Oh yes, it's time again.
Wait, what? Seriously I didn't expect the sequel this soon but here it is, out for PS4/XBone/PC on October 28th. You can already pre-order on Steam.
Here's a boatload of coverage from a place I've never heard of called Saiyan Island. (I imagine it's a lot of dudes with big hair and no shirts shouting and flexing a lot.) Follow the links at the bottom of the page for additional coverage.
http://www.saiyanisland.com/2016/10/dragon-ball-xenoverse-2-first-look-at-goku-black/Xenoverse 1 was a good game, in my opinion. The best DBZ fighting game ever? Hardly. But it had a lot of content to play through and it was enjoyable building a fighter, customizing them and then playing with all the different attacks and abilities to craft your ideal Z-Fighter. I had a lot of fun playing through it with a friend.
The game had some weaknesses though. Namely that the fighting was rather spammy and unrefined compared to Tenkaichi or Raging Blast. Blocking was not a thing that worked hardly ever, Beam Clashes were not a thing, the Parallel Quests (which were the real meat of the game next to the campaign) were occasionally frustrating to try to complete due to the LOL-Randomness of different steps in individual PQs. Online battles rarely seemed to work and when they did they were all sorts of dumb restrictions or the absence of restrictions; like you couldn't turn off the fight timer and the game didn't really try to match people of equal power levels so curb stomping happened with regularity.
Some but not all of that will be addressed in the sequel. Watching some footage, here's what I can say.
- A lot appears to be recycled from DBZXV1. Which is ok. There are so many "iconic" parts of DBZ that it doesn't make a lot of sense to remodel every single character, have them revoice all their lines and their attack barks. That shit would be expensive. Still, I recognize a lot of re-use from DBZXV1 in terms of models, hair styles, faces, all that jazz.
- The fighting is fundamentally the same in DBZVX2. Didn't see a lot of surprises there. But...
- It seems faster and the camera movement seems tighter.
- There is a FUCKLOAD more teleporting possible. I'm not really following how it works at the moment, but it seems to be that it no longer runs off stamina bars. In some matches I watched the two opponents were regularly teleporting far more than in DBZXV1. It still amounts to about the same thing (one player attacks, the other teleports, the teleporting player counter attacks, the original attacker teleports, rinse and repeat....) But there seems to be less "Teleport twice then get your ass handed to you" that pretty much defined how combat in DBZXV1 worked.
- Super Saiyan Transformations don't appear to need to be maintained anymore (no longer appears to just deplete your Ki Bar while active.) I read something to the effect of "how strong the SS Transformation is depends on what your Ki level is when you activated it."
- New Hub city. It's purportedly 7x bigger than Toki Toki City. Which, Toki Toki City wasn't all that big. But it's big enough they're going to let us FLY, finally, inside city limits. 300 people will be able to share the same instance of the city at once. There are also mentions of a 2nd hub city.
- There's going to be more questing and exploration of the city than in DBZXV1. Initially you won't get to fly, you'll be issued a car to drive around. (A subtle play on the episode where Goku tries to get a driver's license? Maybe.) The goal is they want you to explore the city in a certain order before you get the ability to fly and access other, new areas and things to explore. Sounds cool, I guess. DBZXV1 was 99% Campaign and Parallel Quests, and 1% running around Toki Toki shopping. So it will be nice to have a more MMO-like space to chillax in and do stuff. They're hoping people are able to be more social than in DBZXV1....which I guess depends on whether we're still restricted to only being able to communicate through pre-programmed sentences.
- There will be twice as many PQs compared to DBZXV1. That is an assload of PQs. Some of them are brand new, some of them are "reworked" PQs from DBZXV1. Again, sequels tend to get slammed for this kind of thing often but with DBZ....when you've already done the Namek fight "right" in one game, does it make sense to do it all over again from scratch in the sequel?
- "Expert Missions" where six players square off against a single, big bad threat. Broly, Great Ape, to name a couple. The kicker seems to be that these missions have a lot of randomness to them. Players might get mindcontrolled mid fight and have to fight themselves in a private battle to restore control over themselves. Enemies might blast you into completely different areas. You might get ambushed by other characters jumping into the fight while you're alone and isolated. Enemies may do crazy, unexpected attacks. It's essentially raiding in DBZXV and it sounds pretty cool, assuming you have friends to play it with or can find pick up groups for it.
- Endless Battles. Now you can fight other players until one of you drops dead, no more fight timer if you don't want it.
- Levelless battles. Now you can fight other players and completely eliminate the stats side of characters so it just comes down to powers and skill. A lot of people wanted this due to how grossly imbalanced fights in DBZXV1 could be.
- There's going to be some kind of save import from DBZXV1. The only tangible example given was that a statue in the new hub city would look like your DBZXV1 character (Savior of time or some such shit.)
- At least 87 non-custom playable characters. Zarbon finally is playable, as is Deodoria. (Not that I want to play either of them but they were both conspicuously absent in DBZXV1.) Other series favorites are appearing as well, like Janemba. (Who I used to beat the shit out of everyone with in Budokai.)
- The storyline this time seems to be less "Fight to keep the DBZ storyline as it should be!" and more "Change the history of Dragonball!" Don't really care about the story that much to be honest.
- There were really obvious, troubling bugs in some of the videos though. Like one enemy freezing in place and taking damage while a "phantom" enemy that was invisible kept beating up the player. The player was obviously surprised and started firing off Ki attacks in an effort to hurt them. Sort of troubling when a bug like that is out in demo footage. Another seeming bug was the camera paying attention to the opponent during their smash attacks. Like, you as the player get smashed and go flying and instead of the camera staying on you, it's over the shoulder of your opponent. Stylistic choice or bug I dunno, it had me really confused watching one fight.
So I guess I know now why this only took ~a year to crank out. It's an improvement over DBZXV1, not a completely new game from top to bottom. Worth the full price of the game? Hard to say. But I know I enjoyed my time in DBZXV1 enough and was wanting more so, I don't have a problem paying full price for it.
Anyways, I'm off to cram comically large amounts of food down my throat. Hard to reach 9000 on an empty stomach.[/list]
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Topic: Dragon Ball Z Xenoverse 2: DBZXV2LMNOPQRSTUVW. That's Time Travel baby. (Read 10486 times)