AEW: Fight Forever

[Your Mom]

40 minutes ago, I Think You Should Busch said:

Much as I want to support a new wrestling game, I've just seen nothing to make me think I'd want to invest more than a $20 Black Friday deal on it.  Glad I've held off for now.

Agree with this. I think I want to try it just to know for myself what I think I already know but I'm happy to wait for Black Friday or sooner if they get desperate but $20 is my limit

[TheGrandAvatar]

For some reason the gameplay has been really fun for the last few day's. 

Had a war with Kenny Omega taking on Malakai Black. In a one on one singles match he manged to better end me playing Omega. This resulted in a Light's Out Match which I won as Omega.

Figuring out I wanted to then target Hangman Adam Page. It was natural to do to get Omega back out. Plan was to dominate Page and make him bleed. Possibly attack him after the match too. However. Boy. What a match. It started off with trading blows, test of strengths, push downs, taunts and a respectful Hangman letting me up get back up everytime. I was enthralled by this kind of and when full respect mode. I did the same for Hangman. Letting him get back up. Us both using the test of strength every step of the way. Almost a Japanese match full of respect. We traded move for move and more. It came down to me hitting the signature, Page going for The Buckshot, which I ducked and hit The End. Handshake after the match.

Now this has me wanting to book more and play more involved in this. I can picture Black and Page having fun brawls of respect. 

[TheGrandAvatar]

Update. Hangman is respectful when facing him, Black is an ass when facing him as Page. Although still a heck of a fun little trilogy of matches from them both. I'm really enjoying it. 

Lance Archer and Brian Cage have also be quite fun to use and as a tag team. Their move set's have been decent to use as a basis for Nemesis from the CVerse.

So have so far Sam Strong, Rip Chord and now Nemesis to use.

Sam Strong eats a lot. . . I think he may fancy some dinosaur meat at some point. 

[The Buscher]

First off I'm happy for @TheGrandAvatar or anyone else that is finding a way to have fun with it.

But everything I've read just makes me more happy I passed.  This article was written by LynchReborn who is probably the main guy modding the PC version.  And the reason he has to mod so heavily is because it's the only way he's found to extract replayability.  Online play for the PC version is a wasteland, down from 1,000 players to 50 at any given time, and while the console drops probably aren't quite as steep, the complaints of online play have been persistent with no signs of improvement.

Nothing but vague updates from THQ Nordic, promising more stuff is coming but at this juncture adding new characters might not really move the needle in terms of getting back players who are already bored with the barebones offerings in the base game.  Several prominent wrestling game streamers have all but given up on the game.  Kenny Omega's not really promoted the game at all since release.  Really almost nobody from AEW is promoting the game outside of Evil Uno and even he is probably bored of it by now.

By the time Stadium Stampede mode is here, will there even be enough players for it to be worth it?  Will people quickly find a way to ruin it like regular online was ruined?  Will there be anything to add replayability for offline players?  People who paid full price for this game, let alone the $70+ Elite Edition with no idea of when any DLC or updates are coming, can't blame any of them for being a bit pissed off at getting nothing but vague promises with no firm timetables and starting to wonder if they've been grifted.

Just all very unfortunate.  I want this thing to succeed but early signs are already pointing toward this being a complete flop.

[Your Mom]

I haven't even noticed them mentioning it on Dynamite anymore. It's on the video board and it sometimes gets those little ads in the corner of the screen but Excalibur doesn't even say anything when they pop up  

[GoGo Yubari]

tbf it's been over a month, I think at that point I don't really want to hear the game being hocked more than once a show. 

I'm honestly surprised that I haven't seen a discount on the game bigger than like $8. I'd be curious to know what the sales are and what the expectations were. I'm still very much like "once it gets down to $30 - $40 I'll probably pick it up" and I was kind of expecting it to be at that point by now. Next month would actually possibly be optimal for that because my guess is outside of Starfield I'll probably at most want to play something I can pop in on for like fifteen minutes and bail out on.

