Evil Geniuses spoke with team member Ari "fLoE" Weintraub about what it was like working with Iron Galaxy Studios on the release of Street Fighter 3 Third Strike Online Edition. He discusses how he was brought on the team and specific things that he worked on.Angstygaijin: “You mentioned that you’ve assisted with several aspects of the design for Third Strike: Online Edition. The Trials Mode was a big part of that – designing trials for both beginners and advanced players. Is there anything else you worked on?”
fLoE: “I helped with a lot of general design aspects; what I thought would work best in the game. I was very adamant about how the controller configuration would work, for example. I was able to bring the voice of the community to the development process. As we’ve already discussed, the team wasn’t really comprised of hardcore fighting game players, so it was great to suggest features and tweaks to the game that would make Third Strike: Online Edition more attractive to the community.”
Sent in by Rafael2487.
3s is the greatest fighting game ever from every aspect in my mind it's capcoms masterpiece I am so glad they made 3so legen... Wait for it wait for it... Dary
Question: How many people knew that Floe was an expert at 3S? Because this was news to me to discover this. I don't think there's any footage of him playing 3S at a tournament either.
I also question the numerous little things wrong with the port. The Size of the Super bars, Urien's Aegis Color, Poison not coming out during Hugo's Taunt, Twelve's XCOPY not having the distorted clone voice.
Not to mention the wretched Ranked mode (why not just have a list of players and show their ping and you can challenge them?) and the fact that Ping is represented by an inaccuracte symbol instead of NUMBERS.
Biggest question: Why didn't they get Kuroda involved at any time during development? I mean, of all people you could get involved in this, why on god's green earth would you exclude Kuroda of all people? The man lives and breathes 3S and can play any character at super high level and destroy nearly anyone.
Also; (rage mode activated) Half the trials are complete garbage and you will never use them. Many basic combos are completely over looked.
"I was very adamant about how the controller configuration would work, for example." Thanks for being selfish dude, now this version is less functional than every other version in terms of button config possibility, screwing over pad players. Not everyone uses a stick. Capcom's fault mainly though. They should have included both the classic and quick button config methods to please everyone.
One last thing: They can't really make the excuse that they couldn't afford to fly Kuroda out there and have a translator. Why not do Skype calls with him? Someone at Iron Galaxy or maybe someone Kuroda knows could've been translator. He could've given some feedback. Better yet, have him visit the Japan Capcom office and test out the netcode from U.S. to Japan?
@#5
Huh? how did they screw over pad players? I have no complaints on how it set up and i use pad. Unless there is another aspect of it i overlooked that you are complaining about.
@#3/4
you sound like the same louis that was the angry troll on ggpo. Most of what you named are minor nuances except the aegis colors. And this isnt the only capcom game to not show ping numbers.... gotten used to it sadly. And kuroda probably didnt want to be involved, or company probably didnt want to deal with the language barrier and relocating him when they could grab some talent from the homeland to do testing. Complaints are understandable but most can be overlooked.
@Louiscipher Maybe they asked him, but was unable to give up his job for 4-5 months to live in Chicago as FLoE did. Maybe he was involved, but not to the extent that FLoE was because of various complications. I remember hearing about them having an inhouse tournament with several top players so I do know that FLoE wasn't the only community player involved.
Okay, dude. Multiple things wrong with your post.
HDR had ping numbers. I have it for PSN, it has actual numbers. I think MVC2 had Ping numbers too.
Again, they got MOV and several other high level J players involved, why not Kuroda?
Back-handed insult has failed.
@powderedtoastman I know with HDR you can bind two buttons to the same action, this is missing in 3SOE. Also with Super 4 you have seporate options for Throw/Focus/Taunt, this is also missing from 3SOE (replace Focus with Overhead). For instance I know that one dude down in Texas that basically plays with his tongue (sorry forget his name qq) makes use of the throw binding so he has one button to throw and also uses it for cr.LK (doesn't use st.LK at all). Not sure if he also plays 3s on the PS2 port with a similar setup, but if he does he would need to change up his game in order to play 3SOE.
