Mitchell Saltzman
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Guilty Gear Strive is now entering its fourth year of content updates, and despite now earning the reptutation as being the “old man” on the block, especially when put side-to-side with more recent releases like Street Fighter 6, Tekken 8, and Mortal Kombat 1, Strive is still continuing on just as strong as ever.
Which brings us to Evo 2024, where Arc System Works made perhaps their biggest announcement involving Guilty Gear Strive to date: In addition to two returning characters, Dizzy and Venom, and one brand new character, Unika, they would also be adding their first guest character to the roster: Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners. I got a chance to catch up with Guilty Gear Strive Producer Ken Miyauchi to find out how this surprising collaboration came to be, along with getting some insight regarding Strive’s future.
IGN: We learned that Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners is going to be in Strive. Can you talk a little bit about how long this has been in the works and how this collaboration came around?
Ken Miyauchi, Guilty Gear Strive Producer: So yeah, we’ve tried to find who will be a good guest character for Guilty Gear Strive. And we’ve been doing this work since 2023, actually. And we’ve been talking to CD PROJEKT RED because our lead artist, Hidehiko Sakamura, is actually a big fan of The Witchers series. And we’ve been in talks with CD PROJEKT RED, and then there was several conversation going on and that kind of led to the decision to get Lucy from Cyberpunk Edgerunners.
Now, I’m not opposed to the idea of Lucy, but Lucy’s not the main character of Cyberpunk Edgerunners, David is. What made you want to go with Lucy instead of David?
Miyauchi: So I cannot talk much about why because that might spoil what we are trying to do. But there is a reason we decided Lucy. Of course, I personally wanted to see David with Sandevistan, but yeah, so I can’t talk about it right now, but I hope people will figure [it] out in the future.
Is there any kind of collaboration happening between you and Studio Trigger who made the Cyberpunk Edgerunners anime? Are you working together with them to make Lucy happen in Strive?
Miyauchi: Honestly, we’ve been in talks with CD PROJEKT RED directly, not through Trigger, but if there could be any kind of collaboration that we [would] be able to do with Trigger, I’d like to do [it]. But that’s still not in [the] plan.
Another thing that you guys announced, which is something that you’ve talked about in the past, is the 3-on-3 mode. Can you talk a little bit about what makes this mode different than something like Dragon Ball FighterZ or a Marvel vs Capcom?
Miyauchi: So you’ll eventually see the game mechanics explanation from our website or social post. So what makes the Team of 3 unique compared to the other games is that people will play at the same time, not just you controlling the character and doing the 1v1 in one screen. So I’m just going to explain the first layer of this game mechanic. The team will be formed with one main role and two assist roles, and the two assist roles will be able to select their skills to interact in the battle.
Oh, interesting.
Miyauchi: And of course, during the battle, the assist players can switch with main players or assist player can interact into the battle with their own character in certain condition. Well the game mechanics-wise in the open beta test, I think people will be able to find out in tutorial, there’s a Team of 3 tutorial mode in open beta test. So I hope people will figure out how they can utilize the new game mechanics that’s exclusive for team of 3.
And then another character that I’m sure people are very excited for is Dizzy. Can you talk a little bit about how Dizzy is going to perform in this iteration of Guilty Gear? And specifically, I saw that she was Queen Dizzy, can you talk a little bit about what the significance of that is?
Miyauchi: I want to explain the details, but I’ll keep it secret for now why she’s called Queen Dizzy. I had the same question when I first received [the] Queen Dizzy name from Daisuke Ishiwatari. There’s a interesting story going on and you if actually see the trailer, you might find some hint of why she’s called Queen. But for more details I’d like to say please look forward to actual her arcade story mode.
And then other characters that were announced were Venom and Unika, from the anime. I know they’re probably early on development, but is there anything you can tell us about how those characters are going to play in Strive?
Miyauchi: So yeah, Venom, and also Unika, I can’t explain the details of how their battle styles are for now. I think Venom is going to be quite similar to how he played in the past series, but sort of like how we’ve been doing, [it won’t be] exactly same as the past series. Because if you want to play his past series style, you can play for example Xrd or XX. At the same time there is certain type of [uniqueness] in what makes Venom, Venom. And we would like to keep that as his gameplay. Regarding Unika, anything that I talk about her is going to spoil the anime series. So I’m going to expect people to watch the anime and then also try to maybe bring up their own theory of how she’s going to play in the game play and check her actual game style later.
