Hayashi talks about Game Balance and the Virtua Fighter guest characters

Yosuke Hayashi was recently interviewed by VG247.com with a few words to say about Fighting Entertainment, balancing the game and its characters, and sharing the game early in development with fans and the media. Its an interesting read out of Hayashi for once. Kudos go out to VG247 for asking questions that seemed to take Hayashi off his normal interview answers.

You'll find some choice quotes below, but be sure to hit the full interview to get Hayashi's take on the Wii U and stepping back into the Metroid series:

Balancing is another area that must have needed a lot of work to make Dead or Alive 5 run as smoothly and as fairly as possible. How challenging has it been to strike a solid balance this time around?

In terms of balancing the most difficult thing for us was balancing the Virtua Fighter characters. Obviously, characters coming from a different game also come from a different fighting system, and so putting them in the game required a lot of work actually.

In the Virtua Fighter system, the recovery period after you get hit is much shorter than in Dead or Alive 5, so I think we had to work around with the frames to make sure the cameo characters fit within our engine.

We had to really adjust them but in the end we’ve preserved the originality of those Virtua Fighter characters, and I think we got very, very close to the way they actually play in Virtua Fighter.

Sega’s team spent a lot of time with us actually and discussed the game’s development, about how we should adjust and balance the game. We also consulted a pro Virtua Fighter player during the process, and got a lot of community input as well.

Can you shed some more light on how the collaboration between both franchises came about?

Actually not a lot of people may know this but the first Dead or Alive game that came out in arcades was actually made with the Virtua Fighter arcade engine. So that’s how the first ever Dead or Alive project came about.

We didn’t aim to be where Virtua Fighter was, but because we used its engine as our base, we obviously had some kind of connection with Sega. So when we decided to make Dead or Alive 5 we went to see them and to say, ‘Hey, we’re making this game’, and through conversation we asked if Sega could join us in this celebration of our comeback.

Sega then said OK, and thanks to our connections in the past they thought it’d be fun, so why not do it? So we got the characters and Sega was very cooperatively actually, in letting us adjust them for our game. We were in very close contact with their development team.

We got their guidance and feedback, we got them to check for everything we were doing with the characters. Because of that kind of close communication, we managed to pull off a fairly close system to the original Virtua Fighter characters.

...

You’ve been quite open in regards to Dead or Alive 5′s development – such as revealing test footage to show frames, big combos and other gameplay traits. Why was it important to give people this insight?

We wanted to share a lot of stuff with our fans and community early on. The reason for showing so much was that we wanted to listen to fan feedback to help us make the game better.

Leading up to each development milestone we threw more reveals out there to get feedback and – speaking of the test footage – we were really surprised that so many people watched it online. It was great that we could open up to the community in that way.

If you look at many fighting games, they chuck out an arcade version, do location tests with it and do a lot of research before they launch the game on consoles. We can’t do that as we’re going straight on to consoles.

Source: VG247.com

 

Thanks for linking this Mr.Wah. It's interesting to me that Hayashi keeps mentioning Ryo Hazuki.

 

Since TN couldn't chunk out an arcade version, they let DOA players testing it out at E3 so they can ask qustions about
DOA5 to make sure the gameplay is smooth, soild & balanced, oh and the feedback thats really helping TN. A very smart, clever idea from them indeed.

 

Arcade location tests still provide broader player data than they can get from isolated showcase tournaments. They have to rely on their internal testing team, which is smaller than a location test in range of players, but whom have more control over testing conditions and timeframes.

I'm confident DOA5 will have a generally good balance, but cannot have the same level of refinement as some of its competitors until it is played by a larger competitive player base over a period of time.

It will be interesting to see what measures TN takes in monitoring high level play and what their plan is to refine the game in the future.

 

When I look at a character like Hayabusa, then compare him to a character like Lisa or Helena, it seems that Team Ninja knows how to balance and opts to make certain characters intentionally stronger.

