MVC3 Preview - The Writeup

[Lennysaurus]

Excellent write up from you both

Did any of the characters seem like spiral at all

I am really keen to work on some trap based teams any one stand out suitable for that?

Yeah trapping is definitely effective in this game.  But expect to get blown up when your opponent gets through your spam.

Also trap characters have little mobility in this, so you cant just zip all over the screen with them either.

[CrazyMobius]

Hey Lenny,
Can Arthur double jump? Also are his attack buttons strikes or projectiles?

[Lennysaurus]

Hey Lenny,
Can Arthur double jump? Also are his attack buttons strikes or projectiles?

Arthur double jumps, and his attack buttons are strikes.  All his projectiles are qcb or qcf moves.

[Chuckk]

I've seen some characters anti-air with say low attack into a chain, launch combo etc, do all characters have access to this from what you know, or can certain characters not magic series a mid-air opponent from the ground into a launch?

[[NIUE] Optimus DAVE]

First of all....

MARVEL VS CAPCOM 3 IS GONNA BLOW EVERYONES FUCKING MIND!!!!!!!!

This game is the true definition of a sequel game. What you see on those youtube videos is nothing to how this game is going to really play.

Bill and Len have already spoken on how capcom have pretty much taken everything awesome out of the mvc2 engine, bar the broken shit, then added some two t-88 turbo chargers and then were like, here you go everyone play this and see how it goes.

The game itself is mad wicked to just watch, like not even watching the characters but watching the backgrounds. I know alot of people will be like, "wtf i dont care bowt no back grounds fool", but straight up, the background will catch you off guard if you're not concentrating.

2 stages to be exact that I remember real well are Thor's and Chris's/Wesker.

Thors has like this mad backdrop of what Asgard would look like, with mad rainbows and unicorns and this big massive bird like flys down and your like WHOA :O:O:O

The resident evil stage, has those licker niggaz all caged up in glass cages and then when you do like any special/super that smashes the ground, then the glass also smashes...its so fucking bad-ass.

But thats enough of that onto my thoughts of the game and stuff.

GAME PLAY
Im not going to repeat what Bill and Len have already said, but I will just add in that when lenny is talking about meter management, he really means it. Also assist management.

Assists are going to get smashed in this game if you're assist happy. The damage they take from supers(Like storms) is insane and you quickly wise up and start to really evaluate whether or not you should call them out.

Also there is a noticeable stand down period before you can use them again. Compared to mvc2, where as soon as the assist jumped off screen, you could call them back in. In marvel3, theres maybe a second before they come back out. It doesnt sound like much when I type it out, but when your playing and you miss-time your assist call, your point character is going to be lonely as hell and open for some mad rushdown.

AND AND AND

this will be a big game changer for Sentinel, but you can no longer call assists while in flight mode. Now this really made me go....WAT DA PHUKK!!!
And no more sneaky Mags normal jump dash over call assist for cross up shenanigans anymore.

Speaking of rushdown, be prepared to LEARN HOW TO BLOCK LOW.

One of the main things that I noticed myself being hit by a lot were low attacks. Im not sure if it was because my timing on the game was still abit off, or maybe some low attacks are just that fast.

ALSO CHIPPING

The game system has this thing where, if you are going to be killed by chip it automatically stops
and you are left with a 1 pixel character.

This means that say you combo your opponent to near death, but they survive with say 5% life.
Then you do a super and your like 'LATER KUNG', the game will stop your super and leave their character with 1 pixel of life. I think they did those to make the 1 pixel comeback more ultra dramatic.

I found pretty sweet and pretty annoying at the same time. Its like yay if its you, poos if its not.
The only way to counter this we found was to superxxKFCxxsuper......I reckon only do it if its a definite game winning moment. Otherwise don't waste your meter.

Thats pretty much all I have to add on the game system stuff onto the.....

CHARACTERS!!!!!!!!!

DEADPOOL(for Richard )
Its way too early for me to say that Deadpool is the new cable, however from what I got out of him, he does look like a pretty good contender.

His gun moves come out pretty quick and can catch alot of moves before they come out. Decent damage and real easy to cancel into his sweet Bang Bang super.

His 'Pineapple' move is so good because he jumps up and throws it down to pretty much mid-screen and recovers fast enough to do his shooting special.
This coupled with Dooms missile assist(SO AWESOME) is gonna be gayness for a lot of people.