Did you ever expect Strive to be going this strong for this long? It had a lot of entries at Evo this year.
Miyauchi: Yeah. I’m actually very, very surprised to see that we’ve been getting [consistently] over 2000 [entrants], throughout all the years of Evo for now. And I’m really, really happy that communities are supporting our game. And it’s achieved all because I think the Guilty Gear community is very enthusiastic and they keeps wanting to support the game, and really appreciate it, and I really want to pay back their support with Gear Guilty updates.
Is there anything you can tell us, any kind of hints you can give us about what to expect mechanically from the updates that you’re bringing to Season 4?
Miyauchi: In a Developer’s Backyard just a month ago that I released, I kind of talked about what’s coming in the next few months, which are the Battle Balance updates, the minor version, it’s coming out at the end of this month. And also the major one is coming sometime… I don’t remember when I said this, but I think it’s around October, end of October timing.
But the minor updates is more of mainly targeted to those characters who have less chance of getting access to their potential. So more of, buffs to those characters. And also adjusting on some of the universal mechanics such as the burst meter gain and also the positive bonus kind of thing. And also we have some changes to Roman Canceling mechanics on some of the invincible moves. So those are coming in the next character balance update. And I think this update will sort of shake up some meta in the current competitive fighting scene and I hope people will look forward to it.
Beyond new mechanics, is there any kind of intention of improving some of Strive’s more, let’s say, base level features? Are we ever going to get frame data in training mode? Are we ever going to get matchmaking that doesn’t go through the lobby system? Anything like that in the works?
Miyauchi: So those are updates that I’ve been always thinking that I want to accomplish, I mean, implement in some point. This is just from the producer perspective, I’ve been always talking about it with director. And we are always talking about when we’ll be able to do this update. And currently we announced the new updates that’s coming in next, which is the Team of 3, and the development on Team of 3 is going so hard right now. And once we release that, I think we’ll be able to take our hands on those updates. So I’d like players to look forward to them, too.
I apologize for this in advance because I feel like I ask you this every single time that I’ve talked to you, but insta-kills, fans love them. It’s one of the things that I think fans love the most about the Guilty Gear series. What are the chances of them still making their way into Strive? And if it’s something that you’ve thought about, are there any unique challenges involved with implementing insta-kills into Strive?
Miyauchi: So implementing instant kills is something that we would also like to do, and I do agree that it’s some, how do I say, very, very unique mechanic that presents Guilty Gear. So we would like to make that happen sometime in the future. I can’t tell when will that be possible because developing instant kill actually takes a lot of time. And also the character animations, emotions, which makes instant kills very, very unique and cool, will take a lot of time developing.
We try to make it unique because we animates them by frame, by frame. And if the instant kill motions are long and cool, that means we have to have more time to make sure every pattern looks cool, right? And if we decide to implement instant kill to all characters, that means we have to develop that to all characters, which is almost nearly equal to developing maybe two characters. So we’ll try to find a chance. Our team has been expanding still even now, we have our motion designers and animators recruited in our team and our team is getting bigger. So I’m looking, please look forward to future updates if we’ll be able to do it.
Final question, I’m asking this of pretty much everyone that I’m talking to here at Evo, but we’ve just crossed a milestone of Rollback netcode, everyone kind of has rollback netcode now. It’s now become standard among fighting games. I think fighting games are a lot better for it. What do you think is the next step for fighting game evolution across the genre?
Miyauchi: That’s something that we’ve been also discussing among the development team. Of course, as you know, Arc System Works has been making fighting games and we’ll continue making fighting games. And if we make new fighting games, we’ll always discuss about what will be something that we can bring, revolutionize the fighting game, how do I say, industry. And I don’t have the answers yet or I can’t share any answers for it, but I will be always thinking about it. And I honestly think the community right now, fighting game community right now, is in the best form of the current era. In the past, there was always… I mean, I wish if I would be a player in this fighting game era right now, people are expecting more and more fun things to the fighting game and we’ll try to find out what we’ll be able to provide to the community.
Mitchell Saltzman is a Senior Producer at IGN. You can find him on Twitter @JurassicRabbit