Guilty Gear Strive balance update coming in late August, more adjustments planned for October
The team over at Arc System Works released a new Developer's Backyard today detailing the current state and coming changes for Guilty Gear Strive.
Naturally newcomer Goldlewis Dickinson is a large part of the talk, but developers also noted plans for a two-part Strive balance update. The first portion of this is slated for late August while the second should be coming "around October." Read on to see exactly what the team had to say.
"In the late August update, our main goals are strengthening the characters we've determined to be lacking in power, and improving moves that don't have enough options for use. We plan to pinpoint the changes we make to specific targets, rather than making overall changes. That means some characters may remain unchanged."
Indeed, while Strive has proven to be fun enough for most, many players have expressed some distaste at how overly powerful avatars like Sol Badguy currently are. Frustrations with May's Totsugeki attack have led to rapidly spreading memes in the community, so perhaps we'll see some toning down on fronts like these.
"We are considering changes to damage output or minor adjustments to the properties of overwhelmingly powerful characters and moves, however we will make these decisions very carefully," continues the section in the Developers Backyard post.
As a two month old title, Guilty Gear Strive is at a somewhat awkward point in the natural fighting game cycle. Players are surely beginning to feel the pain of overtuned abilities, of which there are usually a relative many in vanilla versions of games, but may not have had ample time to yet discover existing counters to them.
The natural tendency might be to simply nerf characters who seem to be generating a lot of complaints, but listening too heavily to frustrated emotional responses can result in taking things too far and robbing current top tiers of their fun factors.
Perhaps this two-step process will make for a more nuanced and effective approach for balance. Once the lower tiers are tuned up, the Strive community can reassess just how much more powerful the top tiers still are, and the needle can moved with smaller, more precise alterations.
Let us know in the comments below what kinds of changes you'd most like to see and why.
