Thoughts on Marvel Versus Capcom 3

So Ultimate Marvel Versus Capcom 3 releases next week. I think people are pretty excited about it despite a fairly long list of complaints. The biggest and probably most legitimate complaint is that it's too damn soon to be releasing a sequel. Marvel Versus Capcom 3 was released in February. This is easily one of the shortest life spans for a fighting game ever, and probably one of the smallest gaps between a game and it's sequel ever, which kind of sucks. I think my biggest problem with it relates to Malcom Gladwell's 10,000 hours.

In his book, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell says it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become really good at anything. This includes Chess, playing violin, or making banana sculptures. In general it takes about 10 years for a normal human to accomplish this quantity of practice. The generation of fighting games before Street Fighter 4's reawakening of fighting games came out about 10 years before Street Fighter 4. Over those 10 years, players developed their skill and plumb the game's depths like ghetto scuba divers searching for treasure chests filled with crack. I'm a little bummed that MvC3's crack chests will not get the same chance that MvC2's had.

What I really wanted to talk about though was the design of "vanilla" Marvel Versus Capcom 3. This game has gotten a lot of hate in the fighting game community because old pros can get "random'd out" by scrubs, kind of like the tea party members in the republican presidential candidate race. But I think people have just failed to appreciate what a spectacle MvC3's design is. The game's goal was to capture the essence of what made MvC2 "hype", and they pulled it off with x-factor.

To give a little back ground on x-factor, you should probably watch this and this and this (that last one is a little long and stupid, sorry). MvC2 and the evolution of it splay is pretty interesting, and could probably be a post all it's own, but there are two important things to know to appreciate MvC3: 1) MvC2 was really really imbalanced. There were the 4 "god" characters, a bunch of pretty okay characters and a bunch of really bad characters. That's just a function of MvC2's production though, the goal was to have as many characters as possible, not really to have them all balanced. But this did lead to a lot of "cheap" stuff. 2) Comebacks like the ones in those videos happened more often than in any other fighting game I know of.

So MvC3 was designed to recapture what made MvC2 great while trying to make it more of a balanced game/something people who don't want to waste 10,000 hours of their life can appreciate. There are a bunch of characters again (with the additions from ultimate, it will be around 50), and this time almost all of them have techniques and abilities that are really really good. Rather than having 4 god characters and a legion of trash, the game has a bunch of really good characters, and like 5 bad characters.

The other big change is x-factor. I'm going to make a big statement here: I think x-factor makes Marvel Versus Capcom 3 the most innovative fighting game since, I dunno, Guilty Gear. X-factor is a one time use power up that increases damage and speed and can be used at almost anytime in a match. The buffs you receive and the duration of x-factor increase with each character you lose. The problem most people have with x-factor is that when you're on your last character, x-factor turns them into some kind of omnipresent samurai ninja master who will easily blow away the entire other team. Some people to say that the game doesn't really start til x-factor has been activated.

Those people are 100% correct.

But this isn't a bad thing. It's just really weird. People have spent a lot of time playing Marvel Versus Capcom 3 like a normal fighting game, when really it's much more strategic and mathematical. An apt simile is that most people treat MvC3 like a knife fight, so they get upset when their opponent pulls out a shotgun. But I think that's the wrong approach. You need to be waiting for the shotgun, and waiting for it should be part of your strategy at all points in the match.

If the game had gotten the 10 years it deserved, I think we would've figured all that out. Alas UMvC3 is nerfing x-factor, and pushing the game to be more 'traditional'. Bummer.