^ Dont' worry, 3SOE is printing money. Capcom is a business, they are probably already in pre-production for 4th assault.
I don't 'entirely' blame you, Floe. But a lot of people are frustrated by this release, I'm sure you can understand that. Since Capcom has had a horrible track record with patching known problems it's not looking good for the future.
I'd love to know why no one tried to get Kuroda involved too.
Floe, you don't post here. You have better things to do than look at us nerds nerdrage and whine.
@#9
I didnt say none others didnt have ping numbers shown, Last i checked none of the sf4 series games had the ping number and mvc3 didnt have it, and cant recall if re5 had any ping numbers. That was the point i was making not every capcom game follow the same online model. But playing on ggpo for a few years i can understand how the ping numbers are good. I agreed the complaints are understandable... relax.
@#10
This is what i was overlooking, as i never did additional bindings like that nor did any of my friends. And we all been playing on pads since the old school days. But i can see where you are coming from now. Not just screwing over pad users in that sense. which is where my comment was aimed at.
@12 - Broken? The battle cry of the scrub.
Whatever happened to trying to overcome your opponent? These days everyone just whines like a b!tch until they patch it. Put in work you lazy SOBs.
#2 gets my voice
Every single person who worked on this port should be flamed, my opinion.
@ #18
Is that why the tourny scene was dominated by Chuns, Yuns and Kens?
Face it, many top players were just as intolerent to having to work so hard for their wins.
18 it does seem to be becoming like that nowadays dang Internet age nothings ever good enough
And i have seen some sick urien, makoto, oro, play plenty of these characters are capable of jacking you up just because they are not always finishers doesn't mean in the right hands they couldn't win people are always so quick to look at tournament results
@ #23
It still doesn't change what happened in tournies - which are the true test of how balanced a game is, especially over the 10 years or so that it was out.
You'll always see the odd person beasting with a lesser used character, but for every one of those guys - there are 50 yuns/chuns/kens.
Although to be honest, the Japanese and American SF3 scenes were pretty different. Much higher level in Japan and more notable players with weaker characters.
why people still complain about it being a supposed 3 character game. wasnt it only like that from japanese tourney results.....which doesnt really apply to rest of the world. Just how people joked around how american fei and sagats arent top tier with the sf4 series. Unless all ya plan on playing at SBO or something, i dont think that character excuse holds any water really ...as we dont play at that high of a level yet for it to matter that greatly.
It is what it is all the people that complain about the tourney scene in 3S for the most part were never in the 3S tourney scene look at uryo's Sakura beating all types of competition people just wAtch these top tier characters and think no one can beat them all games will always be lopsided in the valance department that's just life in fighting games some characters just have better tools but all for the mist part most characters in a game can become viable with training and execution and I play for the challenge so that is a good thing because when you beat these top tier characters you can say hey my Sean beat your whoever it's the ultimate pimp
Smack
@15 FloE was asked to give his input, thats not his fault. Plus it's an opportunity even a scrub would take and being a Chicago native like myself im glad some of the pro gamers in the Windy City is getting some exposure like this.
3rd Strike at it's core is perfect, you can't deny that. If you put this in a tournament it's gonna work. The only problem is the Online mode which is really just buggy but what game is'nt?
I think it's time for the FGC to grow up now, as in RIGHT NOW! We've beern here for years, there is no need to act like a bunch of spoiled children.
@14 FloE you don't have to defend yourself, im glad you had some input in the game and the trials do make sense. They are designed to get beguinners started, thats more than enough.
@#27
Have you checked it? LMAO. Funny thing is that in the other thread is one on tournament results. In case you havent seen the trend, the japanese showed up and cleaned house for the most part.
And the one evo(09) where they show it appears to be just american teams, had various characters making a showing.
Which goes to show that my main point of my post is valid, basically without the japanese players the tier list in america doesnt hold much water and the emphasis was more on the players than the character choices.
@ "why not kuroda?"
because kuroda has too much aspergers.
