They waited until the very end to mention that junk. They told people that there would be Strive news at their Tokyo game show time slot and there was only the announcement of a keychain, a body pillow and a tournament already mentioned earlier. It's well deserved though on both sides because the companies chose the direction they wanted even knowing how people would react.Īfter the sales of Strive, it seems like they're getting arrogant by being more distant to the community. Strive will still be played, but for fun and Melty will be the new tournament game representative.
Fighting game players like to dive deep and put full commitment to a game they feel has that depth they crave. That's why Strive has run it's course already. They made a game for people who're afraid of real fighting games and Melty, being that it WAS simplified from the other games is still made for real fighting game players. Change is fine when improving on things, but for the most part, Strive was purposely made very shallow. Most fighting games see an INCREASE after a DLC. Never forget we managed to lose 25% of the playerbase the same month we got Goldlewis Dickinson. Its unsurprising that a game like Strive got stale fast. Gameplay wise Melty characters have tons of agency and moves ontop of universal systems that allow for near unlimited offenisve and deffensive creativity for a wide variety of playstyles. The lobby system and waut times only get worse the higher your rank gets and the start time to play a set is higher than any other game on the market atm.Ĭompare that to a game like Melty where lobbys are simple and functional with complete steam integration so joining a friend takes less than a minute till your ingame playing. This style of play and lack of combo variety makes most Strive sets incredibly similar even at the very top % of players. Strive is a fighting game where both players scramble to smother the other guy. Personally I believe Strive has failed in alot of gameplay areas that lead to the player drain. Tekken 7 surpassed Strive a month ago and before MB was ever out we were seeing around 2k players. Strive is BLEEDING players but thats just because it has glaring flaws that have gone unaddressed for months. Ive been monitoring the game since launch. I wouldn’t say melty coming out had any impact on my decision to play strive and as usual for a fighting game the players that will long-term end up carrying the player base and community are the ones that stick with the game regardless as to what else comes out. If it makes you feel better about players not leaving over melty, I wasn’t a huge strive fan and basically only play it casually now, and I sort of slipped away from strive a while before melty dropped for other games (+R, BBCF, Uni). This is all speculation, as I haven’t seen your experience exactly but it’s food for thought. It’s also worth mentioning that new players show up in the biggest numbers right at launch, and so the skill scale shifts upwards over time naturally for any multiplayer game. I don’t think it’s in any immediate danger of becoming unpopulated for a good while now, and dev support is still ongoing so I’d say the downturn you might be seeing is that the “new game” hype that dragged a lot of new non-FGC-ish players in might be finally wearing off, leaving strive with a core player base that is more familiar with fighting games, leading to more matches at the higher end of the skill scale. Right now, player count is pretty good and netcode is fantastic, meaning Strive is saved from discord matchmaking for the time being. But, for now, For Honor has its day in the sun.I dunno if I agree that it’s currently in a state where it has become hard to find good matches, but I can understand being worried about this happening for sure. For Honor‘s drop-off may not be that steep, but it’s not likely to retain hundreds of thousands of players. Evolve saw a similar resurgence when it went free-to-play a few years ago. This graph is basically a flat-liner until it suddenly spikes. Earlier this week, For Honor had something like 5,000 players. For Honor‘s 227,000 easily cracks the list and firmly places it in eighth place. It’s impressive enough to earn a spot on Steam’s vaunted list of games with the most concurrents ever. Not too shabby for a game that released in early 2017.
That’s Monster Hunter: World territory, which had a tremendous PC launch earlier this month. The move was a major shot in the arm, as Steam’s concurrent users chart shows a peak of approximately 227,000 players today. Yesterday, the bare-bones Starter Edition of For Honor went free-to-play on PC. More specifically, a whole lot of people are playing the For Honor Starter Edition right now. A whole lot of people are playing For Honor right now.