[TheGrandAvatar]

Thank you. @I Think You Should Busch Fully agree with what you and other's have had to say about the game over recent week's in here. 

I think the main reason I'm having fun is probably because it is AEW, and mostly I am probably looking at it through nostalgia eyesight. 

The game isn't great by any standards. Yet has it's fun and some charm about it. Half of the fun comes from trying to make fun with the game yourself, much like we did with one's many year's ago. 

Having played a lot of bad wrestling game's over the years. It isn't that bad. Wanted the game to succeed myself, but it has been very unfortunate with how it has all gone. But can understand with the state of the game at launch, and some not enjoying what AEW and THQ have presented. 

Fully regret at the moment paying full price for it. At best it's one for picking up when it is on sale. 

Still. I can have the Bromance on the game. 

[apsham]

Honestly, the game is being exactly what I bought it to be. It's not something that I was expecting to put a ton of time into nightly and it's not something that I bought for online play. I wanted a game that had AEW branding to play like I used to play the N64 era games after growing way too tired of 2K's policies and design. Between this, and Fire Pro/Wrestling Empire to sink time into I'm pretty good to go.

[zero]

It's completely fine, but the lack of features and customization in 2023 is pretty stark. I think if it came out shortly after the maligned WWE 2K20, it would be far more fondly received, but 2K22 and 2K23 are both pretty damn great, so I think folks are dogpiling a little more than they would have. Like everything AEW, it gets put under a bigger microscope when their WWE counterpart is clearing a very low bar. 

I've been revisiting Def Jam: FFNY recently and Fight Forever is definitely in that vein, but it's just missing that x-factor. Given the lukewarm response, I doubt that "we'll continuously update it!" will actually happen and we'll probably get a Fight Forever 2 (at best). 

[Vamp]

I think it's pretty interesting that Omega and Kahn thought this game was finished before Yukes did. Which makes me wonder what state the game was in at that stage. 

The actual in ring gameplay is fun although arguably not all that representative of AEW.

And they clearly shot themselves in the foot by saying they were inspired by No Mercy and then releasing a game that has less features than No Mercy. 

Doesn't help that neither their communication nor their release schedule for patches/DLC is up to scratch. If they had been updating the game frequently from launch and released the DLC within the month than they'd have got away with shit communication. If they'd been better at telling the community anything than they'd have maybe gotten away more with their lack of updates. 

I'm not convinced there'll be an AEW FF2. The relationships between everyone involved seem pretty sour. 

It's a shame because I do think the actual wrestling bit of the game is more fun than 2k, and has a lot of potential. 

[Gabriel]

Provided that the things that we've been wanting since launch are relatively easy, I would imagine that continual updates would be more cost-effective than another game with full-on production and marketing costs.

Plus, they know that the fanboys (myself included) will shell out for content that we want. So if they can tailor that content, even with an added cost to the customer in the form of it being DLC, it would likely be more financially intelligent to do updates for Fight Forever instead of making a second game and relegating the debut to Fight For-a-Little-While.

Obviously, there are things that we want that will take more development than just whoever has been maintained by the developers for the post-launch team, and those are things they can tell us we'll have to wait for. We're big boys and girls and lizard people and other such things, so we will understand.

I think the majority of the more recent negative talk of the game comes down to the lack of clarity from anyone involved in the game as to what is happening. They tease more content, but give no dates, or even hints as to what they are working on. All we know for sure is that we're getting a battle royale Stadium Stampede mode and the already announced additional wrestlers and mini-games. No dates.

As far as I've seen, they haven't even said a word about additions to the creation suite, which I do believe is the number one thing holding this game back. I've said it before that we all have imaginations, pens and paper or a laptop, and fond memories of No Mercy... so if the creation suite were up to par, I believe very strongly that this game would have a much longer shelf-life for the bulk of the players.

Things I'm happy to pay extra for: new wrestlers, new arenas, a season/universe type mode, additional stories for Road to Elite.