Kuroda does not use Q. He uses Akuma when he's serious and not trying to troll. The top 3 thing is actually very America-centric. Japan has WAY more diversity in terms of character usage because they are infinitely better at 3S than the rest of the world.
list_of_sbo_winners.txt
If you look up the Tougeki 3S winners, which you can do easily on Wikipedia, it's always been Yun, Chun, Ken, and Makoto. Except one year, where Kuroda was playing Akuma. Kuroda has won 2 SBOs. Both times, he had to use Akuma/Ken. The game is horribly unbalanced, in the US and in Japan. A few character specialists, for all their effort and skill, will not change this fact.
As for 3SO, I respect Floe, and I wholly believe that his role is overstated. The interface of 3SO is awful and I have a hard time believing that Iron Galaxy didn't ask him for his opinion, give him some lip service, and then shut him out. Because the game should not look like it does, which is a mess. The matchmaking is arguably some of the worst ever and there is stupid stuff all around, like readying/skipping with X of all buttons, being unable to pick 2nd Impact and 3S colors without changing them in a menu, the overly simplistic button binds, the annoying Player Match interface...
@mndy
Argument about the interface and whatnot is subjective, it's not stopping a person from playing. People can have their opinion on that.
But the bugs should be understandable. GGPO is old tech meshing with older tech meshing with newer tech. Expect bugs. I don't know what game online or off that don't have bugs. It's just the nature of things.
The question is NOT that there are bugs, the question is will the bugs be fixed soon? According to Derek they are on it now so the bickering about the bugs is invalid, no one is perfect, it ain't gonna happen, it never will happen, it's time for us to grow up and have some patience.
This is not a direct attack at you but I was using your comment as an example, it's time for us to chill, there are other fighters, there are other games, there is a world outside from this, lets move on people.
Note: The button binding is simplistic because most people people just want to review their buttons. IF it's not the way it is then change is a button press away. Can't say much about the colors though...im on the fence on that one.
@12 we wanted 3rd strike they gave us third strike. Period. If they rebalanced it people would have complained EVEN MORE. So yeah. and besides the tiers only matter in high level play most people on 3s OE are noobs just like sf 4.
Shut the F** up about tier lists please. Yes Chun, Yun, and Ken are the best characters in the game but that doesn't mean the other characters can't win. Scrubs blame every single loss on the tier list, its pathetic. man up and accept your losses and learn from them.
#40
Wrong. A poor interface is a poor interface and deserves to be called out on. The training mode is bare bones, ripped straight from the PS2 edition of the game. The Plsyer Match system is awful, as the pings lie, the game allows you to enter full rooms before kicking you out, and shows you private slots when it should just not show you private slots at all and let you change the size of rooms. It feels rushed. The button binding system is a step down from SF4. The replay system doesn't save names. The ranked system is an absolute joke. Can't sort by anything, you just hit the button and go, and it takes 5 seconds just for the ping to show up.
Yes, you can still play the game, but all these flaws add up to a shoddy port job with zero polish. Don't try to act like you're some big man who sees the big picture. Yes, there are other games, but when a game disappoints, people should be able to call it out.
And for all of you saying tier lists are for scrubs? Tier lists aren't the Bible, it is true, but you people are fools if you go around talking about how tiers don't matter blah blah blah. Most people who call 3S unbalanced do not blame every loss on a tier list, they are just saying that the game is unbalanced, because it is. People have known how unbalanced the game is for over ten years. It is just FACTS.
would've like a blind select, sick of ppl wait on me to pick my guy first in rank it's weird, but I like 3SO so I can live with it.
#46
Trust me, people have been complaining about 3S since day 1 and the complaints you hear about the game today are at least a decade old. The thing about 3S is, it always had this backlash against it. This is why I had to laugh when I read the description for 3SO and it says it is "one of the deepest, most revered fighters ever." This is just simply not true. Most of the people who think this actually have a pretty weak understanding of the game.
I'm too tired to rehash old arguments about the flaws of 3S. Really, the problem is 3SO. This game was hyped so much, and they just had to join a relatively solid netcode and a 13 year old game, and yet the finished product is just so rough and poor. There's so many little flaws you can't help but go "why?" From Twelve's voice, to being unable to pick 2I and 3S colors at once, to the wonky online interface, there are so many things wrong with this game.