I know Hayabusa is the poster child, but I have a hard time believing anyone of significance really thinks Helena and Lisa are on equal ground with him in this game... or even anywhere close to his level.

Makes me wonder if there's an internal tier list that developers try to target. I know it would explain a lot about the Soul Calibur 5 patch adjustments. "Hey, let's nerf ZWEI, the worst character in the game!"

 

It is a little annoying how the ninjas are always at the top but at this point it's to be expected from Team Ninja. Top players that can get by without them have my respect

 

I may catch hell for this. But, I hope they do another Metroid together. I loved Other M.

And, I wonder whats up with the Ryo talk?.. I will not get my hopes up that it concerns DOA5. But, maybe in the future we will see him in DOA. Would be pretty cool, IMO.

 

What a crappy answer in regards of balance, nothing about balancing the cast just talking about VF characters and even then they barely had anything to say.

 

Hayashi revealed a little more of their intent in balancing in this interview.
http://www.freestepdodge.com/threads/interview-with-yosuke-hayashi.1050/

The thing is, I don't think he would ever answer anything very specific about balancing one character against another or if they are happy for some characters to be stronger based on developer preference, storyline favour, etc. And that's more Shimbori's area anyway.

 

I really want to trust them on their opinion of balance but developers make very obviously stupid choices in some games when it comes to balancing characters. Plus Helena being shit is a universal opinion so far so I'd like to know who's opinion's they are getting cause I haven't seen a single person say she is good yet.

Knowing our luck they probably only asked MASTER about Helena and I know how that conversation would go.

 

If there is character favoritism in DoA5, which is in just about every fighting game, team ninja by far has to be the most conservative about. In older DoA games the ninjas rarely shared the top tier with anyone but now the grapplers are looking sick and Jann Lee is looking good too. The top tier in games like Tekken or Street Fighter are no accident. And in those games the bottom tiers can't even compete at competitive levels.

From what I've seen of team ninja, this time around, is that they have a much more solid understanding of what balancing a game needs. No game is ever 100% balanced but in that there is a meta game factor. Sometimes pulling out a low tier character can be downright demoralizing and often times people don't even know how to play against them since they are so unpopular.

Bottom line: too early to say DoA5 is balanced or unbalanced. Lets wait till we have an actual metagame and plenty of hours of R&D on every character. In the videos I've seen, most people are still playing this game like it's DoA4. If game balance is are biggest concern then this game is already a success. Good fighting games don't have to be balanced to be good (though it helps).

 

If there is character favoritism in DoA5, which is in just about every fighting game, team ninja by far has to be the most conservative about. In older DoA games the ninjas rarely shared the top tier with anyone but now the grapplers are looking sick and Jann Lee is looking good too. The top tier in games like Tekken or Street Fighter are no accident. And in those games the bottom tiers can't even compete at competitive levels.

From what I've seen of team ninja, this time around, is that they have a much more solid understanding of what balancing a game needs. No game is ever 100% balanced but in that there is a meta game factor. Sometimes pulling out a low tier character can be downright demoralizing and often times people don't even know how to play against them since they are so unpopular.

Bottom line: too early to say DoA5 is balanced or unbalanced. Lets wait till we have an actual metagame and plenty of hours of R&D on every character. In the videos I've seen, most people are still playing this game like it's DoA4. If game balance is are biggest concern then this game is already a success. Good fighting games don't have to be balanced to be good (though it helps).

I just want Helena to be really good at something, every character seems to have something they are great at and so far Helena doesn't have anything. She isn't fast, she's unsafe, she does lousy damage, she isn't good at CB's and her sit down stuns aren't good.

I just want something involving the new game mechanics that I can abuse. So far her game plan is stun them hope they guess wrong, the essence of DOA4. I'd like to see her as a pure mix up character having 50/50 sit down stuns and CB's, combine that with her low damage output and moderate speed and she would have a real game plan whilst not being OP.

 

Where's he getting that DOA4 released in 2008? It's 2005, right?