All cards in StS2 do have their final art already. But we know there was a closed beta with a smaller group prior to this public EA release, so I dunno if they’re sitting on older beta art that maybe they’ll show us eventually.
I’m huffing copium, I know.
I considered including that one but I was getting too close to just linking every damn card. And it’s one that requires a lot of context to get the joke, I don’t know how many people reading this thread have played the original.
Some of my favorites: Disarm, Rampage, Double Tap, Immolate, Wraith Form, Boot Sequence, Self Repair, Meteor Strike, Protect, Fasting, Nirvana, Sands of Time, Study, Tantrum, Scrawl, Panic Button, Apparition
In Slay the Spire 1, clearing the True Ending with each character unlocks beta art for their card pool, and then clearing it with all characters unlocks beta art for all the colorless cards too. You can freely toggle each card individually, pick and choose your favorites. This was especially fun for Watcher, because during her development period they got the community involved to submit their own beta art.
I’m a little sad that StS2 doesn’t have this, but maybe that’s just because we don’t have the True Ending yet (and we do know that one is coming).
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No idea, but I’m assuming probably not.
Here’s my whole library if you want to see everything I like. Some notable exclusives:
Co-op is the major new selling point. Beyond that, the core formula hasn’t changed too much, they’ve mostly just expanded on it with new characters, cards, enemies, etc.
But for anyone who’s put a lot of time into the original, I think you’ll really appreciate all the littler elements that really add up. They’ve had a lot of time to rethink some nitpicks with the original and learn some lessons from it.
For example, a lot of events in the first game were a binary choice of either taking something or taking nothing, in which case the event becomes an empty floor. Act 1 events in particular were often a trap. MegaCrit has talked about how StS2’s events are being designed so that simply doing nothing is never an option, and I really really really like this! Just exploring all the new events is great, I’m suddenly prioritizing ?s on my paths just to see them all.
Boss relics have been replaced by a new system called Ancients. Part of me is still not sure how I feel about this, part of me is kind of excited by the fact that I don’t know how to feel. The game feels very different without energy relics (mostly, there actually are a few but many runs will not see them), and that’s definitely something that makes for a new and different challenge to get used to.
There’s also a new mechanic where cards can receive Enchantments, either permanently or just for the duration of combat. You can come up with some very cool combos to experiment with using this system, and on the flipside the enemies that are able to negatively mess with your cards are super interesting to me.
When Slay the Spire 2 was announced, I was honestly skeptical of how they’d top the original. StS is the game that ruined all other roguelikes for me just for how damn polished it is.
I can confidently say StS2 has raised the bar. It’s actually the smaller details that have impressed me most, like the way doing nothing is never an option at events. And enchantments are such a cool mechanic, gears are spinning in my head looking for fun things I can do with them. Equally cool when enemies can negatively enchant my cards too, new kinds of combat challenges.
I still don’t know how I feel about Ancients, it’s weird not having energy relics anymore. But part of me kind of likes that this is weird and different, it is by far the biggest change that makes for a totally new meta to explore. I can already tell that mastering this game will be a journey.
As polished as Zero is, it is kinda just another Mega Man platformer. Some variations on the formula to set this subseries apart, but if you’ve played other subseries you know the core formula.
Whereas what made Battle Network so special is that it was a completely unique kind of game that was never seen before, and we still haven’t really seen anything like it since.
Partially owned still counts.
Same reason why Mario and Zelda aren’t on those platforms.
Damn, everything with Azuma hit way too close to home for me.
All that said though, I do want to highlight the top comment right under the video:
The FGC are like a Death Metal band complaining they aren’t as popular as Taylor Swift.
Every time the FGC compares itself to the most popular FPSs and MOBAs, I want to scream. I think a lot of people are just so jealous of those games that they lose sight of the fact that fighting games are still doing pretty damn well even if they aren’t #1. Fighting games keep steadily growing with no sign of slowing down, and there are a lot of other genres that would kill to be in the position fighting games are in right now.
In fact, the only reason I call myself a fighting game player is because my actual favorite genre is dead. Even just the luxury of booting up ranked and finding an opponent to play with is a luxury many of my favorite games do not have, and forget about ever going to a tournament.
So I bounce back to Skullgirls, a game from 2012 that is still populated enough that I can click the button that says Quick Match and get a match quickly. And if you take a step back to think about it, that’s insane that SG has held onto that for so long, isn’t it? Do you realize just how many games out there can’t say the same?
I want to agree with some of the points made, I want to agree with anyone dunking on that awful article that kicked this latest round of discourse off, but there’s a lot that’s off base.
Saying fighting games are somehow special because they are “state-based”, I just don’t think any part of that tangent made sense. Not on its own, and not as something that relates back to the thesis.
As for the era of releasing a game once and never updating it, that era is over and it is never coming back. In today’s attention economy, updates are a hook that keeps players coming back. The second a game stops getting updated, it is declared ‘dead’ and a large percentage of the playerbase moves on. And while us old fogeys can shake our cane at the kids these days who view games this way, I think the author fails to recognize that there are real advantages to post-release updates.
He says a game should just be perfectly balanced at release, and, like, that’s just not how anything works. Games from that era rarely ever had good balance. Even the games we look back on most fondly have much worse balance than literally every modern game that has had patches. And think about how many more games we don’t look back on fondly, there is hella survivorship bias. If any developer thinks their game is too good for updates because it will be as good as Vampire Savior on the first try (a game which, I must remind you, has Sasquatch in it), odds are they’ll end up with something more like SVC Chaos instead.
The best way to balance a game is to put it in the hands of players and get both subjective feedback and hard data from them. Within 24 hours of release, the world will have put more collective playtime into your game than a team of dedicated playtesters could if you gave them five years. This is the biggest advantage of the online update era. We have to accept that games are made by humans, humans are never perfect, and thus balance will never be perfect, especially on the first try. But by accepting that 1.0 will never be perfect, we have a process that can refine towards better balance.
In fact, we’ve known this since the pre-online era, because many fighting games back then still had updates. I assume the author does not want to play World Warrior or New Generation today, they want to play Super Turbo and Third Strike. He shows Soul Calibur onscreen during this section of the video… but he’s showing the console version! SC is an example of a game where the console ports were the updates, arcade was the 1.0.
I’m almost positive it’s one person who keeps making new accounts.
The point is that their license is effectively considered to be expired. Kansas is asking them to turn the old one in for a new one. Nothing’s going to happen if they don’t, but then they’re just holding onto a worthless piece of plastic they can no longer use.
I’m just saying that the original is always better than dub.
To say that as if it’s universal is exactly what I’m trying to say is wrong. Especially if your justification is “it’s not 1:1 so it’s bad” - SungWon Cho, who IMO is one of the most talented English VAs out there, has a response to that that’s way better than I can ever put it.
They took a week off two weeks ago, I think they didn’t want to air during the Olympics. And since the dub is on a two week delay, that has reverberated to this week.