"The button binding is simplistic because people just want to review their buttons?" Come on. People can read a button sheet, you know. This stuff is indefensible.
For the price of the game, I wouldn't expect a whole lot of patching or interface changes. The game will most likely remain as-is sans a few bug fixes.
What's amusing is that a rebalanced or new version might have garnered more sympathy for at least trying to produce something new. Instead they tried to squeeze out a quick and cheap port, slap 'for the fans' and 'love letter' on it and got called out on it.
What's dissapointing is that they'll probably only fix it enough to make it respectable rather than delivering on their hyped up pre-release claims.
@42 Another worthless drooler who has no clue what tier list or game balance means.
Floes a really good player, but he did mess up the trials by giving very obscure and uncommon utilised combo's, ones which are aimed at one or two chars or just plain easy ones (i can see why the easy ones were there but the uncommon ones were useless and should have been more popular combos to teach the new people how to beast on it)
Also Ryu's trial 4, why put in a glitch as a trial which is even banned in tournies
@46
you seriously complaining about Twelves voice? like you owe him your life. c'mon man, we know the netcode for 3SO is horrible, but i think you just hate the game regardless. who complains about a voice of one character, and blames the entire balance of the game for that same reason? i think you hate the game, and are just trying to pull out as much small details, as you can to make the game look bad. its a gerat game with very FEW flaws, that can be fixed (which Capcom said they would).
I just wish they had a better player than floe to be a part of it, because he is not 3S dedicated. There are so many more dedicated players to it than him, yet none of them are mentioned, and that saddens me, because it could have been a lot better if they had the true players of 3S, exclusive players of it, working on it. No offense to floe though, good in other games, NOT in 3S though.
Oh, and to go with #46, the netcode is definitely a MAJOR flaw with this game. I'm in Japan with a T1 line, and I rarely get anybody with green ping and rarely even get a good ranked match. Ping is usually terrible, which is odd, because Japan has the best internet supposedly, yet I get very bad games ONLY for 3SO and not any other game I play, even PC games on WiFi, not wired.
"do a jab Shakunetsu Hadoken and cancel into Raging Demon to move across the screen. Then, finally, throw the regular fireball."
That's a cool little puzzle i guess. But i think he should have been thinking about basic BnBs and Useful combos to get newbies to 3s into the game.
Just quoting Floe's post on SRK:
"im not really sure why everyone thinks im not a 3s player when before sf4 3s was probably my main game? i played everything that was competitive at that time but i placed well at every 3s event i ever went to..including some evo 9th's..as for trials modes there are 2 ways that people can expect a trial mode to go..either a way to teach people this 10 year old game..or to actually be challenging and reward you for completing difficult things like achievements..but when you have a 10 year old game + only 5 trials to work with i think going the latter route is the better and more fun way of doing it..it IS called challenge mode for a reason..teaching someone how to do c.short x3 super with ken is nice but is it really something you would waste one of your 5 trials on? when they can just see it in a video and go to the actual training mode to learn something like that rather then doing it once and seeing "complete" and totally disregarding it..you want finishing the trials to be some sense of accomplishment and i think thats what they are..also remember that a lot of my trials were changed because when i left the company to move to LA a lot more was done to the game since I left..so please stop trying to make it seem like im not a 3s player or wasnt the right person for the job because i missed details that i wasnt even around for when they happened"
The trials were still very impractical. You should've had at least 3-4 trials that show basic combos, and the 4th or 5th one is some impossible crap. They're totally uneven with maybe one Trial per character having something practical.
Also, you were not the right man for the job. Honestly anyone else part of the 3S community would've been better. It didn't have to be Kuroda, it could've been MOV, Pyrolee, Gootecks (he's rusty as feck but still knows more about the game than you), Rockefeller would've been better.
I'm sorry, but when you say "I was the best guy at the time and I know 3S" that is totally wrong and you are lying. Any member of the 3S community would've been better.
I wonder if he was the one that gave them advice on how ranked should work.