His katana-rama seemed pretty safe on block, I wasnt punished once but maybe that had something to do with my assist keeping them in block stun. But seem pretty good to use at the end of a block string.

His BangBang super in the air is pretty cool for lock and chip i see it being used to dhc out incase hes in trouble, like Doom photon array dhc out.

His other super, I dont know what its called, but where he flys all over the place slashing is pretty good to dhc into for damage. I didnt really use it that much though.

One of the main reasons for me using him was to see if he could fill the void of no strider, and his teleport being a big decider.

That being said, he is no strider filler, he is a brand new character type all on his own and he is awesome.

His teleport is way way WAY faster then strider, but that thing where you can only do it 2 times before blowing up does make it less spamable, BUT, i did only think of this towards the end of the night, but you can use the 3rd teleport as a kinda ghetto anti-air just like jins(mvc2) where he came in and exploded and destroyed rushdown.

I got it to hit once but I can really see some potential in people using Deadpool playing keep away, building meter and then teleporting twice THEN leaving a small gap in your keep away pattern and letting the opponent thing they're in for "free" and then BANG....later bo

his moves are all pretty quick and especially his low a attack. I stuffed quite a few supers with it, before they came out. Mad Deadpool Swag.

And his launcher is even better when your the one pressing the button. SHORYUKEN.

Any other questions for Deadpool just ask, I can't remember everything off the top of my head.

DOOM
Dooms moves seem pretty average, but his character movement just felt real slow. Like oafish.

His dash was poos. They made it about 25% slower then what it used to be. Maybe even 50%. His airdash is just as poos, but his dive kick is mad quick now. Divekick cancel to fly seemed real fast and you can still do old mvc2 tricks like airsuper divekick and airsuper again for ghetto as cross-up tricks. MVC2 Doom users will know what I'm talking about.

His keep away game though has changed. You can now only do one photon shot (pink shit, now yellow shit) in the air. But you can do ground ones alot faster. You can do them while there are still yellow shit bullets on screen.

His plasma beam on the ground has been turned to poos though. It does push back as far as it used to and the recovery is pretty lame, but holy armadillo batman, the air version of it is quick and can be done heaps of times, ala old school pink shit.

Im thinking with Doom, they wanted him to be different from what he was in mvc2. His keep away is going to be more ground based now, and with the faster start up and recovery of his molecular shield(ROCKS) he is going to be controlling the ground alot more then the air. And thats his normal special move molecular shield, not his assist one.

His launcher is nothing like his old one. DO NOT EXPECT TO USE IT THE SAME. Its slower and does not have a massive hit box on it.

His psuedo-rushdown that he had in mvc2 is gone Im thinking for now, until we get more hands on time with working out his tri-jumping.

He is however still the KING ASSIST. His new missile assist is so beast that you will not believe it.

I gotta stop here cos my internet time at the G.I. net cafe is up, but I'll continue my write up with my thoughts on IRONMAN, WESKER AND ARTHUR(READ:NEW SPIRAL)

[[NIUE] BIRRY WONG]

5% Life on the chip thing is a little extreme haha. More like 10-15%. So if one super will chip kill you, you will die from it, but if you need a lot of chip (ie DHC chip) then you will probably survive with one pixel. Not 100% sure on how this works, but its actually pretty cool. You can still do mad chip damage this way, but its harder to Kill a character with by just chipping half their lifebar away. Might be different under KFC effects, but i'm not sure.

[CrazyMobius]

I'm really glad to hear that this game plays different to MVC2. I tried playing some MVC2 today but got too bored as it runs too fast. 

[LN]

I presume you guys had already used your own XFactor when getting chipped to death - because the healing factor from a lvl 3 xfactor totally negates chip damage, basically. There are vids of Justin Wong doing trish chip super xx hailstorm and the opponent not taking ANY damage.

[Lennysaurus]

I'm really glad to hear that this game plays different to MVC2. I tried playing some MVC2 today but got too bored as it runs too fast. 

If you don't like MVC2 cause its too fast, then you're gonna have the same problem with MVC3.  It's as fast, and I might even go so far as to say that it is possibly faster.

[CaptainHook]

Being a quick game might be my only hope for liking this. Hehehe.

[[NIUE] BIRRY WONG]

I presume you guys had already used your own XFactor when getting chipped to death - because the healing factor from a lvl 3 xfactor totally negates chip damage, basically. There are vids of Justin Wong doing trish chip super xx hailstorm and the opponent not taking ANY damage.