Things I'd be pissed to not get for free: creation suite updates. It's literally the only thing that I feel ripped off about.

Also, I'm not sure if how they created the models will allow it, but they kind of fooled us all into believing we'd be able to properly edit the attires of existing wrestlers... so we really should be able to do that. If it takes a lot of extra coding, I'm happy to pay up to a certain amount for that addition... but it really should have been in the game from the beginning as well. If they created the in-game models in a way that doesn't allow customization, then they need to re-think that if they make a second game in the future.

[Bobfoc]

4 minutes ago, Vamp said:

I think it's pretty interesting that Omega and Kahn thought this game was finished before Yukes did. Which makes me wonder what state the game was in at that stage.

The claim that Omega was heavily involved with the development process never impressed me. There's only so much that someone with no games development experience can actually offer in terms of gameplay mechanics.

[apsham]

44 minutes ago, Vamp said:

I think it's pretty interesting that Omega and Kahn thought this game was finished before Yukes did. Which makes me wonder what state the game was in at that stage. 

That was clarified pretty quickly afterwards. Yukes commenting on it not being 'complete' was due to them needing to do a lot of final things like marketing, printing, final QA sign-off, etc. Which is pretty much telling - Kenny wanted a specific type of game, probably played it a few times and said "yeah, this is how it's supposed to be, we're done" but without the knowledge of all the extra stuff that has to happen before it's actually gone gold.

[King Ellis]

My Uncle works at Nintendo and he just showed me a screenshot from the upcoming "Road to Collision" mode:

[K]

On 11/08/2023 at 18:31, Gabriel said:

Provided that the things that we've been wanting since launch are relatively easy, I would imagine that continual updates would be more cost-effective than another game with full-on production and marketing costs.

Plus, they know that the fanboys (myself included) will shell out for content that we want. So if they can tailor that content, even with an added cost to the customer in the form of it being DLC, it would likely be more financially intelligent to do updates for Fight Forever instead of making a second game and relegating the debut to Fight For-a-Little-While.

Obviously, there are things that we want that will take more development than just whoever has been maintained by the developers for the post-launch team, and those are things they can tell us we'll have to wait for. We're big boys and girls and lizard people and other such things, so we will understand.

I think the majority of the more recent negative talk of the game comes down to the lack of clarity from anyone involved in the game as to what is happening. They tease more content, but give no dates, or even hints as to what they are working on. All we know for sure is that we're getting a battle royale Stadium Stampede mode and the already announced additional wrestlers and mini-games. No dates.

As far as I've seen, they haven't even said a word about additions to the creation suite, which I do believe is the number one thing holding this game back. I've said it before that we all have imaginations, pens and paper or a laptop, and fond memories of No Mercy... so if the creation suite were up to par, I believe very strongly that this game would have a much longer shelf-life for the bulk of the players.

Things I'm happy to pay extra for: new wrestlers, new arenas, a season/universe type mode, additional stories for Road to Elite.

Things I'd be pissed to not get for free: creation suite updates. It's literally the only thing that I feel ripped off about.

Also, I'm not sure if how they created the models will allow it, but they kind of fooled us all into believing we'd be able to properly edit the attires of existing wrestlers... so we really should be able to do that. If it takes a lot of extra coding, I'm happy to pay up to a certain amount for that addition... but it really should have been in the game from the beginning as well. If they created the in-game models in a way that doesn't allow customization, then they need to re-think that if they make a second game in the future.

i will buy it as soon as CAW isn't garbage. it's wild to me how shit it is.

[Gazz]

1 minute ago, K said:

i will buy it as soon as CAW isn't garbage. it's wild to me how shit it is.

What do you mean? If you go on YouTube, you can create pretty much anyone you can think of.

[K]

[9 to 5]

42 minutes ago, K said:

What a dumpster fire.

[FLiam]

Another.

[King Ellis]

2 hours ago, FLiam said:

Another.

The UncanniEST.