Xbox 360 Fighting Games... get with the program already. Please.

[Forerunner]

You know, I love fighting games. I really do. I suck at them, but that's another story. It's fun to get a bunch of people together and just beat the crap out of each other. It doesn't matter if it's firing that final kamehameha in DBZ Budokai, smacking people around with Nightmare's sword in Soul Calibur, or that satisfying moment of nailing a fatality in Mortal Kombat. There is one thing... one thing that fighters do that really bug me. Please, for multiplayer, START HAVING EVERYTHING UNLOCKED AT THE START! I mean really? I can't tell you how many times I've bought a new game, invited my friends over, and have online like half the characters locked. It's irritating. Ok, I get it. Unlocking stuff means more replay value which means more time out of your game. I've got it. Even still, when I unlock everything I end up becoming the guy out of my friends who is better than everyone else just because I had to unlock everything before we could play. Sometimes we go through it together but point being we shouldn't have to. Keep unlockables in the game, I'm totally ok with it! Moves, characters, and anything else that hinders playing the game right off the bat... just keep unlocked from the beginning.

 

[Claptrap]

I dunno, most fighting games lately DO have all characters unlocked from the beginning. Super Street Fighter 4 (though vanilla SF4 didn't), Marvel vs Capcom 3 (Ultimate too), Persona 4 Arena, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, Street Fighter X Tekken, Tekken Tag 2, I think Mortal Kombat too... all of these have all characters unlocked from the beginning.

There is only one very recent fighter that I remember not doing this and that's Soulcalibur 5. But 3 of the characters are lame mimics, so awful. I don't know about DoA5 (I think I remember hearing about the Virtua Fighter guests being unlockable, though). But yeah, all characters being unlocked from the beginning has kind of become the norm lately, thankfully! I agree with you that the ones that do have locked characters are annoying as hell so yeah, good to see the practice has become less common lately. It's also such a pain in the ass for the tournament organizers to have to make sure all the setups have all characters unlocked.

I think that the practice stopped being so common once fighting games started to target the competitive scene more while ignoring the more "casual" crowd, if that makes any sense.

 

[BlackSolaris]

I dunno, most fighting games lately DO have all characters unlocked from the beginning. Super Street Fighter 4 (though vanilla SF4 didn't), Marvel vs Capcom 3 (Ultimate too), Persona 4 Arena, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, Street Fighter X Tekken, Tekken Tag 2, I think Mortal Kombat too... all of these have all characters unlocked from the beginning.

There is only one very recent fighter that I remember not doing this and that's Soulcalibur 5. But 3 of the characters are lame mimics, so awful. I don't know about DoA5 (I think I remember hearing about the Virtua Fighter guests being unlockable, though). But yeah, all characters being unlocked from the beginning has kind of become the norm lately, thankfully! I agree with you that the ones that do have locked characters are annoying as hell so yeah, good to see the practice has become less common lately. It's also such a pain in the ass for the tournament organizers to have to make sure all the setups have all characters unlocked.

I think that the practice stopped being so common once fighting games started to target the competitive scene more while ignoring the more "casual" crowd, if that makes any sense.

Agreed. also what was kind of lame was the amount of things you needed to unlock to create cool characters, most of them being paid DLC.
And why the hell don't we get even a little of exp by playing versus? Every single mode you gain exp, but there, it's just like you ain't playing at all.

 

[lindbergh]

Having to unlock some characters add to the replay value of fighting games. It makes you want to play the game over and over in order to see all the characters. I'm not that good at fighting games too but I don't have a problem with regards to having to unlock some of the characters. However, when I have to pay to download additional characters, that's another story, a story that I don't like.