Yea. You would get chipped down to one pixel, and then the chip would just stop. We were not in X factor mode.

[geneterror]

I’ll drop some notes I made before I run off to get married:
Arthur Sux.
Pixies get the smash.
Assists get THE SMASH more haha.


Nah but for real, I’m back and ready to drop some observations. Bill/Lenny I hope none of this is stuff you guys wanted to save for the podcast or anything. Some of this might also be a bit of a doubleup on what Lenny, Dave and Bill have covered.

Gameplay stuff:
Something I had wanted to test early on was Crossover Tags, I hadn’t read much about them previously so I wasn’t sure if/how this was going to work.
It’s works the same as MvC2 but the input is easier. For those that didn’t play MvC2 crossover tags were a way of countering and tagging to another character at the same time. A tactic for MvC2 was to have Cable in your team not on point with AA assist, wait for someone to use a projectile with a lot of recovery ie. Rocket Punch or Ice Beam etc or a move up close where the crossover tag always hits. When they hit you block and then counter, Cable hits with his AA as he tags in which you can cancel into Air Hyper Viper Beam.
With meter management more prevalent I can see this as potentially a more viable option for safe tagging than DHC in some situations. Like Lenny said I gave it a try with Thor so I had him in second on my team. I waited for Lenny to hit me and put me in blockstun, crossover tagged to Thor and cancelled his Mighty Smash into air super. I just didn’t manage to note how much meter the crossover tag used so that’s where I’m not sure how viable it is yet but it’s still a safer option than DHC for characters with really unsafe supers.

You can’t call assists while flying. This will change how Sentinel plays for sure with no Capcom/Blackheart styled assist to cover him and to a lesser extent it will alter how characters like Doom, Iron Man play as well. This is potentially huge but I’m not gonna go on about it, MvC2 players will know how this is going to change some characters gameplans though. Unfly combos are out it seems and I struggled with the controls a bit much to much to try airdash in combos ie. Magneto in MvC2. I also forgot to check for doublejumps in aircombos ala Psylocke and Cammy in MvC2. In fact I didn’t notice if any characters had doublejumps.

The knockdown on exchange combo ender from the air puts you on the ground and you can’t roll. What you can’t tell from the vids is how long you are prone after being
hit down from the air. You get put on the ground in a OTG possible state, unable to roll for a LONG time. I tried it with C.Viper and after knocking them from the air with exchange I had easily enough time to watch how far they had flown from me and choose the appropriate distance Seismo to OTG them.
After the exchange knockdown from the air you cannot OTG with normals only specials. This is good, being able to OTG after exchange with normals would have been busted in my opinion. As Lenny said when we were talking shit afterwards being able to hit them with normals after exchange would have lead to easy resets, probably to easy for big damage.

I seemed to be dropping air combos a lot on smaller characters especially X-23. I’m not sure if the way around this is to speed up the inputs for my air combos on smaller characters or to have seperate air combos for the smaller characters. Smaller characters are definitely harder to hit in this game. I can’t wait to see hitbox info for the varying size characters as I think the divide is more prevalent than ever.

When you tag and your character flies in from offscreen this is now an overhead and a lot faster seemingly balanced/nerfed by the fact that on hit I couldn’t seem to follow it up with a combo like MvC2 but that could easily have been me still scrubbing out.

I don’t know if it’s because the game is now 16:9 instead of 4:3 but I couldn’t seem to get that vertical height with I could in MvC2 charcters like Doom or Storm where you used to run away off the top of the screen, confused as well by the fact that the stages now zoom to suit the action onscreen. Also there is no fly screen any more, these factors combined to make the stages feel shorter but wider than before.

Character specific stuff:

Dormammu:
Yes he plays like Blackheart but can’t spam projectile normals from the air. Now that we have that out of the way I started having a bit more luck with him towards the end but struggled with his normals. Not that they are bad, just a bit odd. He is going to be a zoning/lockdown machine after some time in the lab I think. The vortex/blackhole special is huge and covers more space on the screen that I expected. His jump SUX but really who cares you don’t want to be in their face you want to be smashing them from over half a screen away.

Doom:
Dave is probably better to talk about Doom but I’ll say a little bit. Doom feels similar to MvC2 but slower and less spammy. They have nerfed Photon Shot spam in the air, you only get one Photon Shot per jump now and the ground one feels worse as there seem to be less projectiles that move at a worse angle for covering space, more left and right and less upwards angle. His Hiden Missle assist is good for zoners and his Molecular Shield is good for covering dash ins from the smaller characters. I think people will swap between the two assist types depending on who makes up the rest of their team.

