then it could be a pretty smart idea to tread old ground, offering novelty for the younger audience while poking that nostalgia bubble for the older demographic.

One exceptional thing they've done is use crowd noise and chants recorded from live AEW shows. Love that touch. Also like the ability to use finishers from different positions, like Kenny doing a One Winged Angel from the top rope.

Aug 25, 2022 17:04:43 GMT Emperor said:

Also like the ability to use finishers from different positions, like Kenny doing a One Winged Angel from the top rope.

It's cool but it's also been the standard in wrestling games for over 25 years. :lol:

I'm not versed in how the WWE games have played for the last 10 years or so, if the WWE games play differently then it could be a pretty smart idea to tread old ground, offering novelty for the younger audience while poking that nostalgia bubble for the older demographic.

The developers worked on WWE games from 1999 till 2018 so you can still see a lot of cross-over and they were the main competitors to AKI.

AEW selling it as 'pick up and play' could easily apply to the SmackDown series as well.

That is my take. It looks like a good game. It could use a ton of polish on the graphics, but I do not really give a fuck about the graphics if the controls are good and the game feels good.

People seem to want this to be a WWE game, and that is not what they wanted to make at all. You want AEW in WWE, just download the CAWs and you are all set anyway.

The game looks bare bones and they've shown little to suggest it's anything more than a cheap Yukes game.

That they've reportedly spent a lot of money on...

Aug 25, 2022 17:31:22 GMT Big Pete said:

Aug 25, 2022 17:04:43 GMT Emperor said:

Also like the ability to use finishers from different positions, like Kenny doing a One Winged Angel from the top rope.

It's cool but it's also been the standard in wrestling games for over 25 years. :lol:

I meant using the same finisher from different positions. We saw a One Winged Angel from standing and a different version of the same move from the turnbuckle. In my experience if you have a grapple finisher you can only do it from standing, in some games you have to face your opponent (as opposed to facing their back).

They really did not spend that much on it. I heard 10 million. Which is not much when you consider the Call of Duty games have 50 million budgets and are incremental releases. Most major console games cost 100 million these days. WWE games are likely spending 100 million plus.

Doing wide releases is expensive as fuck as you need to hire specific teams for each device you want to play the game on.  

Aug 25, 2022 17:50:40 GMT Emperor said:

Aug 25, 2022 17:31:22 GMT Big Pete said:

It's cool but it's also been the standard in wrestling games for over 25 years.

I meant using the same finisher from different positions. We saw a One Winged Angel from standing and a different version of the same move from the turnbuckle. In my experience if you have a grapple finisher you can only do it from standing, in some games you have to face your opponent (as opposed to facing their back).

It's just a different animation altogether and was common with wrestlers like DDP in the old AKI games. They'd usually do it for a few wrestlers and now just about every wrestler in the 2K games has a top rope version of their finisher.

They really did not spend that much on it. I heard 10 million.

Reportedly spent over $10,000,000 and that was in September of '21 and in May of 2022 Sports Gamers Online and Fightful broke the story the company made 'extra investments' despite the game already being way over budget and cutting corners to get the product on the shelves.

Even then, that figure could go back to a report SRS released where TK reportedly invested 8 figures into the Games Division.

I'll probably pick it up when the price drops a lot. No way would I pay £50 for any game, especially a wrestling game.

Stores here have stopped selling AEW action figures, so I don't really think there's going to be much of a demand for the game - hopefully the price drops quickly!

www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/aew-fight-forever-preview-gamescom-2022/

A hands-on impression from somebody who's never played AKI games and blames the game because he's terrible at it.

Not a ton to grasp here, other than wrestlers teleporting to be in the right position for the animation which was never in AKI games and was a short-cut the SmackDown games would use.

The common theme so far is that fans wanted No Mercy, but they're getting Wrestlemania X-8 instead.

IGN loved the preview.

www.ign.com/articles/aew-fight-forever-a-much-needed-alternative-to-the-mainstream-gamescom-2022

They were mixed on it.

They liked the Special system which is a series standard.

They disliked the hit detection and how reliant matches were on reversals. I'd have to double check, but one of the basic ideas of the AKI games is that after you took a bump you could crouch which would allow you to either grapple, strike or backroll to either regain control or reset the flow of the match. They also didn't like the lack of entrances, but that was never vital to those older games. No Mercy cut the entire full entrances down to a taunt on the entrance ramp.

Again, it seems like none of these journos actually grew up with the AKI games and make these weird approximations of what these games were like.

They said elsewhere it was one of the top games at the con.

My take is it will be a good wrestling game. Not a great one, just a good one. Which is what to expect from a first paid to make game.

Hit detection is always an issue in these games but the reversal system makes sense if you want to capture the ebb and flow of an actual wrestling match. Most matches are not just people trading moves back and forth until a pin, there is an ebb and flow that changes based on reversals.

I always turn off entrances so do not really care about that.

The thing is, they keep trying to talk it up as 'exactly like' No Mercy and they're missing the crouch mechanic that made it stand out from the Yukes game and allowed it to be more than just reversals.

I thought maybe the journo was so bad at the game, they skimmed over it. However it didn't appear in any of the control tutorials either so it's clearly not in this build.

Other little nuances from No Mercy remain too. One of the biggest holdovers is the ability to hold the guard button while you’re getting up to crouch on the mat. While crouched, you are invulnerable to attacks, and are able to punish overly aggressive opponents with a quick strike to take back control of a match. Or if your opponent is wise to the tactic and backs off, you can just do a quick back roll and reset to a neutral position.

That is still there.

That's good news, I must have scrolled past it. Looking at the footage again, I can see where the animation is as well, even though they never explicitly had it in the controls or pointed it out on commentary. That's a plus, from the sounds of it and looking at the footage it appears they'll have to adjust the selling. Usually in the opening portions it's a back and forth where hardly anything is sold and it takes a strong grapple to really gain any type of advantage.

Game will not be perfect, and will be on the rough side since it is the first game on this engine, but it looks fun if you temper your expectations. Will be like a 7 game most likely carrying over the same limitations on first engine games have, the old No Mercy engine had and simply not having a decade of assets to reuse in a modern sports style game that fans of customization now expect.

Just hope it performs well enough were they can make a strong sequel. Because TNA was very bare bone games which they had big plans for the second one that never happened.

Wrestling fans seems to want to make sure it is a one and done game with the response so far.

Aug 26, 2022 21:24:53 GMT c said:

Wrestling fans seems to want to make sure it is a one and done game with the response so far.

I can understand why so you get to keep all the current wrestlers plus get all future wrestlers in theory.