Hulk:
Definitely got a buff from MvC2. I found in MvC2 he had no good jumpin attack. He still has the stupid clap with j.C but his best jump in now was with j.exchange as it had a nice hitbox and good priority and led easily to a ground combo. The biggest change for Hulk is they swapped the inputs for his moves. So Gamma Charge is now a qcf+atk which you can repeat into another forward Gamma Charge, the up Gamma Charge or you can now Gamma Charge backwards for the second part. This makes Gamma Charge more comboable and versatile because you can do it without charge making it easier to punish blocked/whiffed assists. Gamma Wave (?) where he lifts up the rocks is now a charge move. Hulk seemed to consistently do quite high damage.

Wolverine:
This is the most fun I have had with Wolverine since XvSF! Beserker Barrage is really strong but Beserker Slash is where it’s at. With the aid of the right assists this will allow for a nice mixup/lockdown game. I thought from early writeups that it always changed sides when it hit but it doesn’t it depends which strength atk button you use. Using A will leave you on the same side, C will almost always leave you on the far side as long as you’re not more than half a screen away. Using B attack was a bit of a guessing game. I can see this being used with Doom Rocks assist or Sentienl drones ie. Start combo call Doom Rocks assist Beserker Slash to the other side and start a new combo while Doom rocks still hit them from behind. Also worth mentioning is his down C in the air, while not an overhead it is fast and covers ground quickly. Anyone that played MvC2 will know what it was like when Rogue when randomly go mental and rush you down with down HK, it’s like that. I couldn’t seem to find a height restriction on it. For SSF4 players the closest thing I can think of is that it’s like Cammys EX Cannon Strike. It’s better than it was in previous games though as it no longer bounces you back up in the air on block so you can maintain pressure on the ground after using it.

Thor:
I actually really enjoyed Thor but because we were on a time restriction I didn’t really get a chance to find the best way to work him into a team. I kept having him on point because I wanted to play him but wasn’t thinking enough about team dynamics. Thor is strong, if you can actually land it his piledrive special move does a lot of damage. One thing I couldn’t tell from the videos is how slow the startup on his projectile is. The delay after putting the input in until the projectile actually coming out is huge. Once it comes out it’s a beam like Iron Man and has decent priority but I think people will get hit out of it on startup a lot early on. The other downside to the projectile is actually Thors height because the projectile/beam comes out at Thors shoulder level which is quite high. In a match against Dave he was using Arthur and even while Arthur is standing Thors projectile goes straight over Arthurs head. I think this will be the same for Arematsu maybe even Zero and possibly others like X-23 etc Also it whiffs over low blocking medium to small characters. His Mighty Smash though is hit confirmable and does good damage, it also makes a good assist as it seemed to have a decent amount of startup invunerability and covers a good amount of ground in frount of you.
I was surprised to see Thor has an 8-way air dash even if the range is short. I’m going to stick with Thor when the game comes out, I’m just not gonna start him out on point.

The others:
Played a couple of games with Tron, she looks good but you have to play her differently to MvC2 but thats just as much her change in inputs as the changes to her move properties. Drill semmed safe or at least lot safer. Her throw super looks good and will catch people unaware a lot early on.
Captain America played OK, his shield hitting on the way back from throwing it now definitely helps his zoning but out of the charrs that have been in since XvSF he didn’t feel as improved as Hulk or Wolverine.

I’ll come back and post anything else I can think of later. Honestly in the three hours I don’t even think we scratched the surface of this game and as everyone that
has played the Vs games in the past will know that it’s going be a long and interesting ride while people figure this game out. I think it’s got the staying power of MvC2 that’s for sure.

Finally I know the others have commented on this but the visuals and audio are awesome. A lot of fan service in both the audio and viuals, especially the choices for music. The stages are vibrant and have a LOT going on but somehow the characters don’t get lost in amongst it at all. The game is still explosive to watch and also I’m sure some people want like this but it seems crazier than ever.

[gunsmoke]

 

[CrazyMobius]

Hey did anyone get to see the online match making? Just wondering if it searches locally like SSF4. Seems that lag would be a big deal in this game.

[Rorooze]

Because heaps of other people would have been online right?